These days many of us let Apple Music, Spotify and other streaming services build our playlists for us. But lots of people also maintain music libraries of their own, so what can we do with all those tracks and albums?

In the internet age, we get our music from all kinds of places. A song might be on YouTube but not on Spotify, or maybe you can’t remember whether you bought it on Apple Music or Tidal.

Luckily, there’s a way to cut through the digital musical chaos. This app connects all your streaming services, so you can get the music you want anywhere, any time.

The internet has revolutionized music, and so have mobile devices. That’s as true of learning music as it is for listening to it, as these three deals demonstrate. With them, you can gain command of the ukelele, master Apple’s powerful Logic Pro X music-production program, and learn thousands of tunes straight from digital sheet music.

Londoner David William Hearn is not a trained programmer. He has no university education when it comes to making software. And yet his musical notation app for iPad, StaffPad, just won a coveted Apple Design Award this week.

The iPad app gives composers and conductors powerful tools for writing and tweaking musical scores, and for sharing their changes instantly with musicians on a stage or in a recording studio. StaffPad places the iPad and Apple Pencil squarely in the center of the collaborative creative process.

Here’s how Hearn and his team created their award-winning music-notation app.

Learning and playing music can be hard, especially if you’re not able to dedicate every waking hour to the craft. But there are ways to make music fun and easy.

Take, for instance, interactive sheet music app Tomplay. It offers great features and tools that prove useful to musicians of all levels.


Tomplay makes learning and playing music easier and more fun. Just choose the track for the song you want, and press play. A high-quality recording will accompany you as you play along, with more than 18,000 titles to choose from.

The score scrolls automatically in time with the music, so you don’t have to mess around with flipping pages. Plus, you can change the speed to work your way up to full tempo.

Tomplay also lets you add annotations for performance notes, loop specific passages for practice, and lots more. Little wonder it’s earned 4.4 out of 5 stars on the App Store.

Buy now: Get a year of Tomplay Interactive Sheet Music for $49.99. That’s half off the usual price.

Learning music is a great way to sharpen your mind and deepen the enjoyment of life. However, even some experienced musicians find reading music intimidating. Interactive sheet music player Tomplay offers accessible, readable scores of thousands of songs — for all instruments.

With it, you can play along with more than 18,000 songs on your iPhone, iPad or Mac. (It works on Android and Windows, too.)

Overbridge 2 is an amazing new app/plugin from Swedish drum machine and synthesizer maker Elektron. As its name suggests, it acts as a bridge between your computer and Elektron’s hardware boxes.

Using Overbridge, you can plug in, say, the Digitakt drum computer and sampler, and stream all eight of its audio tracks to your Mac or PC over a single USB cable.

This week we edit photos using the iPad’s trackpad, solve math problems with a Mac keyboard shortcut, add dynamic complications to our watches with Watchsmith, and more.

If you’re a stuck-at-home musician, or just someone who would like to learn to make music with their Mac, then maybe you’ve just downloaded the generous, lockdown-era, three-month free trial of Ableton Live. And if you’re a GarageBand (or Logic Pro X) user, you may be feeling a little lost.

Fear not. I did the same thing last year. At first I was overwhelmed just trying to do basic stuff, like routing my guitar into Ableton or trying to work out why the app offers at least three record buttons.

So, as a relatively fresh Ableton user, I thought I’d make a list of handy tips for new users coming from Apple’s music apps.

This week we punch through muted, silenced phones with magic alerts, replace $1,300 hardware sequencers with a $20 iOS app, and enjoy Endlesss music jams with anyone, anywhere in the world.