Connect to the Cloud

How to proceed

Your EarMaster Cloud login credentials were sent to you by email when your user account was created by the admin of your school. You will need these credentials to connect EarMaster to the cloud on your Windows PC, Mac, Chromebook, iPad, iPhone or Android device. 

Your EarMaster Cloud credentials consist of:

• The school ID of your school*
• Your user name
• Your password

* If you are paying for your own access via a personal subscription, leave this field empty

Phone, tablet and Chromebook (students only)

1. Download the free EarMaster App from the App Store (iOS) or the Google Play Store (Android or Chromebook)
2. Tap the cloud-shaped icon at the top left of the screen, type your EarMaster Cloud user credentials and tap "Log in". 

Windows PC and Mac (students and teachers)

1. Download EarMaster for PC or Mac using the download link located in the email you received from EarMaster Cloud. 
2. Tap the cloud-shaped icon at the top left of the screen, type your EarMaster Cloud user credentials and tap "Log in". 

If you are a Teacher, you will have access to 2 tabs at the bottom of the screen:

• A Teacher view that gives you access to EarMaster's 4 teaching tools: Student Results, Assignment Manager, Workbook Editor, and Music Library.
• A Normal view which shows you the standard home screen of EarMaster, as seen by your students.

Lost your credentials?

Don't worry. Go to this page and type the email address that was used to create your EarMaster Cloud user account. You will then receive an email with new credentials.

No internet access?

No problem. You can use the app offline for up to 7 days. All your results and progress will be saved locally and uploaded the next time you start EarMaster while connected to the internet.

Overview of the Teaching Tools

When you log into EarMaster on PC/Mac as a teacher, you are met by 4 teaching tools:

• Students Results - the results of your students
• Assignment Manager - the place where you can assign workbooks (formerly called "Courses" in EarMaster 6) to your classes and students
• Workbook Editor - where you can create assignments and save them on your computer.
• Music Library - where you can have a complete overview of all items available for your lessons, such as chords, scales, melodies, etc.

HOW TO PROCEED

1. Create an assignment with the Workbook Editor and save it on your computer
2. Open the Assignment Manager, select a class or a single user in the left column, and click on "Add Assignment" to send your assignment to that class or user.
3. When students have completed your lessons, you can check their results in the Student Results area.

Check out the video tutorial below and the other tabs of this support sections to obtain more details on each of the steps described above. 

Video tutorial: Teacher workflow in EarMaster Cloud

How to create assignments

Open the Workbook Editor

You can create assignments for your students in the Workbook Editor, which is available from the home screen of EarMaster when you are logged in with a Teacher account.

Structure of a Workbook

An EarMaster workbook is structured around 2 levels: Modules and Lessons.

A module is simply a group of lessons, and the module title is the general heading for these lessons. When designing your workbook, you can use the modules to organize your lessons according to themes, difficulty levels, or curriculum steps.

Lessons are the actual training material of your course. A lesson can be either an exercise, explanations with audio and visual examples, or a mix of both.

A common way to structure a course is to include in each module a group of lessons that introduces variations on the same theme. It could be for instance the same intervals, melodies, or chords executed differently, played in a different key or at a different tempo, etc. The passing threshold would be set very low (even as low as 0%) so that the students may experience variation during the training session instead of getting stuck in a particular lesson. The last lesson of a module can be a test with a higher passing threshold. For that last 'test' lesson, you could set the setting If failed, go to so as to have the student retake the whole module if failed.

Name and describe the Workbook

You can name the workbook by clicking on "Unnamed Workbook" at the top of the screen.

Add modules

To add a module, click on the + icon in the module toolbar. 

Add lessons

To add a lesson, click on the + icon is the lesson toolbar. Then select an activity type in the Exercise Setup part of the screen, below the description of the lesson.

Depending on which activity you have selected, you will find different sets of options to configure your lesson. 

Import lessons from existing workbooks

Besides configuring your lessons from scratch, you can also import lessons from existing workbooks. To do that, open the Tools menu and click on Import lessons from workbook. If the workbook you are looking for isn't listed, you can click on browse to locate a workbook on your computer. 

