Yesterday I traded my Blackberry in for a Google Android phone. It’s a little hard to believe, even for me. I loved my Blackberry, and got some pretty extensive use out of it. I was hearing great things about Android, particularly for musicians, and I was ready to make the leap.
To be honest the jury’s still out on whether or not the Android is for me – I plan to give it 30 days, and swap my Android for my Blackberry if I don’t find it useful. I want to make sure that I’m not going to be more distracted by this thing as opposed to saving time. I’ll let you know how the experiment goes!
Regardless, after I bought my Android, I was impressed by a number of things you could do with it. Downloading various apps in the Android marketplace is super easy. It seems like this little phone can do a whole lot for a musician, both with cool music-related apps, and apps to help boost your productivity.
In this blog, I want to present you with some useful tools I found so far to help with both musicianship and productivity. Check out these apps:
This app is truly amazing. You can record any kind of practice session with your Android’s built-in microphone, and then go back over the practice and record time-stamped notes to help you put things in perspective.
The product itself will actually evolve into a full desktop application at some point in the near future, but for now, it’s available exclusively as a free Android app.
Mobile metronome is an Android app that allows you to set a metronome tone to various time signatures of your choosing. It’s 100% free, and as the developer says on his website, “Yes, it is steady and doesn’t oscillate as most if not all other Android metronomes.”
The audio engine can be a factor with Android metronome apps, so you need to find one that remains on beat and is fairly consistent throughout your practice. So far this one seems rock solid.
If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly coming up with new notes and ideas for your business, and you need somewhere to jot them down. Considering that your phone is something you usually have with you, a great note app could really save you some time and energy – particularly for those of us who always seem to forget about bringing that notebook along.
Evernote is a popular note app, not just because of how easy it is to use, but because it lets you organize your notes, unlike many other note-taking apps. You can take notes in the form of photos, text, voice note and file upload, turning your android into a flexible note-taking and organizing device in addition to its many other uses.
You can copy and drag-and-drop text information, pictures, and anything else you see and access on the web into your Evernote interface. You can also take a photograph from your cameraphone and drop it into Evernote, add a sound clip so you can remember where it was taken, and then store and access everything into the same area for easy finding and use later.
Your notes are also fully indexable, and the Evernote search interface is highly intuitive. Just one search query will scan and access all your indexed notes, and will connect you with common themes across Evernote where you data is stored.
What’s more, Evernote works practically everywhere – you can then access the same notes from your computer desktop, your phone or mobile device. You can use its powerful search feature to access your themes anywhere.
If you operate on a very set schedule, productivity can be all about knowing when you need to receive calls. Sweet Dreams is an amazing app in that it disables calls and other phone alerts based on your location, time of day, or certain movements.
It’s difficult sometimes to turn your phone off during practice, but if you typically practice around the same time daily or weekly, Sweet Dreams will take care of all that for you. Without even thinking, your alerts could go down for a few minutes or a couple hours at a time. And since you’ve already gone to the trouble of programming the phone to go silent, the likelihood is that you won’t turn the phone back on when you’re practicing.
Android has some great tools for productivity and handy apps for musicians. If you haven’t checked out an Android phone yet, I highly recommend it.....at least so far :)
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