Touch Notation
| Category | Price | Seller | Device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Music | $11.99 | Kawai Musical Instruments Manufacturing Co., Ltd. | iPhone, iPad, iPod |
In Japan, Touch Notation was selected as one of the ‘App Store Best of 2014’ apps, and held the No.1 spot in the iPad Paid App index for music apps for over two weeks.
Touch Notation is available in free and full versions, allowing musicians to experience most of the app’s features at no cost.
Up until now, musical score creation software has relied upon dragging individual notes from a palette onto staves. By contrast, Touch Notation allows musicians to draw directly onto the score using a finger or touch pen, and have their work immediately appear as beautifully written notation, then played back using the app’s 30 built-in instrument voices.
- A wide-range of functions accessible from a cleanly designed, intuitive user interface.
- Ability to enter musical expressions for adjusting tempo and dynamics.
- Convenient transpose feature for raising/lowering the pitch of the entire score.
- Output scores using Air Print, or save to Dropbox in PDF, SMF, MusicXML, and ScoreMaker formats.
Touch Notation allows the following musical symbols to be entered by hand:
- Note, Rest (including dotted and double-dotted), Long Rest, Beam, Tuplet (Triplet)
- Accidental, Tie, Slur
- Accent, Staccato, Tenuto, Fermata
- Trill, sfz, Arpeggio, Pedal, Senza
- Metronome symbol
- Crescendo, Decrescendo
- Dynamics symbols (ppp~fff)
- Octave symbol
- Repeat brackets
- Repeat marks (D.C./Fine/D.S./Segno/Coda/to Coda)
- Clefs (Treble Clef/Bass Clef/C Clef)
- Key signature
- Time signature
- Bar lines (repeat marks)
Other musical expressions (‘Dolce’, ‘Tranquillo’, etc.) can be added using text input, while comments and memos can also be written freehand directly onto the score.
* Entering rhythm notation, drum notation, tab notation etc. is not supported.
* Older devices may experience stuttering when playing complicated scores with many simultaneous notes. Users are recommended to test the free version of Touch Notation in order to assess the app’s performance on their device.
Reviews
Great app! But needs updates...
Jtcart
I think this app had potential to be great. Simple tools and easy to use. The only problem is the developer hasn’t updated this. Wish I could’ve seen how successful this app would have been in the long run.
Potential to be phenomenal, but... Can no longer export
Thistledowne
EXPORT FAILS - by any method. What kind of notating software allows one to use an SATB template but not enter lyrics? I’ve paid for the whole package, and no lyrics? Massive shortcoming. Other shortcomings: 1. Cannot search the help utility by keyword. Many sub-level menu items hidden under parent items but not listed in tree form in the table of contents. 2. Cannot export Midi ‘parts’. 3. Cannot export mp3 renderings of Midi. 4. Cannot specify beginning measure number. 5. Copy and paste an expression - THEN BE ABLE TO EDIT THE EXPRESSION, else have to create new every time and unify format, say, if one is creating measure numbers because program lacks item 4 above. 6. Do NOT link song listing to Title property. If I wish to maintain several revisions, I should not have to edit the Title in order to tell the difference between versions.
Great app - needs update for 2018 iPad Pros
BKVibes
Have been using this app for on the go composing. Very useful once you get comfortable with the input methods. However this needs an update for the new iPad Pros (2018) so the app will display edge to edge. Also with the iPad Pros now supporting midi keyboards, note input via an external midi keyboard would be game changing.
This could be really good but right now it’s not
bbbbbbaaaaaaammmmmmm
The input is very intuitive, more so than another notation app I bought for iPad. Unfortunately, after paying for it I discovered too many bugs which have not yet been addressed. 1. Copy and paste function is terrible! When copying a bar to another bar it doesn’t put the notes where they were in the copied measure, they get transposed all differently depending on where you touch the screen, so you have to sort of guess where to tap the screen, and if you guessed wrong, which you probably will do most of the time, you have to copy all over again and try to paste in the right spot, which is ridiculous. PLEASE FIX THIS!!! 2. Playback tool is too limited. This should be more like a standard playback tool with rewind and fast-forward controls not just play and stop. Also there should be a way to have it play back in swing like other notation programs can. 3. The sound is buggy. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, and the only way to get it back is for me to restart my iPad. I shouldn’t have to do that, the sound should be more robust than that. 4. There are some basic articulation’s and phrase markings which don’t exist in this app, such as marcato, falls, and glissando. I would be happy to write a more positive review if these items could be addressed and if the maker or makers of this software would show more interest in supporting it with more frequent updates as these problems are brought to their attention by users like myself who actually paid for it.
A powerful tool if you take the time to learn how to use it
gvhstw
Very frustrating at times, but over all this app is very well worth the price for all the features it offers. Devs: please keep working on this! It has huge potential if the kinks can be sorted out. PROS: Easy to use Intuitive controls Convenient shortcuts Great playback function Works well with Apple Pencil Very flexible with what and how you write CONS: Gesture recognition is hit-or-miss Unable to format text Unable to erase handwriting In-app videos no longer work after a recent iOS update For those having trouble copying and pasting: you can copy entire measures by double tapping and dragging to select all the measures you want to copy. Then double tap and drag to highlight an equal number of empty measures where you want to paste your notes. The notation will copy exactly without having to move stuff around.
Crashes
hawaiian808808
Tried to input Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and encountered tons of problems. The most irritating were that the app kept crashing upon inputting on page 3, and the inability to have sfz stay on the score after input; it kept disappearing and only one (of about 4) remains on the completed score. Seeing how infrequent this app is updated, looking for another similar app.
Great app- one important suggestion
nightowlgk
I use this right now for bass parts, lead sheets, or a melody. Transposes very well. Once you learn the hand writing recognition it is very intuitive. I even use my fingers with great results. Chord input is great, text input could be smarter: allow editing of text after the fact and text formatting options......... Great copy and paste for whole bars or sections speeds up work incredibly. Just lasso the section and click copy. Put you finger down, slide it around and paste it where you want it. Very accurate. I have one important suggestion. They should add a white ink color to the pen input so that you can the erase or clean up other “ hand written” entries that you might have put in before. I use this trick in ForScore all the time.
Good app
pjl21
Kawai is heading in the right direction with this app - great sounding orchestral voices even at the entry level. The open ended sequencer is a great feature, along with the copy/paste functions. I hope their next rev includes better MIDI mapping, allowing 16 channel assignments for playing external synths, (both iPad and hardware versions). Currently, I'm using the Griffin dock which has MIDI in and out. I would use this app all the time for live performance if it had that output capability. In the meantime, I'll have to keep using my Yamaha QY100.
