Incredibly frustrating to use – NotateMe Now Review

I used to use NotateMe on a Samsung Galaxy Note a few years ago, and remembered it being a little aggravating to learn how to write so the app could understand, but basically useable and useful for transcribing before doing the rest of the work in Sibelius. I installed the free version on my iPad Pro, expecting it to have hopefully improved and to work reasonably well with the Apple Pencil, but..... ugh. It’s such a pain! I have trouble writing dotted rhythms because it doesn’t recognize my dots, no matter how big or small I try to draw them. If I want to write 16th or 32nd notes I sometimes have to try over and over and over to draw the beams, because it doesn’t recognize them; or some of the notes under them just disappear for no reason I can see; or extra partial beams get added in random places; or accidentals or extra slurs or extra rests in other voices show up out of nowhere. I have to make note stems absurdly long to get it to work, except that for beamed groups that go between the top and bottom of the staff I start running out of space in the writing area, which is oddly skinny given how much screen space there is available. Sometimes I have to write the same thing six times in a row before I get it to say what I want. I think my handwriting at this point would satisfy any theory teacher I’ve ever had, and the app still can barely decipher it. It also crashes a lot, no matter what I quit out of in the background. And it has stopped playing back from the edit view, and will only play back from the formatted score now. The only reason I give it two stars instead of one is that for music with only a single voice and no complicated rhythms it’s OK. The only reason I’m still using it is that I’m trying to transcribe a Bach violin partita in order to ultimately arrange it for a different instrument and I don’t feel like hunting down another app.
Review by Stickler for Tuning on NotateMe Now.