Symphony Pro - Music Notation

I have been prompted just about every 2 seconds to write a review so here goes... In terms of the execution of this app there are bugs everywhere. All hint pop-up boxes are blank on my iPad and they freeze the program every time. It’s crashed multiple times. Info and windows go off the screen when in landscape mode for example. There are many other ways that this software has caused me frustration so far. In terms of functionality - a lot of basics are lacking. With handwriting, it will only become very flexible to me when you can write in double bar lines, chord symbols, 1st and 2nd endings and multi-rests. It’s far to clunky. There’s tons of other features I would love to request just for me to be able to write the most basic of charts as I would usually do in Sibelius. For now please just fix bugs and I will raise my rating to a 4 star.

Love it. Must get to know all the tricks still, but love it.

Exceptionally great app... Bugs to take care of: 1. It keeps crashing when I edit my recorded sheet (through midi) to add things like lyrics or extra instruments. 2. Keeps giving midi error and I have to restart program app and enable midi over and over again.

I had such high hopes for this but it is absolutely unusable and the documentation is absolutely no help. Deprsssing, regret paying for it. Crescendo beats it by a mile.

I use this app when I quickly have to write down some musical thoughts I don't have time to open finale. Combine with the Apple Pencil it's really nice. Later, I can import it into finale as an XML. it's really just a musical notebook for me. Definitely had to play around with it for a while in order to use it effectively. I think it's worth 10 bucks.

I love this app, believe me. The resources you get for free are tremendous. But sometimes some of those resources don’t work. First and foremost is the ties. I don’t know why but ties are not working. Not for piano, not for winds, not for nothing. Being a aspiring jazz musician, ties are very important in composition, so that needs to be fixed.

This is a great app, but it has two major problems. Because of these two problem, I almost want to give it three stars, but I’m going to give it four because it DOES have potential to be outstanding. A lot of thought went into this app, so it has potential. The first problem is that it’s glitchy. Things disappear, get moved around, etc. This is extraordinarily infuriating when you spend hours working on a project only to come back the next day and a bunch of parts of the project are moved or resized or something equally obnoxious. The second problem is that entering text is an absolute NIGHTMARE. If you only enter LIGHT text here and there, it will probably work for you just fine. But, if you’re using this particular app to write educational material (like for lessons or classroom), it’s just awful. I did manage to write an entire guitar method book with it, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience to deal with the text aspect of it. Text gets resized, moved around and the worst part - when you export the project, sometimes the text is a jumbled mess. If they fix these two issues (especially the text issue), I’ll give this five stars.

Honestly, It’s my favorite app on my iPad

I’m an old cello guy who has all his music in SP. The program allows playback customization to meet my declining skills. Adding accompaniment parts allows me to use Bluetooth to play accompaniment via an external device while using a pedal to start, stop, and repeat the score or parts of it. These features are a real help in practicing. I’d say, however, the program has some "quirky" faults: 1) It will not back-up my scores to the iCloud. Apple support showed me how to manually copy/paste scores to the Cloud. I finally had to creat a spread sheet to track changes and a date when it was manually backed up. 2) The Apple pencil does provide better a selection technique than a fat finger, but the pencil isn’t always recognized by the program especially if the pedal is active. 3) The User Manual needs an update. I’ve spend lots of time trying to figure out a complex program. Sometimes the explanations are vague or don’t address the searched issue. I am very appreciative of the Lab’s continued work on improving a remarkable software program. Thank you.

This is the first time I’ve felt compelled to write a review for an app, but after dropping $25, it seems worth the time. Bought the main app along with the $10 add-on for handwriting recognition and it just simply doesn’t work. Maybe it’s user error, but I literally cannot select the correct bar and staff I want to write in with the display going wonky and zooming in and out. Once I finally get the correct staff selected, when I go to write (you know the thing you have to pay an extra $10 for), it lets me write one note and then fails to allow me to write any other notes for a chord and fails to recognize a sharp symbol. I tried five times just now to write a simple D and F# in the bass clef and every single time without fail, it got the D, interpreted the # as a staccato marking and didn’t even let me write the F. All I’m trying to do is write down some basic ideas and the user experience SEVERELY limits the usability for such a simple action. Not gonna lie, feeling pretty ripped off right now. Hopefully someone else can avoid the mistake I made.