In early July MakeMusic made a big announcement, that they were buying a company from France called Weezic.  On the surface that may not seem like a big deal until you realize WHY they bought them.  Until that point Weezic had been a competitor to SmartMusic, providing a different way for people to do automatic assessment of a musical performance just like SmartMusic does.  The big difference though was that Weezic was truly cross platform compatible, meaning that it could run on just about anything with a web browser.  Now do you get the picture?  If you work in a school district that has gone totally one-to-one Chromebook then rejoice!  SmartMusic is coming to the Chromebook!

 It sounds like it is pretty much a done deal and in the press release it makes it clear that the purchase of Weezic was specifically to gain the technology to be able to eventually port SmartMusic into a format that will run in a web browser.  SmartMusic already runs on PC, Mac, and the iPad, but MakeMusic seems to recognize the demand for a cross platform, Chrome compatible version as more and more of the world realizes the benefits of inexpensive Chromebook laptops.  In a 2014 Edweek article Benjamin Harold points out that during that year "web based laptop computer sales" accounted for one third of mobile device purchases made by school districts. During the same time frame the percentage of iPads being used in schools has declined by seven percent.

In other words, MakeMusic sees the writing on the wall that in the future if they want to remain usable in the education community they pretty much have to embrace the ChromeBook platform or be left behind as more and more Chromebook compatible competitors like PracticeFirst begin to gobble up their once locked down market share.

MakeMusic does not give a specific date for when they expect to be able to make SmartMusic available to Chrome but one would hope that it will happen within the next two years as the Weezic application was already fully operational as I found in a review I did of it a few years ago.  

EDIT: Got some additional information and it now sounds like MakeMusic is planning to release SmartMusic on the Chromebook in the fall of 2016.

So what do you think about the idea of SmartMusic coming to the Chromebook?  Is your school already a Chromebook school or are you still able to get by with using the program on iPads or PC's?  

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