I’ve been fiddling around. On the fiddle.
Har.
Played a ceilidh last night with Mumpers Community Ceilidh Band. There are a lot of us, and the stage is cramped, and the quality isn’t exactly pro, but we do make a jolly noise. One day there’ll be a proper ceilidh band that I’ll be in, but I need to work on my playing reliability before I can regularly expose myself like that!
Had a taste of it doing the cubs and scouts ceilidh at the University of Nottingham about a month ago, and that was great, but I definitely should have been playing better that night. More practice, that’s the only way…
So the other thing I’ve been doing today with music is composing. I got an idea for a tune as I was coming home from Hack24, and now I’m really starting to put it together. I got something I liked, and wanted something portable for composition so I foolishly bought an app for my iPad to do it.
I think you can guess how well that went from my choice of adverb in the previous paragraph.
I’m going to pose this as a question: if you were writing an app for music notation, and the user copied some bars and pasted them somewhere else, would you copy just the notes or would you take the bars with all the time signature changes within them?
If your answer isn’t the latter, I want a warning banner before I buy it.
I also want a warning banner that you might mangle the end of my piece when I paste into the middle of it and refuse to let me undo it (despite undoing things which happened earlier than the total mess-up). The only saving grace is that I exported a PDF of the first draft, so I can re-enter the notation in something else and continue there. But in the mean time I’ve wasted a load of money on an app that’s not fit for purpose, so I’ll be asking Apple for a refund on that. Who knows if they’ll give me one, I can’t even request it until I’ve had the invoice email through and that’s as yet unseen.
And speaking of apps on the App Store, I finally figured out (after some searching) why it would never let me leave a review — when it wanted a nickname, it was unhappy that my nickname wasn’t unique, but didn’t bother showing me an error message.
Come on Apple, your stuff was meant to be good once.