Flat for Education & PracticeFirst - Perfect Together
At MusicFirst, we offer all of the best cloud-based software for music educators and their students, and one of my favorite things is when two companies work together to create an ideal solution for our customers. One such collaboration is the incredible integration between Flat for Education and PracticeFirst. Flat for Education is a wonderful notation solution for music teachers. Easy to use, lots of wonderful features, a large collection of worksheets, and even live collaboration. My personal favorite feature is one that they released a few years ago, and I’m not sure that everyone knows about it. It is a direct export feature that allows you to take any score that you are working on in Flat and export it directly to PracticeFirst - our world-class performance assessment software offering. It is amazing. Here is a video that illustrates how it works:
This export feature is a HUGE time saver for music teachers. No more figuring out if you have the correct version of MusicXML, no more worrying about the instrumentation transferring, and it eliminates about 4-5 steps from the usual process of exporting scores out of other notation programs and then importing them into PracticeFirst. This amazing feature can be found in the download menu (the one that looks like a cloud with an arrow pointing down). After you are done working on a score that you would like to have your students practice and be assessed on, simply click the download icon and select Export to PracticeFirst from the drop down menu (see below).
Depending on the size of your score, the export process can take a few minutes. You will see a progress bar at the bottom of your screen once you export the score. As an example, when I exported Semper Fidelis by John Philip Sousa, it took about 2 minutes to export the full score. Once the export is complete, you’ll be redirected to PracticeFirst (as long as you subscribe to both software titles in the MusicFirst Classroom), and then go through the score import process. Super simple!
If you would like to try this process out for yourself, just sign up for a FREE 30-day trial and start exporting scores today!