Recording - August 2011 - 60

Learn music, learn terminology, learn technique... all on your iOS device
Reviews by Mike Metlay
In this month’s iOS Music Tools, we take a look at several iOS-based educational resources, large and small... a couple of which are also of use to readers who might not have an iOS device yet, or don’t plan to get one. Read on!—MM chunks that can (to some extent) be examined in any order. With video and guided screen tours as the main medium of choice, the user can jump around, relisten where needed, and generally tailor the flow of the tutorials to suit his or her needs. This work for your machinery. (For the purposes of this review, I used the N.E.D.pad app with my iPad; the desktop version requires a PowerPC or Intel Mac running Leopard or better.) So, before we go any further, you’re wondering: what’s the catch? Where do I have to start spending money? Here’s how it works—you can buy tutorials one at a time for download, and/or you can sign up for a subscription to the streaming service. You can do a Starter membership, a one-time billing of $49.50 for one month or $99 for three months, or you can sign up for a Pro membership and be automatically billed at $25/month or $199/year. This is a huge simplification over the site’s pricing structure as of a few months ago, which had several levels of paid service where certain videos were available at one level but not at another. Now, you pay and you get in all the way: as of press time, the library has nearly 250 titles containing over 700 hours of instruction in some 14,000 short videos. Membership also includes free access to the Hub, a collection of articles and quick tutorials about the software and technologies covered on the site, and the ability to post and reply to notes and read threads in macProVideo.com’s extensive discussion forums. Obviously they want you to sign up at the Pro level, as that gives you the most access for the best average price, but you might find a Starter membership will work for you to dive in and learn what you want if your needs are very specific. The Pro subscription will be very tempting, though, because there’s a lot of material to enjoy, including an entire series of intensive recording-technique videos and hundreds of hours of content on non-music stuff as well, like basic Mac OS X training, web design in XHTML and WordPress, Final Cut Pro, Aperture, Photoshop, Illustrator, iWeb... a very impressive list. Once you buy your access membership, macProVideo.com doesn’t care whether you’re an audio guy, or do video or web stuff, or all at once... it’s all there for you.

For Education

macProVideo.com N.E.D.pad
free to registered users; www.macprovideo.com

I admit it... the placement of this review is a little bit of a cheat, because you don’t have to have an iOS device to take advantage of what macProVideo.com offers; the N.E.D. (Nonlinear Educating Device) product I’ll be discussing today is available not only for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but also in a desktop version and a version for web-browser playback. So read on, because there’s something for more than just iOS users here! If you’re wondering what Nonlinear Educating is, it’s the macProVideo.com byline—essentially an approach to learning a topic that’s broken up into easily digestible
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approach isn’t anything new; aside from the obvious appeal of seeing and hearing what you’re trying to learn rather than just reading about it, video-based instruction has always had pause and rewind buttons attached. But with the N.E.D. application family, macProVideo.com has given us a unified and easy-to-use framework for accessing its educational materials anywhere, any time. When you first come to macProVideo .com, you are encouraged to create a personal account for yourself. When you do, there’s a fair bit of material immediately made available to you for free , and you are also allowed to visit the site’s many discussion forums and also to download and install whichever flavors of N.E.D.

http://www.macProVideo.com http://www.macProVideo.com http://www.macprovideo.com http://www.macProVideo.com http://www.macProVideo.com http://www.macProVideo.com http://www.macProVideo.com

Recording - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - August 2011