Phoning it in!….

If you don’t yet have an iPhone/iPodtouch then you are still hearing the hype no doubt.  I have the touch and if it’s possible I think Apple is ahead of the hype and the curve.  How about the ultimate musician’s accessory, no joke….

Phone, IM, Email, Games, Browsing etc…all great stuff but what sets the gizmo apart is the application store.  Sure there’s the bubble wrap program, the marble games, tons of silly apps and also great reference and info apps that all utilize the on-line capabilities as well as the accelerometer (tilt feature).  For literary junkies (and for free) you can even get the complete works of Shakespeare!

Best of all though, are the music apps.  You will find metronomes, tuners (yes a real tuner for iphone), a Piano and literally dozens of choices transforming one device into multiple devices that once upon a time and even still would set you back hundreds of dollars for each one.  My favorite so far is TaptheBeat Free by Masayuki Akamatsu, which simply has a big button on the screen that if you tap at least 4 times will tell you what tempo you are tapping in beats per minute.  This is invaluable and for conductors I think even better than a metronome, a great training tool if you need to nail tempos for ballet, accompanying film or even just to make you more consistent with tempos (I hate the word tempi, sounds like a sushi dish!).  For teachers too, listening to a student and being able to silently work out their tempo whilst they play for you would be very useful I would think.  A few of the metronome apps have this feature now also but they aren’t free like TaptheBeat.

For the audience member the free Flashlight program can set be for the red light, so that program notes can be read without the light being too bright to disturb anyone.  I imagine down-loadable program notes will be available soon too (if they aren’t already).

Now on itunes I discovered (maybe I’m the last one to discover this) that you can create playlists of excerpts by highlighting the song/movement etc.., then in File click Get Info, then in Options you can edit the start and stop time, so if you want to excerpt just a theme or passage you can.  For pre-concert talks/lectures this is very useful, the only thing is that it will only let you do it once per track, so you can’t create multiple excerpts (unless I just haven’t discovered a way to do this), but if you have several recordings of a work, you can do it by having different versions in your library.

Apple isn’t just ahead of the curve, they are the curve and I’m not a paid spokesman, just an iFan!