Once you have selected the workbook you want to import from, you will see a list of all the modules and lessons it includes (and the workshops in the case of EarMaster's General and Jazz workshops). Select the content you need, and click OK to add the selected module/lessons/workshops to your custom workbook.

Save your Workbook

To save your Workbook, go to File-->Save Workbook or Save Workbook As…

Workbooks can only be saved locally on your computer. They will be uploaded to the Cloud when you assign them to students.

Notice that Workbooks located in the cloud can't be modified. You can only modify your local copy of the workbook and then upload it as a new separate assignment. If the assignment you have modified is already assigned to students. You must unassign it before uploading its modified version to avoid having students use different versions of your assignment. The modified assignment will be treated as a new assignment in the Student Results for the simple reason that it does not have the exact same content and structure as the old one.

Try your Workbook

To try your Workbook in EarMaster, go to the FILE menu at the top of the Window and choose "Open Workbook". Find your Workbook on your local computer and click Open to load your Workbook in the home screen of EarMaster, under the "Normal View" tab. The Workbook will be updated every time you modify it in the Workbook Editor and save your changes. 

Deploy your workbooks as assignments

You can assign your Workbooks to whole classes as Class Assignments, or to individual students as Personal Assignments via the Assignment Manager. For more details on this, please check the Deploy Assignments tab.

How to Deploy Assignments

 In EarMaster Cloud, an assignment is a Workbook created with the Workbook Editor and sent to a class or individual students via the Assignment Manager.

The Assignment Manager

To deploy your assignments, open the Assignment Manager from the home screen of EarMaster on PC/Mac. The Assignment Manager is only available when you are using EarMaster with a Teacher account.

In the left column, you will see all the classes in which you have been added as a Teacher by the Admin of your school account. If you don't see your classes here, click on the "Refresh" icon at the top of the list while holding the ALT key of your computer keyboard. If your classes are still not appearing, then please ask your school Admin to add your teacher account to your classes.

Currently, EarMaster Cloud enables you to assign one class assignment per class and one personal assignment per student at a time. When you want your student to work on a new assignment, you can simply replace the current class assignment or personnal assignments.

Assign a Workbook to a Class

Select a class in the left column, and then click on Add assignment. Your school's assignment library will be displayed. If your assignment isn't yet online, you can click on "Upload workbook" to upload it to the cloud, and then assign it to your students.

All the students enrolled in that class will now see a new entry titled [Class name] Assignments in the list of training modes when they open EarMaster. When clicking on that new entry, they will be able to see and use their current assignment.

Replace the current assignment by a new assignment

When you would like your students to use a new assignment, you can remove the current assignment for the selected class by clicking on the cross-shaped icon next to the assignment's title, and then replace it by a new one by clicking on Add assignment.

Your students will see the new assignment the next time they start EarMaster.

Remove an assignment

Removing an assignment for a student or a class via the Assignment Manager will make it disappear from the home screens of the students. To remove an assignment, click on the cross-shaped icon to the right of the assignment's title, as illustrated in the screenshot above.

Multiple assignments to a Class

Currently, EarMaster only supports one assignment at a time for a class, and it is not yet possible to queue multiple assignments. But there is a workaround that allows you to assign multiple workbooks to a group of students:

If you want to add 3 assignments simultaneously to your students, create 3 classes in EarMaster Cloud, and then add the same students to all 3 classes. Now you can make one assignment for each of your classes, and since each student is a member of all 3 classes, the assignments will show up as 3 different entries in the home screen of EarMaster.

Disadvantage: if you already have many classes in your school account, then multiplying them with many assignments will give you a large number of classes.

You can name those classes in several ways, depending on your teaching strategy:

- Week 1
- Week 2
- Week 3

or 

- Harmony
- Sight-Singing
- Rhythm

Teaching Strategies

There are several possible teaching strategies to incorporate EarMaster in your courses. We will list some of them below:

One workbook per week/month/trimester/semester

Assign one workbook to each class every week, month, trimester or semester. You can prepare the next assignment in advance by working on a new workbook saved locally, or by adding new lessons to a Master Workbook (see further down).

