Our next big update is coming this summer, and today we’re excited to show you another change we’re making with forScore 9.
Since the beginning, forScore’s metronome has been a core feature and an invaluable tool for many of our users. Later, we added utilities like the pitch pipe and tuner, but with little room in the control bar along the top of the screen these new additions were buried in the tools menu.
With forScore 9, that’s changing: the metronome, pitch pipe, and tuner are now all accessible from the main view. A segmented control allows you to switch between them quickly, and forScore updates the toolbar icon and remembers your choice so it’s always just a tap away. We’re proud of the work we’ve done to make these utilities easy to use, and now we’re giving all three of them a chance to shine.
That’s not all, though! We’ve also added a new accessibility setting that lets you customize the metronome’s ‘tick’ and ‘tock’ sounds. If you’ve ever had trouble hearing the default sounds (or if you simply prefer a different style), just add two .wav files to your forScore library and select them in the “Metronome sounds” section of the accessibility panel.
Many musicians work on different projects, in several bands, or with multiple clients at the same time. The music you need for each may overlap, but more often than not there’s only a subset of your collection that you’ll be working with at any given time.
For those situations, we created Libraries. Instead of seeing all of your music all of the time, Libraries allow you to divide your collection into distinct sections so you can pick the one you need and everything else will disappear until you’re ready to see it again.
In forScore’s main menu, with the list of categories showing, tap Libraries in the upper left-hand corner to create your own and switch between them. The default library, “All Libraries,” shows everything on your iPad. 
If you select a different library, however, only music from that library will appear in forScore’s menus or in search results.
Once you’ve created a new library by tapping the + button and supplying a name, it’ll be empty. If you select it, music you import through iTunes or from cloud services like Dropbox will be automatically added to it, but if you want to put some of the music already on your iPad into your new library you’ll need to switch back to “All Libraries” and do a few more things.
Find one of the scores you’d like to add to your new library and tap the circled arrow button to the right of it to show the metadata panel. Now, in addition to the Layout, Setlists, Audio, and MIDI sections you usually see at the bottom, you’ll see a new section called Libraries where you can tap to check or uncheck the libraries you want the current score to be a part of. You can batch edit multiple files, of course, to save some time.
Categories like composers, genres, and tags give you the ability to browse through your files and find the right thing quickly, but they aren’t like folders—each score can be listed under many different categories. Similarly, libraries aren’t exclusive: a score can be part of several different libraries, and it’ll be visible when you’re working in any of them.
For more information on creating and working with libraries, be sure to check out this section of our knowledge base.
Bonus tip: If you’re sharing your iPad, libraries are a great way to set up different music collections for different users.
This summer we’re releasing forScore 9, and we can’t wait to show you what’s new—so we aren’t! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be giving you a sneak peek at some of the biggest changes we’re making.
With this major update, we focused on making forScore more flexible and personal than ever before. Our audience continues to grow at an incredible rate, so customization and personalization are essential to ensuring that forScore can meet the needs of each new user. We’ve got a lot of big things to show you, and we’re kicking things off today with a powerful new feature called Buttons.
Like the essential Links feature, the new Buttons tool allows you to place tappable, colored dots anywhere on the page. Instead of simply handling repeats, however, buttons are far more versatile and powerful. They can be programmed to perform one of seven major functions, with plenty of options that give you a wide range of new ways to make your musical life a little easier.
The first two actions allow you to control forScore’s metronome: start or stop the metronome (after a customizable delay, if needed) or change the tempo partway through your piece. The third allows you to start or stop the current audio track (again—after a delay, if needed), and the fourth plays a note with the pitch pipe.
The fifth option allows you to send a set of MIDI commands, including program changes, Song Select messages, or raw hexadecimal codes. There’s also a new type of MIDI entry: delay. Now you can specify a number of milliseconds to wait between sent commands. This new delay entry is not only available for buttons, but also for commands sent automatically when opening a score or bookmark.
If you’ve used forScore’s Notes feature and the “remind me” option, you’ll be familiar with dropdown note reminders. Now, you can program buttons to show these same kinds of reminders on command.
Finally, the Navigation action allows you to move to the next or previous score or to perform either a half- or full-page turn (the opposite of what would normally happen, depending on your settings).
Each button uses a customizable, action-specific color to make buttons instantly recognizable. We think buttons are going to be a fantastic new way to control forScore’s many functions, and we can’t wait to share them with you later this year. Be sure to check back soon, though, since this is just the start of what we’ve got coming in forScore 9.
With forScore 8, we introduced the Devices panel, allowing forScore users to connect to Bluetooth Smart accessories that are both versatile and power efficient. Some people use it to connect to their iRig BlueBoard pedalboard to turn pages and more, and others use it to improve their annotation abilities with a smart stylus: we launched the Devices panel with support for FiftyThree’s Pencil and Adonit’s Jot Script, and added support for Adonit’s Jot Touch and Wacom’s Bamboo Fineline with forScore 8.1 a few months later.
Bluetooth Smart devices offer much better battery life than older Bluetooth devices and, for devices like a smart stylus, can give developers like us enough information to implement features such as palm rejection and pressure-sensitive drawing. There’s one benefit that may not seem as obvious, though, and that’s how forScore can use buttons on one of these devices. In the ‘Page turners & shortcuts’ section of forScore’s settings panel, you can map these button presses to specific forScore actions. Just tap one of the actions, then press the button on your device. Now any time you press that button, forScore will perform that action.
There’s more, though: since forScore can communicate directly with these kinds of devices, we can tell not only when a physical button is pressed, but we can also tell when it’s released. That means we can do two different things for a quick press or a longer press and hold. So now your single-button stylus can perform two separate actions, or your two-button Jot Touch can perform up to four. And, for the ultimate power user, the iRig BlueBoard lets you connect two additional pedals through auxiliary jacks for up to twelve possible actions, assuming you can remember them all!
An update to one of Apple’s support documents today suggests that a public beta of iOS 9 is coming soon. As with any iOS beta, we do not suggest installing prerelease builds on any device that you use to run forScore. This is especially true for iOS 9.
The three private beta versions of iOS 9 that Apple has released to developers so far have all exhibited an issue that makes forScore unusable. The issue is very clearly on Apple’s end, and the bug report that we filed has been marked as a duplicate (meaning that we’re not the first to report it and that Apple is definitely aware of the problem). Until this problem is fixed, forScore will frequently become unresponsive until the home button is pressed or double-pressed.
Rest assured that these problems will be fixed by the time iOS 9 is released this fall. In the mean time, please do not install any beta versions of iOS 9 unless you’re using a dedicated device or you don’t plan on using forScore until the fall (gasp!).