Music publishers had one job for a long, long time: print music on paper and sell it. But what made sense for printed products just doesn’t make sense on an iPad, and the Rearrange tool’s split function is just one of the ways we’ve helped musicians drag their sheet music into the 21st century.
Rearrange is a great tool that lets you duplicate and move pages around within a score, but it’s also a great tool for splitting one file into many: tap the circled slash (/) icon at the bottom of any thumbnail image to create a new section starting with that page. When you do, you’ll see a dividing line appear between your two sections, and you can use the X button to put them back together. You can continue working with your file, duplicating, deleting, and moving pages—you can even move pages between sections.
When you’re done, use the “Save As…” button and enter in a name to create separate, sequentially-named files. Now, you can tag, sort, and search for pieces independently no matter which book they came from.
iPads are great for saving space and taming stacks of paper, but their screen size really only lets you read one or two pages at a time. When you need to work with a few different pieces at once, tabs help you spread out a little and give you the breathing room you need.
When you’re viewing a quick peek popup or the thumbnail preview of your item in the metadata panel, you’ll see a plus symbol in the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Tap that symbol to keep your current score open in one tab and open the new one in another.
Now, you can tap to switch scores without losing your place. And, if you’re using a setlist or the “flip between scores” setting is on, each tab will maintain its own queue. The Tab bar is hidden by default, but if you find yourself using it often you can change that by enabling “Always show tab bar” in the settings panel.
Five years and counting, forScore has grown a lot since it was first released. Many updates have introduced major new features, and if you weren’t a forScore user at the time or didn’t have a chance to read the release notes, you may have missed some of them.
With that in mind, we’re introducing a new series of posts that aim to highlight some of forScore’s more hidden or niche capabilities. They may be completely new to you, or they may be features you noticed but never checked out. Of course, we’re always happy to take requests—if there’s a feature you use that no one else seems to know about, let us know!
Today, we’re going to take a look at an easy one: Quick Peek. When you’re using forScore’s global search panel or viewing a list of files in the scores, bookmarks, or setlists menus, tap and hold an item with two fingers to preview it. You can tap to open it, tap away if it’s not the right thing, or tap the plus button in the bottom corner to open it in a new tab.
Of course, if you’ve never used tabs before, well, that’s a topic for another week!
April 1, 2015
| In Depth, News
Five years ago this month we released forScore 1.0, and with a hundred updates since then it’s easy to forget where it all started. That’s why we’ve put together a special retrospective to celebrate our journey so far and to look back at those incremental changes as part of a larger story. Whether you’ve been a loyal forScore user from the start or you just recently discovered it, you’ll be surprised to see how much things have changed.
We say it often, but it’s always true: we couldn’t do it without you. The support and feedback of our customers has always been our greatest asset, and we can’t thank you enough. Here’s to five years so far, and to the next five!
Our new Groups service is coming soon, and thanks to Apple’s recent acquisition of TestFlight, we’ll really be able to put it through its paces. Unlike previous betas, which were limited to just 100 devices (including our own development devices), Apple now allows up to 1000 people—not just devices—to test our apps and give us helpful feedback on stability, design, and workflow. That’s where you come in!
If you’ve helped us beta test forScore in the past, you’ll be automatically moved to the new system and will receive an email when the next test version is ready. If you haven’t helped us previously, you can sign up here. Since we’re testing our new Groups feature, it helps if you and your colleagues decide to sign up together.
Beta testers are a huge part of app development, and without this invaluable feedback our updates would be much less frequent and meaningful. We think that this new system will really help us take forScore to the next level and we hope that you’ll consider joining our team. It’s not always glamorous, but it’s what goes into making forScore the best app it can be.