06/05/2026
Hello, Dr. Drone community! It's been a long time since I've had a chance to touch or maintain Dr. Drone (the full-time teaching gig is a little more than full-time as one could guess ;). A few years ago, the development platform that DD was coded in was deprecated by Microsoft. As often happens, all developers using the Xamarin Forms framework had to learn and port their projects to Maui, which I just didn't have time for with my teaching duties. That being said, I've spent the last few years delving into audio and am seeing a possible powerful and cross-platform method of bringing back Dr. Drone using industry standard development tools (in this case, C++ and the JUCE audio platform). It would be a heavy project to port everything and take at least a year (optimistically speaking), but after pulling up Dr. Drone to show a few colleagues a few weeks ago, I remembered just how powerful an app it actually is, and should deserve a revisit! Which brings me to a few questions:
- What aspects of Dr. Drone did you rely on and use frequently?
- What aspects of Dr. Drone were "feature bloat" that might not need to be ported?
- What aspects of Dr. Drone drove you crazy? (What would you want improved, without turning it into a full out notation software ;))
I locked in the cost of DD at $1.99, but it seems like all apps now are all about "In-App purchases", which I personally find very frustrating... but in an effort to increase DD usage, I wonder if that might be an option (boo!). DD itself and the core basic features are free, but heavier features are available through in-app purchases like improved audio presets, pitch tracking and reporting (with a "grade"), ..... I'm a trumpet/theory teacher and programmer who has zero business chops, so any advice is very welcome! If I could give all my work out for free, I would, but financial realties have started to kick in as I'm sure you're all dealing with as well!)
A million thanks for your interest and support of Dr. Drone over the years. Maintaining it proves to be challenging, but something tells me it's time to revisit it and give hardcore practicing musicians a solid and pedagogically powerful tool.
