![]() Recently, I heard Myke Hurley talking about his brand-new Logitech MX Master mouse ( Logitech) ( Amazon). Nevertheless, I’m always interested in how things are going on the other side. Somewhat related, Katie Floyd and I spent an hour and a half talking about the relative merits of competing word processors just this last weekend on Mac Power Users. If the answer to either of those two questions is yes, you're going to need to purchase the subscription plan. The gating issue is whether or not you have two macs or you want to use Microsoft office on your iPad. Purchasing Microsoft Office for Mac on a monthly basis is going to require an investment between $7 and $10 a month (depending on which version you buy). With the new $150 version you can only install the application on one Mac and it does not include access to the iOS versions. In that sense, this $150 version feels like a begrudging sale more than something that they actually want you to buy. There is no mystery to the fact that Microsoft prefers its customers move to the monthly plan rather than outright purchase. Yesterday Microsoft announced that you can now purchase a license for Microsoft Office for Mac outright $150. If you haven’t played much with Fantastical, I recommend watching my screencasts on the app. There is a whole bunch more and you can read the release notes here. Related, arrow keys can also now navigate the day, week, and month views. You can scroll to a specific day or week using the trackpad and you can expand the scope in week and day view by pinching on the trackpad. Quite often I have need to duplicate an event and being able to copy and paste an event with my keyboard is golden. So far, my personal favorite new feature is the ability to cut, copy, and paste events and reminders. The new version supports OS X El Capitan, which will be landing on your Mac later this month. Version 2.1 released yesterday and it’s the biggest update since they launched version 2. That gave me a good opportunity to kick the tires on the newest version of Fantastical for Mac. I spent most of today with my head down on a calendar intensive project. Stereo Mic Tools uses the iPhone or iPad’s camera to help you position microphones in stereo recording configurations, which require precision positioning in order to capture the sound accurately. It’s customizable to adapt to different skill levels, and students have a lot of fun with it.Ī couple of brief mentions of clever and useful apps for audio engineers: Speaker Angle helps you set the toe-in angle of your monitor speakers, which helps improve the sound. The Ear Trainer plays a musical interval, and you tap on the screen to identify it. Tenuto contains drills and exercises for learning theory, while its companion app, Theory Lessons, covers the lessons. You’d think a metronome would be accurate by definition, but I found one that wasn’t true, despite claims by the developer that it was “the most accurate” in the app store.įor students of music theory, I often recommend the Interval Ear Trainer module in an app called Tenuto. There are many metronome apps, but this is my favorite - simple, straightforward, and accurate. Pianists need to learn how to fit into the complex grooves in a very specific way, and this app is a great aid to that process.Īnother app I use frequently is the Yamaha Metronome. Originally designed for dancers, it’s very useful for musicians too. In teaching Afro-Cuban/salsa/Latin jazz piano, I have students play along with rhythm accompaniment from an app called Salsa Rhythm. But if someone sits in and wants to sing a jazz standard I don’t know, the charts in iReal Pro come in handy. Most of the bands I work with have their own printed music charts of original songs. The playback engine includes a mixer, so pianists turn off the piano track and practice along with bass and drums. You can instantly change a song’s key and tempo. iReal Pro consists of chord charts and a MIDI playback engine which reads the charts and plays them back using drums, bass, and piano or guitar sounds. If a play-along track is at a tempo that’s too fast for a student, or if they’re playing a song for which there’s no commercially-available play-along, I use an app called iReal Pro. It’s wonderful to have instant access to not only the play-alongs but my entire music library.įor casual listening, I use Synology’s DS Audio app. I play the tracks via Synology’s DS File app on my iPad, and the audio streams to a Marantz AV7005 pre-pro with built-in Air Play. The tracks are in my iTunes library, which is stored on a Synology DS212j network drive. I use play-along tracks both for my own practicing and with my students. ![]() I’m a professional jazz pianist and a music teacher, and I use my iPad a lot every day.
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