Newzik: Sheet Music Reader Reviews

As a cellist who frequently plays orchestral and chamber music, Newzik, along with my iPad, is seriously the best thing ever. With my AirTurn pedal, page turning and fumbling with paper is no longer an issue. The editing function is so easy and flexible, and the fact that you can use different colors for marking and highlighting makes Newzik incredibly useful. Add to all that the fact that I can easily add any PDF to my music library, be it repertoire I’m currently playing or études and other practice work, not to mention keep all my students’ work in one convenient app, makes this app a complete game changer for the classical musician. If you’re wondering whether to take the plunge and use an iPad for all your music, I can wholeheartedly say DO IT, and be sure to use the this app app combined with a Duo AirTurn pedal. Such a worthwhile investment!

I’ve been using this app for a couple of years now and there is plenty to like. As a tuba player, this allows me to find music quickly. It never blows off the stand, and I always have enough light. I did have pay for the upgrade to 5.0 when I thought it would be free for existing users. But, I don’t really mind supporting the folks that provide such fine support to a product I use almost daily.

There are two features that I would like to see: 1) white notes on black background. This would help greatly when the scene calls for blackout.
2) the ability use the iPad’s camera to snap an image of a piece of music on paper and bring it directly into the library without going through one or two independent apps to change the image to a pdf.

I got this because I am performing singer/acoustic guitarist who has been in the process of updating my songbook to my iPad mini. I’ve used a few competitors apps with one that I’ve even subscribed to that I’m regretting now. The reason being that neither was very friendly with the Irig blue board.

I’m not a user manual kind of guy and was able to configure Newzik with the Irig blue board and figure out how to import files within an hour. I thought because my iPad mini is older (2 generation) that I was having compatibility issues with the other apps. This very well may have been the case.

Newzik is great and easy to to intuit if you’re like me if like to go in and figure it out. 🙂

The annotate feature isn’t functioning well for my work. I annotate my scores heavily because I sometimes have to play from orchestral reductions. I find it incredibly helpful to be able to edit out the notes that I decide to leave out. It isn’t freezing up a lot on me when I zoom in using the annotate feature. Otherwise, I actually really like Newzik , so I really hope that you will find a way to fix that problem because I paid for this product. I use ForScore for a different job, and I still prefer that app over this one. But, I really need a good second app to use because I need to keep some of my sheet music in a different spot.

Lately it’s gotten a bit “buggy”. It doesn’t let me send emails directly from Newzik . Don’t know if it’s a problem with iOS or with the latest update from iOS or from this app.

The this app team is working on it but have yet to get me a fix for the issue. I can work around it by sending the files using the cut and paste format in PDF conversion but I cannot even send this app an e-mail directly from Newzik .

It’s going on five days now and no fix yet. Just sent an email to this app via Yahoo asking if I have to pay for a complete deletion and re-installation but it’s 8:30PM in France right now so no one in the office.

This does everything I wanted it to do and more. I love having the ability to put multiple different parts along with different variations of recordings together in one entry and switch between them on the fly. Works great with a page turner. Despite the “Composer/Piece” terminology I’m using this with rock and pop music too, and works great there as well. I’m planning to replace a handful of different apps with just this one, once I finish loading up all my music.

Newzik came highly recommended and, despite the fact that it is not free, I had decided that if it was half as good as it looked, I would purchase it to replace the free sheet music app I currently use.
However, while the trial version allowed me to import sheet music, it would not allow me to access any of the files I imported to test out features. I could not explore any of the menus, make annotations, even turn pages. Every time I click on a file, a pop up appears that tries to sell me the paid version. When I close the window my file also closes.

I had actually planned to purchase Newzik, but if this is an example of their customer service, I am very hesitant. Just as I will not purchase a car without a test drive, or buy a violin without playing it first, I refuse to pay for a product that does not allow a user trial.

I am extremely disappointed. What could have been an excellent product has turned out to simply another high pressure sales gimmick. Companies need to treat potential customers better than this.

