forScore Goes 2.0 - Schools Rejoice
by Tim Chaten
October 26, 2010
Eager to start using forScore before the AirTurn hardware is released? Here is some great news: forScore 2.0 is now available! The highlights include half-page turns, Bluetooth file sharing, VGA output and bookmarks.
Bookmarks give you the ability to navigate through huge PDFs to different parts of the score. A great application for this is for pit musicians in musicals. Musicals are notorious for cutting out scenes and forcing musicians to jump ahead, sometimes hundreds of pages to the next piece. Bookmarks will help alleviate that problem. Bookmarks appear as a file that can be added to set-lists for practicing or performing a certain repertoire.
A notable change is that no scores are included in the app itself. Now, you have the option to download the ones you need, or an easy way to download all the free ones, that were previously available. Another long requested feature is the ability to sort your scores from easy to difficult (many users, like myself, are not quite up to snuff to play the harder music yet).
Finding music has also become much easier. The app now integrates fully with metadata and has a new global search. One cool feature is a user can bind an audio file to sheet music to allow playing along with the original audio!
ForScore also added a few features that make the app more school friendly. The first is the ability to transfer files between iPads. A typical scenario is a high school conductor that has all the parts loaded onto their iPad and can then send those files to each of the section leaders to distribute to the rest of the section. Another school friendly feature is VGA output so a teacher/conductor could output the full score onto the big screen.
These features add upon the already great features of annotating, visual metronome, and much more. ForScore has really become the go to app for many needing to read sheet music on the iPad. It is updates like this that continue to prove the iPad is a great platform for reading music.