As soon as students are supposed to switch to the next workbook, change the current assignment in EarMaster's Assignment Manager, and the software will load the new assignment in the student versions automatically. 

One workbook per discipline

In the web Admin interface (https://cloud.earmaster.com), create one class per specialty (for example: ear training, harmony, sight-singing, etc.). Then add all your students to each of those classes and assign a specialized workbook per class. That way, your students can work with multiple workbooks at the same time.

Notice that this solution works only for smaller accounts. If you have multiple courses with many students, this solution might incur too much extra work. 

One 'master workbook' to rule them all

In order to compile a whole year's worth of exercises into a single workbook, what you can do is keep a 'master workbook' saved locally on your computer, and add lessons to it as the year passes. Every time you want to send an assignment to your students, you can create a smaller workbook and import lessons or modules from that 'master workbook' using the Tools-->Import lessons from workbook option in the Workbook Editor.

That way, when the year has passed, you will have a all the assignments from the passed year nicely gathered into a single workbook, ready to be reused next year.

Reviewing Student Results

In the Student Results section of EarMaster, you can easily review the results obtained by your students when using your assignments or the built-in courses of EarMaster. Each time a student completes a lesson, the results are stored online in your EarMaster Cloud account and you can view them immediately.

USING FILTERS

When ALL RESULTS is selected in the RESULTS drop-down menu, you will see general stats for the students enrolled in the selected class. You will also get access to filters to display different sets of results. The filters available are:

1. The group of students to show (i.e. the class), on the left side of the toolbar.

2. The date range to show (only when viewing ALL RESULTS)

3. The workbook to show (e.g. class assignment or built-in course), at the right side of the toolbar.

When you have selected filters, all statistics available for the selected workbook are shown next to each student. To go into more detail, navigate to specific modules or even a specific lesson to compare the results of your students. You can also double-click on a student's name to see a detailed list of scores for each of his individual attempts.

ABOUT SCORES AND ATTEMPTS

In EarMaster, a MODULE is a container for a set of lessons. In the screenshot below, Module 4 consists of 4 lessons: 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4. The SCORE column for each MODULE is based on the average of the best scores of each lesson of the module. 

The score for each LESSON is the score of the best completed attempt. By clicking on the arrow next to the tile of a lesson, you can see all successive attempts at one lesson. The best one is singularized by an orange "thumbs up" icon. 

EXPORTING RESULTS

You can export results as a printable HTML page or a CSV file for use in spreadsheet editors. To do that, prepare the results view you would like to export by selecting the filters of your choice, and then open the EXPORT GENERATOR

Notice: Results obtained by the students in the Customized Exercise training mode are not uploaded to the Cloud. They are a free space for students to practice on their own without being monitored.

IS SOMETHING OUT OF SYNC?

Syncing problems can be caused by an obsolete local cloud cache. Fortunately this is a rare problem, but if it happens for some reason, please follow the the instructions below.

Error message saying that user does not exist

If you get an error message saying that a user does not exist, then go to STUDENT RESULTS and click on the Refresh icon while holding the ALT key (alt/option key on Mac) on your computer keyboard. 



If clicking Alt+"Refresh" doesn't solve it, try clearing the cloud cache by following the steps below.


Student users or student results our of sync

If the students and/or their results, as they appear in EarMaster in Teacher View, are out of sync with the data in the cloud, you should try clearing the cloud cache in the EarMaster app. This could be, for example, if you have deleted or created users in the admin dashboard but the changes are not reflected in the app. Or of Student Results seem to be out of sync. 

You can clear the cloud cache which will force the app to fetch the newest data from the cloud.

This is a simple and safe process in a few steps:

    1. Open the EarMaster app and log off via the cloud icon if you are already logged in
    2. Click Preferences in the lower left corner
    3. Choose "Reset app" in the menu to the left. Don't worry about clicking, nothing will happen yet.
    4. Click "Clear cache"
    5. Go back and log in

Now the data you see in EarMaster will reflect the data in cloud including all the latest changes (students deleted or created, student results generated, etc.)

