Best of breed, but still not perfect

Like you, I want to create musical scores using a combination of live transcripting from a MIDI keyboard and/or clicking with a mouse. I downloaded this because it was free. Wow, for free, I would normally give it five stars. But, there are some issues.

First, the good. When all is well, I’m able to play the lead on my midi capable keyboards and it quite perfectly transcribes the music properly. For that I would give it five stars. It also is amazingly great at being able to add notations such as chord symbles. And, it has some videos that make it pretty easy to learn. I whole heartedly would recommend this software for people who want to create their own scores… or simply one page lead sheets like I am doing.

So, it’s with the spirit of continual improvement that I am going to knock one star off. That one star off because of several issues that make me loath to hop back in and keep using it; which is a real shame.

Firstly, it’s obvious the developers want you to buy the pro version, but this feels like a distraction while you’re using the app. I’d easily would have paid up to $10 for this app and would have rather have done that then to feel like I’m getting half an app.

Next, and perhaps most importantly, the user interface is kinda wonky and weird. There are these things called “snippets” that you can create, but the management of “files”, “songs”, “snippets”, etc. just has me confused. Why not just create the concept of a song and handle snippets like movie editing software handles clips? I kinda get it, but the selection, editing and deleting of snippets is just hard to deal with. IE, I can never seem to select a snippet and delete it.

My biggest issue is that I can’t seem to figure out how to simply get the metroname going and then record from my keyboard. There’s not “start listening to midi keyboard” button. Instead, I *think* you hover your mouse over the bottom section of the app and just start playing. But it doesn’t always work and there’s no window for midi status to let you know the app is ready or connected. To the developers, I recommend they find some people to test the app and simply sit behind them watching how they interface with the app. I’m a developer myself and while this process can be painful to watch, it’s incredibly helpful to watch how people learn to interact with your application.

You know what? I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to give this app 5 stars because it’s the best app I can find to do this. Even though it’s painful to use, gives me occasional errors (just click “ignore”) and I’ve struggled to simply select two adjacent notes and tie them together (there’s no function to do this?). Where was I? Oh, yeah, the point is that despite its obvious flaws, I think the developers deserve 5 stars because of the way it intelligently transcribes your playing into music. I just hope there are updates that address some of these issues.

To the developers: Since you have no way of responding to reviews, I’ll hit the “contact” button to make sure you can contact me with questions.

Cajun Burgular about ScoreCloud Studio, v3.4.4