Composer's Sketchpad

I was hoping to find something to edit midi on at an affordable price, and I was disappointed to be unable to import music. Please add this.

This is a great tool for developing musical ideas. Pitch-wise it is pretty accurate, rhythmically it is lacking. In order to see subdivisions for 16ths you need to put 16 beats per measure. - that is misleading, it should be four beats per measure and have options to see subdivisions by either 8ths. 16ths, or triplets. That would be great. It supports the Apple Pencil, but cannot tell the difference between my pencil and my finger, so every time you go to move the sheet you end up with stray notes. Better Apple Pencil support and more accurate musical ways to control the rhythmic subdivisions would make this a very useful tool for serious musicians.

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Play icon doesn’t toggle. Erase button doesn’t. Stops playing every time I touch the piano roll even though I’m just trying to move the screen. Looked like a good idea. Just not done well to my way of thinking.

Updated update: *still* a cool idea. Dark UI theme is very much appreciated, as are standard iOS gestures for drawing and zooming. Now: copy/paste? Please? It is the one missing function that keeps me from using this app more than once every few months. Update: MIDI export: yay! All the other stuff: still want, especially copy/paste, dark UI, and regular iOS scrolling and drawing gestures. Also, there seems to be an annoying lag with the current two-finger drawing: I lift my left thumb but if I try to scroll too quickly with my right, I end up with a stack of notes that have to be erased. Thanks for listening to your users! --- I'm giving this app four stars because I like the idea so much and because even though it is missing some fairly basic functionality it is already extremely flexible in the variety of musical ideas you can take down. I was not even sure anyone had made a simple piano roll music editing app when I went looking for one, but here it is, brand new! So it is a piano roll-style music writing app that comes without a hugely complex DAW attached to it. It can be used for microtonal work at a fairly rough resolution: if you turn off the snap-to-pitch option, it will let you draw notes anywhere between (Western even-tempered 12-tone) pitches that you would like. It is equally flexible with regard to meter: snap-to-time can be turned on or off, and although the roll itself has grid lines for regular measures, you can ignore them entirely. Without the snap-to functions, you can sketch melody lines freely, but there is little precision if you want to be able to create tones at precise frequencies that are not on the even-tempered scale. I have not been able to find any additional preferences to changes scales for the snap-to values. And so this truly is a sketchpad if precision is important to your music but you are trying to work outside of modern even-tempered Western music. My main problems with this app are that very basic digital tools are missing. There is no copy/paste on the sketchpad itself, so repeating structures can take some time to fill in. There is no export of any kind: no audio files, not even an image file of the sketch itself. A dark background app theme would be very helpful for those of us who find glaring white backgrounds painful--or even just annoying--to work with. This app has a lot of potential. Honestly, I could see it becoming into a synth/sampler that created audio stream output. MIDI would be gravy, if challenging to implement. At the least, my wishes for added options would be something like the following: Improved editing: copy/paste; the ability to draw straight lines from one arbitrary point to another rather than being restricted to snap-to-pitch; and making the non-standard two finger drawing/zoom function optional while adding the usual iOS gestures for these functions--myself, I find those gestures adequate and those implemented here to be awkward. Import user samples for custom instruments. Export and/or record audio into aiff or wav format. A sine oscillator as one instrument choice--this would give the app and the user some basic synthesizing power. Audiobus integration that would allow further processing of the audio output. Great start. Add more stuff! :)

I applaud this guy for really incorporating ideas from the reviews. Thanks to the "Help" menu, I now know how to properly use this app. I use Finale (from MakeMusic) to compose on my computer, but it's painstaking process of selecting and plotting notes one at a time. This app really makes it easier for me to scribble down any tune that comes to mind, and I believe that's what it's made to do. I don't think it's for writing out entire scores, but that doesn't make it bad. (Although, you can export this as a midi . . . somehow?) In fact, quite the opposite. There are already tons of other programs that can plot notes on a staff. You can do that on regular paper. This app lets you capture a song that you made up on the train and hear it right away without caring about what key it's in. You can experiment with instruments you don't know how to play. It even has more options than the traditional composition programs and doesn't break the bank. Composer's Sketchbook is really something quite different, innovative, and now with instructions, intuitive! Hopefully new features like crescendos and ritardandos will be added in the future, but I'm already a fan! Thank you so much!!