Nota ABC - Session Trad Tunes 4+

I downloaded to evaluate against Tunebook and The Craic but found Nota lacking.

Unlike Tunebook when you edit the abc of a tune you can’t see the changes to the score until they are saved. There is no shortcut/common musical additions to the pop up keyboard as in Tunebook.

Changing the playback instrument doesn’t take effect until you quit and open the app again. The normal choice of MIDI sounds is restricted to 3 with the extra 2 available only when you subscribe. This is unnecessary - no such restriction on Tunebook or The Craic.

Hiding the sidebar to see more score is cumbersome because you must find the small icon on top left while Tunebook and The Craic both do this when you tap the score.

The playback bar at the foot of the screen is too big and obscures screen space that restricts viewing of more than four lines of notation.

Tunebook & The Craic retain a library and vast store of tunes with links to import from various sources with an initial purchase with no ongoing charge.

There is no ability to export as PDF or share other than in fairly technical formats. In Tunebook I can share by email, Airdrop etc.

Tunebook is by far the most useful app for working with abc files and for storing tunes. I have used it to publish several booklets and use it constantly at sessions and gigs to access my tune library.

Sorry to be so negative but this app will frustrate anyone serious about using an iPad to manage their music. Nota is at best a Beta test app.

Hello, thanks for your feedbacks.
Most of them are valid suggestions, and will go straight to my “next features” list. Some of them ("share abc via email") were already planned, and are ready in my test versions; some other will require more work.
Both The Craic and Tunebook are great apps, I agree, and they’ve been around for a while, and this is probably why they have some features which Nota is missing. It’s a 1.0 version, but I’ll do my best to incorporate suggestions and make it grow. In any case, If you’re interested, contact me at info@notabc.app: you sound like a dedicated user and I’d love to pick you mind and get more feedback. Cheers! Davide

UPDATE: last week Nota ABC 1.0.1 was released; it fixes the "plaback instrument" problem that you reported, it allows you to share the tune via system sharing (email etc) and has the printing feature (single tune or whole collection). It's not everything but, hopefully, it's a small step in the right direction. More features will come. Thanks again for your input!

I’ve been looking for an app like this for a long time – the existing offering of native apps for databases of tunes is quite dated, and I wanted something modern, and something with previews in the listing.

Nota caught my eye immediately, with a modern design, and exactly the functionality I was looking for. I couldn’t initially figure out how to populate the database from my current list of tunes, which was just a long note in the Apple Notes app; I contacted the developer who replied within a matter of hours with a very helpful and friendly response, and I was able to follow his clear instructions immediately.

The app did a great job of matching the tune names to the online database and generating the sheet music and previews, and it was easy to manually match the few that weren’t done automatically.

I’m very pleased! This is definitely my new tune database.

I'm really glad you liked Nota ABC! Needless to say, do contact me again in case of any doubts or suggestions!