Flat: Music Score & Tab Editor 4+

Great Music Creating software

This is an amazing app. It’s free for one thing, which is amazing unlike other software/apps and please do not change that. They have a cheap premium plan that gives you some extra but definitely not necessary features and helps support the devs. I use the app on the go and the website at home and both are amazing. You have access to all the features no pay walls, it’s laid out logically and easy to find things. If you don’t understand something there is a great help page with simple explanations. I only have two problems. One: The violin synthesizer isn’t the greatest. And 2: The app gets weird when you have >8 instruments or get too long of a composition. Also some features from the website need to move to the app (harmonics, line customization, written - in things like corde, and LH pizz for strings). Other then that, this is the best music notation app on the App Store.

Developer Response ,

Thanks a lot for your review! Regarding these features that are only available in our website right now, they will be added in an upcoming release in our iOS app as well.

Good for most people

This app is great for if you just want to write something out quick. Obviously the phone isn't going to be most ideal method of composing music, but I feel like there are a few things here and there that could use some tweaking. Particularly with the guitar interface. I know I'm probably a minority when it comes to this, but I would like to use this so I can transcribe songs accurately, most of them being rock/metal songs, which are sometimes in different guitar/bass tunings like D standard, Eb standard or drop C, and while you can write in lower notes than what's accessible with standard E, it won't show up on the tablature, which, if you're someone who uses tablature primarily, can be a little inconvenient. So lower tunings for guitars/basses I think would be a welcome addition. Also, many of the guitar techniques that you can write out on the app won't happen during playback. For example, palm muting doesn't change the guitar sound, it just says that the notes are palm muted, bends and pre bends sometimes won't even appear in the music even after repeated attempts to add them in, and even when they do get added in, the notes will not bend during playback. Letting notes ring also doesn't do anything during playback, it just says to let the notes ring. Otherwise I'd say this is going to be fine for everyone else, which is why I gave it a 4 star rating even if I personally had some problems with it.

A couple problems

This tool is really good for most things, but there are a couple problems with it I noticed pretty quickly. 1 - The free version of the alto sax sound is PAINFULLY out of tune. I tried arranging a marching band show, that includes sax features, and had to cut out the part just because of how horrible it sounds. I am not exaggerating at all, if it has a unison with any other part, it will completely ruin it. 2 - copy/pasting is weird. If I want a trumpet/trombone unison part, chances are they will not be playing the same octave. If I copy a part from the trumpet line and paste it to the trombone line, it would be a lot simpler if it just transposed an octave down to the trombone’s practical range instead of being 30 ledger lines above the staff. Either that, or allow moving more than one note at once, like if I select a measure and move it down, it would be simpler than having to select each note and pulling it down. These problems are definitely not deal-breakers, there is a lot of really good stuff with this app and these problems are kind of niche(I don’t think a lot of people use this for marching band and jazz band pieces). All in all, it’s a good app, it just has a few tiny problems that would make some people’s lives a little easier if they were fixed.

Developer Response ,

Hey, thank you for your feedback, we truly appreciate it. We are sharing this with the tech team so we can enhance these aspects.