October 2020 Update

David William Hearn • Oct 21, 2020

A new season, a new update!

Hello StaffPadders!


I hope you've all had a wonderful summer, and have been staying healthy and busy during this most unusual year.


Over the past months, I've enjoyed hearing from StaffPad users all over the world. There's a fantastic sense of community that's springing up, and I'm so happy that the app is inspiring people to write music. We've been growing here as well, and I'm sure those who email our customer support will be well looked after by Andrew and Steve; our new friendly support agents.


For those interested in reading more about the finer details of the app, I would highly recommend ordering a copy of Steve Barden's book: Mastering StaffPad. Steve has compiled an excellent compendium of StaffPad's major concepts and features, and it's a pleasure to read.


As the summer turns to autumn, we're happy to announce the release of the StaffPad October 2020 Update. This is a free update, available in the App Stores now. You'll need iPadOS 13.6 or later, and Windows 1909 or later, to receive this update.


Let's take a look at what's new...


Dark Mode

Dark Mode can help with eye strain when working in low light environments, or late at night. To change this appearance setting, open the settings and choose "Dark" under "Interface Appearance". On iOS, you can also set this to change with the system, so that it automatically switches to Dark Mode when iOS does. It can take a few minutes to adjust seeing music presented in this way, but I've found the more I use it the more natural it seems. Perhaps inevitably, I'll admit that I've joined the dark side and use Dark Mode most of the time!


Harp pedals and Glissandos

Harps are mysterious things; they can be quite tricky to write for. Often, composers will write for harp as if it were a piano, and harpists are left to write their own pedalling in to interpret the composers intent as best as possible. If you're feeling brave, you may wish to specify the pedal changes in the score yourself. StaffPad now contains a couple of really intuitive features for working with harp pedals.


One of the most common "light touch" use-cases is to specify particular scales for glissandos. Previously, StaffPad would always playback a diatonic glissando based on the key signature; however, now you can specify a custom glissando scale for harp staffs via pedals. Write a glissando as you normally would, then long touch the glissando itself, and choose "Edit Glissando".


A new harp pedal control will show up, and you can slide the pedals into positions with your finger to set a custom scale. The app will write the text representation of the pedals for you automatically, and you can switch this to a diagram/pictogram if you'd prefer; long touch on the harp pedal text and choose "Switch Pedal Style".


If you want to really get into it, you can also manually specify pedalling at any point on the harp staff. Simply long-touch below the staff and choose "Add harp pedal".


Finally, if you don't want to worry about manually working out the pedal positioning, but do want pedal changes to be written in your score, you can tell StaffPad to do it for you. Tap the harp's staff name to open the Edit Staff control, and toggle the "Show Pedals" switch on. StaffPad will automatically place harp pedal diagrams for you, and update them in realtime as you change or add notes to the staff. If you've written something that's truly impossible, StaffPad will alert you by colouring those notes in red.


New note head styles

We've long had X note heads in StaffPad, but these are now joined by 5 more styles: triangle, small slash, circled, ghost (parentheses), and diamond. To use these note head styles, write your notation as you would normally do (using regular note heads), then tap on the "Convert note head"  tile in the palette. Choose your style from the mini-tiles that slide out, and paint your note heads on using your pen or Pencil. You can convert them back to regular note heads by painting over them again with the tool


Ghost notes have a special property: they will play back much quieter than normal note heads. This can be very useful when writing for drums and percussion.


Chord Slashes

This is a very neat feature; as well as being able to convert note heads into small slashes, you can convert entire chords into single large slashes. This means you can write out your instrument part, e.g for guitar, using the voicing and rhythm you want, then convert and compress into single slash note heads that are easier to read. Behind the scenes, StaffPad still "sees" the full notation, so the playback is unaffected, but on the score you achieve a more readable and less "overt" notation representation, which can be really useful when working with guitarists. You can convert to and from chord slashes at any time using the tool - just tap on a chord with the pen/Pencil to convert back and forth.


Various improvements

Multi-line text

This one is a small tweak, but useful nonetheless. You can now press shift + enter whilst you're inserting text on your score to create multi-line text.

New Downloads & Updates Manager

Our Windows users will notice a new Downloads & Updates manager that can be accessed from the bottom of the Store page. This page is where you go to update and manage your installed libraries. On iOS, this screen already existed, but we've updated our download method to be much faster, and with a pipeline that enables us to release updates for the IAP libraries far quicker.


You can also now turn on automatic updates just for the library manager - activating this means you'll get the latest fixes for the IAP libraries without having to lift a finger.

iOS14 improvements

As part of the continued lifecycle of the app, we've worked to improve the performance of StaffPad when using iOS14. You can tap to edit a text field (such as the score title), and use iOS14's new Scribble feature to handwrite your title, for example. We've also improved trackpad and pointer support for iOS14, so you can use your magic keyboard or trackpad with more! Lastly, we've moved to native context menus for long-touch menus. These bring a few benefits - they adjust for light/dark mode and work with a trackpad and keyboard a little better.

Ambience Two

A new sound library for StaffPad; this is a sequel to the popular Ambience One library and extends the tool palette with a variety of sounds and instruments inspired by meditation and sound baths. From singing bowls to wind chimes, rainsticks to gongs, this is a relaxing and creative sound pack perfect for expanding your writing and sonic palette. You can find Ambience Two in the StaffPad Store.

Various little things

We've made improvements to the efficiency of playback on older devices. Importing MIDI files is a bit more robust against invalid/corrupted MIDI files. We now interpret more tempo text markings, such as Allargando and Piu Mosso. We've made sure we always print the tempo marking in the first bar on parts, regardless of whether or not it's a multi-rest. We've improved the casting off, so that you should find fewer cases of a single bar being stretched across the entire last page. There are numerous updates to the included and IAP sound libraries. Windows users will notice some new "fluent UI" effects in the symbols palette. We've fixed many bugs, including ones that could prevent the proper export of AAC files on iOS or MusicXML files from the library page. Fermatas now insert themselves automatically "down" the entire score, and behave better with tempo markings around them. Chords inserted on the chord staff now "float" up to individual instruments that have "show chords" enabled, making it easier to work with rhythm charts from a primary chord staff.


Whew! That's quite the list. I hope you find the latest improvements to StaffPad enjoyable, and that our continued work helps you achieve your musical goals. We've got a lot more to do, so I'll stop waffling on (as usual), and get back to work.


Stay safe, and we'll see you soon!


With all best wishes,

DWH


David William Hearn
David is a the lead designer and co-founder of StaffPad, as well as a professional composer and orchestrator.

London, http://www.davidwilliamhearn.com

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