It’s always great for me to get away and be a part of the many clinics and conferences in the U.S. My recent visit to San Antonio and the 2013 TI:ME and Texas Music Educators Association Conferences this February was both refreshing and full of exploration. If you haven’t ever had the chance to visit a state, regional or national conference, I very much encourage you to invest the time; you will not regret it!
The next “x” number of articles that I post will be about my exploration of the events and summaries of my findings.
Post One: MusicFirst
Website: http://musicfirst.com
MusicFirst is being lead by Dr. James Frankel -no stranger here at MusTech.Net or to anyone in Music Education or Music Technology. MusicFirst is the Digital Division of Music Sales Group and was founded with a very noble mission: to “offer music teachers and their students easy-to-use, affordable could-based solutions that enable music learning, creation, sharing, and exploration on any device at anytime, anywhere.”
As a member of the Music Education Advisory Board for the Music Sales Group, I was extremely pleased to see them launch their product(s) at the 2013 TMEA conference. It’s always exciting to be a part of something so innovative and so forward-thinking, even if it’s only a small part! The buzz at the MusicFirst booth was amazing and LOUD –every time I ventured by the booth I had to edge-in to see the MusicFirst team and their demonstrations. Fortunately, Robin Hodson, Head of Sales and Training for the Music Sales Education Division, was able to give me the “conference tour” -it was amazing!
…they offer additional discounts for multiple packages, more users, and for longer length subscriptions!
MusicFirst is now offering an incredible array of “must-have” music education products at an incredible price. What’s unbelievable is how they are packaging them for sale… all of their products are offered and delivered online, in cloud-based solutions that are nicely packaged for use with entire classrooms, schools, or school-districts. The majority of their “packages” include one product priced at $199.00 ,for up to 100 users, per year. You may add another 150 users, for a total of 250 users for $100.00 more -that’s just over $1.00 per student, per year -it’s incredible! In addition to the prices listed, Robin also stated that they offer additional discounts for multiple packages, more users, and for longer length subscriptions!
As a professor of pre-service music teachers that has personally used every software title that MusicFirst offers, I can attest to the quality of their product offerings; every product is useful and well developed. The price, packaging, and services offered by MusicFirst makes purchasing these titles through them a non-decision.
I’m going to “break down” the MusicFirst products and packages by education level and list each of the various pricing options in this post. I’m also going to include a link to each product, via the MusicFirst webpage, for you to find additional information about each product.
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PRODUCTS
via MusicFirst.com:
Charanga Music World – $199.00 for a school subscription
Charanga Music World is a brand new web based tool for anyone teaching students to play an instrument for the first time. It offers interactive music lessons for elementary and middle school students. Explore an exciting world full of musical pieces, videos, quizzes and games, all the while earning coins to spend on new items for your avatar!
Music Delta – $199.00 for up to 100 Users
Music Delta offers a fun, graphical, interactive musical experience for elementary students beginning music appreciation, general music or music history. It lives online and can be accessed by students on any computer, via a school wide license. No extra setup or hardware is required.
Noteflight Classroom – $199.00 for up to 250 users
All versions of Noteflight include these features:
-Unlimited Scores
-Create and save as many scores as you like
-15 Basic Instruments
-50+ High Quality Instruments
-Share, Link, embed and share scores online
-Choose exactly who to share a score with
– High-quality score printing – and much more!
Noteflight Teacher – $295.00 up to 5 sites with 75 per users per site
Noteflight Teacher Edition is like the Classroom edition, except this time, multiple teachers in your school or district can each create their own classroom community, allowing up to 75 students per teacher to use the program. There are versions of the Teacher edition for 5, 10, 15, 20 teachers – or more – ask us if you want to customize eactly how many teachers/students you need to have using Noteflight.
Inside Music – $199.00 for one teacher & up to 150 users
Inside Music is a web-based composition program that includes short, engaging lessons with instructional videos and creative notation assignments following each lesson. Developed in collaboration with Music-COMP and Noteflight, and carefully field tested in Grades 5–12 classrooms, the low cost includes access to Noteflight Crescendo, an excellent online notation application and the only application that allows teachers to comment on students’ work and students to comment on each other’s work. And because it’s online, students can access their compositions from any computer with access to the internet. No need to purchase separate software.