Newzik is for orchestras and they have put a lot of thought into scrolling in that environment. But if you don’t have a foot pedal with you, you are out of luck. If you use automatic scroll, it reverts to displaying the screen by whole pages and won’t turn to the next page until you are already supposed to be playing it. They should be able to respect the option to scroll line by line while keeping the active measure in the middle, but apparently do not accommodate people who don’t carry a foot pedal at all times.

Also the apo crashes when opening many of the MusicXml files generated by major apps, so I can’t put all my music in.

I love this app! Simpler interface than forscore, without sacrificing any practical functionality. Experimentation with this app has led this dinosaur of a conductor and orchestra librarian to venture far outside of his comfort zone in an attempt to embrace today’s technological advances.

Library/bowing annotation is generally much quicker, clearer, and more detailed, without all the paper sorting and lugging. I’d be very interested to see how this works within a staff of librarians (with Dropbox integration and/or library synchronization). Welcome to the future!

I am upset that I spent time uploading music into Newzik and am now just finding out that I have to upgrade to premium and spend $20 a year to upload more music. I only have uploaded about 10 pieces so far. This was not mentioned in the description of Newzik . Wasted a lot of time, now I’ll just buy Fourscore....

I took a leap of faith to try this app instead of forScore which has longer history and followers and strongly recommended by many musicians. I do enjoy this app and it works well enough.

I noticed that Newzik crashes sometimes, and when it does, there’s no help - it’ll continue doing so no matter what I do (rebooting Newzik , the iPad, turn on/off Bluetooth or WiFi etc) unless I change to a different score. It always seems to happen to my longer pieces in the last movement. This never happens during he actual performance, but I’m nervous. Has anyone else experienced this?

I bought Newzik based on the recommendation of a known violinist. As a new release, it is still require some improvements but I was informed by the developers that a new version is being prepared to be released.

What I liked is the immediate support that I received from the developers and this is very important when evaluating an application.

It takes a while to understand how to navigate the application but as I was told, the new interface, once introduced will solve the problem.

Newzik is even better than forScore and I have been using it for over a year with no problems. All the features are great and it syncs with books, Dropbox, google drive, and any other format for download. It is smooth and easy to use. The tech support is fantastic and everyone was timely with their help. I highly recommend!

Newzik is a must for all the musicians. One of the coolest things about Newzik is when the iPad is in horizontal mode, with one tap you can scroll down and see the rest of the page. So the problem of my iPad being small (9.7 inches) got solved. It would be even nicer, If Newzik had the option of staff paper (blank).
P.S: the page turner devices are too expensive tho :(

Before I chose this app, I tried a large number of other music reader programs. When I tried this app, I quit looking. It is by far, the best one out there. If you’re using anything else, give it a try - it’s free to try. I am thankful that a group of intelligent and dedicated people have put this great program together. Thanks this app team !!

I’ve been consistently impressed with the functionality of this software and with the responsiveness of the developers. The program is filled with useful features for live performance and practice. Highly recommended even if my friends have never heard of it! Spread the word!

I’m a violinist but I’m in the middle of big ginger and amateur and all the free violin sheet music is way to hard for me there for like pros so if your a biggener for violin or any instrument I don’t recommend Newzik for you also I love that you can use your apple pen on Newzik cuz I have one and it helps but...
You basically have to buy the premium thing or what Newzik wants you to buy to actually have a good time with it anyways bye.

Finally, I've been searching forever for an app just like this. As a performing solo musician with backing tracks I needed an app that could play backing tracks as well as display sheet music in a reliable fashion. The fact that this app imports musicxml instead of just PDF puts it well above the other apps out there.

I have been using forscore for a while and I thought music score reading apps were plateau‘d. I was wrong. Newzik is beautiful. The UI is incredible, and the functions and form are sleek and easy to use. Bravo!

This is a very professional app, the only one I know of that allows you to play together with other people in sync. And has so many more features! If you are a real musician, you'll definitively enjoy it.