iPhone / iPad / Mac - $19.99/£19.99
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The Apple App Store is filled with music apps created to teach you the basics of reading and playing music. I should know, I download a new one every January as part of a New Year's resolution to learn the keyboard. But if you already have the basics nailed, forScore is an elegant and feature-rich music reading app that isn't cheap but will make finding, storing and playing new music infinitely easier.
forScore is essentially a sheet music reading app that lets you read pdf sheet music wherever you are without the faff of carrying around paper scores or music books with you.
forScore works on iPhones, iPads and Macs. But if you have an iPad that's probably the ideal in both screen size and portability for playing music, whether you choose to prop your tablet up on a music stand or take it with you to play on the move.
You can easily copy pdf sheet music from other apps, like Mail or Safari and send them through to your forScore app via iCloud. You can also import scores from other apps, cloud services and music providers, like MusicNotes.com.
What features do you get with forScore?
Everything about forScore is designed to make storing, categorizing and playing music more intuitive. For example, you can annotate your music, adding metadata to your scores so you can easily search through them later. You can also draw on your music or add text and symbols. When you do that, you can choose to annotate different layers, which can be viewed or hidden instantly.
There are a bunch of display options so you won't be distracted while you're playing, like portrait orientation, a cropping tool and the choice to put two pages side-by-side. On small iPhone screens you can even opt to lay out large pieces of music en-to-end and the app works like a horizontal teleprompter. You can also group different scores together to form setlists, that way you'll be presented with them one after another and can play the whole setlist from start to finish.
At $19.99/£19.99 I'd only recommend downloading forScore if you're serious about playing music. Or maybe you're the type of person who needs to make an investment to find the motivation to get serious.
But forScore is a dream for anyone who wants to be able to quickly download and play new music in seconds – and a great option if you're trying to go fully paperless, too, to save the hassle and the environment.