MIDDLE SCHOOL PRODUCTS
via MusicFirst.com:
Focus on Sound – $199.00 for up to 100 users
Focus on Sound is a fun, exciting new music education software for Windows®, Apple®Mac®, tablets and smartphones which allows students to develop listening skills. Featuring hundreds of photos, recordings, music scores, videos and a fully integrated testing system, Focus on Sound provides two exciting new multimedia software products; Sound Words and Instruments.
O-Generator learn to Compose and O-Generator World Music – $39-$125 – various licenses available
O-Generator Learn to Compose is a unique sequencer for education that uses Rock, Pop and Dance styles to explore the fundamentals of music and composition by manipulating individual sounds.
O-Generator World Music is the newest and most enticing way to learn World Music African and Latin Styles. The O-Generator World Music package combines 2 fantastic programs: Learn World Music & Play World Rhythms.
Soundation – $199 for up to 99 Users
Soundation 4 Education is a revolutionary sequencer and audio recording program that lives entirely online, in the cloud. It works on any computer with internet access (Mac or PC) and doesn’t require any hardware setup or any problems making the software run, which is extremely common with regular music sequencers when used in schools.
Auralia 4 – $149.00 Single User – $499.00 5 User Lab Pack & $80.00 per additional user
Auralia’s 41 ear training topics contain thousands of questions, can be easily customised and have attractive and informative lessons to assist with student learning. The new Courses feature can automatically lead students through all aspects of Auralia, integrating lessons with the drills and tests! Questions are automatically marked, freeing up hours of teaching time, and allowing students to work effectively on their own!
Also available in “Cloud” version at $29.00 per user.
Musition 4 $149.00 Single User – $499.00 5 User Lab Pack & $80.00 per additional user
Designed for students of all ages and abilities, Musition is an easy to use music theory and fundamentals program. Musition’s 34 topics contain thousands of multiple choice, tapping, note writing and comparison exercises, making music theory fun for your students. Musition instantly marks questions, records scores and allows you to print out reports detailing student progress. You may never need to create and mark a theory worksheet again!
Also available in “Cloud” version at $29.00 per user.
Noteflight Classroom – $199.00 for up to 250 users
All versions of Noteflight include these features:
-Unlimited Scores
-Create and save as many scores as you like
-15 Basic Instruments
-50+ High Quality Instruments
-Share, Link, embed and share scores online
-Choose exactly who to share a score with
– High-quality score printing – and much more!
Noteflight Teacher – $295.00 up to 5 sites with 75 per users per site
Noteflight Teacher Edition is like the Classroom edition, except this time, multiple teachers in your school or district can each create their own classroom community, allowing up to 75 students per teacher to use the program. There are versions of the Teacher edition for 5, 10, 15, 20 teachers – or more – ask us if you want to customize eactly how many teachers/students you need to have using Noteflight.
High School SCHOOL PRODUCTS
via MusicFirst.com:
All of the middle-school products above plus:
Naxos Music Library – $225.00 – annual subscription
Naxos Music Library is available for purchase as an annual subscription with a single log-in (from any computer – home/school/desktop/laptop) for a teacher or students to use.
Naxos Music Library is an invaluable resource for teachers to use with their students. With 80,000 CDs (over a million tracks), it represents an extensive listening library – but a subscription to Naxos comes with so much more for education.
- Over 40,000 composer and artist biographies
- Music notes, cover artwork, tracklist, instrumentation and publisher information
- Libretti and synopses of more than 700 operas
- Classical, Jazz, World, Classic Rock, Nostalgia music
- Complete recording catalogs of many record labels (not just Naxos)
- Search by composer and works
- Teacher can create playlists for students to follow
COLLEGE/UNIVERSITY SCHOOL PRODUCTS
via MusicFirst.com:
All of the products are available to Universities and Colleges. Many of them are useful for college level work, such as Noteflight, Aurelia, Musition, and the Naxos Music Library; all of them all useful for the preparation of future and pre-service music teachers.
To find out more about any of these products or more information about MusicFirst visit their webpage, http://musicfirst.com, or contact them directly via their contact page, http://www.musicfirst.com/Contact.
Any comments about MusicFirst and TMEA 2013? Leave them here. :)
Questions about MusicFirst? Feel free to comment here.