MusicXML Import

You can import scores into EarMaster's score library via the MusicXML file format. Imported scores can then be used to make custom EarMaster exercises in these activities:

• Sight-Singing
• Melodic Dictation
• Melody Singback
• Rhythmic Sight-Reading
• Rhythmic Dictation
• Rhythm Clapback
• Rhythm Error Detection

What is MusicXML?

"MusicXML is a digital sheet music interchange and distribution format. [...] The musical information is designed to be usable by notation programs, sequencers and other performance programs, music education programs, and music databases. [...] With MusicXML you can create music in one program and share your results – back and forth – with people using other programs."

Source: https://www.musicxml.com

How to proceed

1. Prepare your scores

Create a score in your notation software (e.g. Finale, Sibelius or Musescore), and then go to the FILE menu (usually) to find the Export to MusicXML function.

You can also find a large number of ready-to-use MusicXML scores in online score libraries, such as: 

Musescore library - https://musescore.com/sheetmusic
IMSLP Petrucci Music Library - https://imslp.org/
ChoralWIKI - https://www.cpdl.org/wiki/
Hymnary - https://hymnary.org
NEUMA - http://neuma.huma-num.fr

File requirements:
- One time signature per score.
- One key signature per score with maximum 6 flats and 5 sharps.
- Monophonic voices only (no harmonies, one note at a time). To use harmonies, spread the notes across multiple voices/staves.
- Maximum 8 monophonic voices, one of which can be chord symbols.
- Supported clefs: Treble, Bass and Alto.
- Supported note values: from whole note to 32nd note, including dotted notes, ties, triplets, quintuplets, and septuplets.

EarMaster can transpose your melodies automatically, so you can define them in a specific key and then select the keys in which you want EarMaster to transpose them when you set up your exercises.

Only features supported by EarMaster can be imported. Unsupported features will be either ignored by EarMaster or converted to similar values (e.g. the unsupported 6/4 time signature will be imported as 12/8).

2. Import your score into EarMaster

Find EarMaster's Music Library via the Teaching Tools menu. Then open the Scores tab and click on "Import MusicXML" to add your score to the list of scores.

3. Use your imported scores in custom exercises

When you make your custom exercise in the Workbook Editor, you can select "Score library" in the "Source of musical material" section, and then choose scores from the library as questions via the "List of questions" section.

In the "List of questions" section, click on + to see the list of available scores. Then trim the score by defining a bar interval, select which voices will be played back, which one will be evaluated, and which will act as accompaniment. Finally, click "OK" to add it as the first question in your exercise.

To add another question, you can either repeat the procedure described above, or you can click on the Duplicate icon to copy the previous question and change the bar interval or the voice options.

Repeat the operation until you have the expected number of questions/excerpts for your exercise.

FAQ

Q: Can I export the score library of EarMaster?
A: Yes, your score library can be exported as an EarMaster database file, and then imported into another EarMaster installation. To do that, use the import/export buttons at the top right corner of the list of scores in the score library of EarMaster.

Q: I imported a score but it looks and/or sounds nothing like the original file. How come?
A: The MusicXML standard is huge and covers tons of features and aspects that are not useful in EarMaster. Therefore, some imports might result in scores being altered beyond recognition. We are constantly improving the MusicXML import feature, so if you experience such a problem, please send us your MusicXML file and a description of the problem so that we may try to improve that feature of EarMaster.

Q: Can I import MusicXML scores on iPad?
A: Unfortunately no. That feature is only available on PC and Mac.

Q: Can I save a custom exercise based on EarMaster's Score library?
A: Yes, but only when using the Workbook Editor, which is available to EarMaster Cloud users with teacher access level.

Courses and workshops available in EarMaster

Click on a course or workshop title to view its full content.

Notice that the availability of the courses and workshops listed below depends on the license that you purchased. For more information, please refer to this Version comparison.