How to
use it

Before the concert

A concert is a name, a date, a hall, and a list of works. Nothing is required except the works.

Building the program

Tap New concert and you land straight on the program page. Tap Add piece, type a title, press return — the field stays open, so you can enter a whole program without lifting your hands. An empty return closes it.

Add intermission puts the interval wherever you are in the list. The other links — concert name, conductor, soloist, venue — each disappear once used, so the menu shrinks as the program fills in.

Fixing what you typed

Double-tap anything in the header to edit it: the concert name, the venue, a conductor, a soloist. Same for a piece title in the list. Tap the red date to open the calendar and the time.

Long-press and drag a piece to reorder it — it crosses the intermission freely. Swipe left to delete one.

The second night

On the concert list, long-press a concert to Duplicate it: the same program, timings cleared, dated the following day. Two performances of one program cost you one entry.

During the concert

One piece is current at a time. Start it when the music starts, stop it when the applause does.

Timing a piece

Start concert opens the timing screen. Red buttons are the routine ones — start, stop. Black buttons are the ones you shouldn't normally need — pause, reset. Stopping a piece records its duration and moves to the next.

Turn the phone

Rotate to landscape and the timer fills the screen, chrome and all removed. It is meant to be legible from across a stage, at a glance, without your reading glasses.

The intermission

The interval runs as a countdown rather than a stopwatch, with a warning before the end and a tuning A at zero. It counts on the wall clock, so locking the phone or leaving the app loses nothing.

An encore

Add piece is on the timing screen too. When you see the soloist settle back onto the bench, add a row — name it ??? if you must and rename it once you recognise what they're playing.

When something goes wrong

You stopped a piece too early

A pause between movements can sound exactly like an ending. Tap the black back button and the piece reopens with the timer still running — the time it spent stopped is added back, so the recorded duration is exactly what it would have been. Not a single second is lost. It's there until you start the next piece, by which point you know the last one really did end.

You need to adjust a duration

Double-tap a duration to change it. The keypad works like a stopwatch: type the digits and they fill from the right, no colon to enter. 1 4 3 0 is fourteen minutes and thirty seconds. The first digit you type replaces the old value; delete to edit it instead.

You left the app, or it was closed

Nothing is lost. A running timer is anchored to the clock, not to the app, so leaving the screen, locking the phone, taking a call, or closing the app entirely costs you nothing. Reopen the concert and it picks up exactly where it should be.

Afterwards

The personnel manager wants the timings tonight. The archives want them tomorrow.

The timing sheet

The share button on the program or timing screen produces a dated PDF: every work with its duration, the intermission, the total, and the time the concert actually ended against the time it was scheduled to begin. Send it by mail, message or AirDrop without leaving the app.

See a real one — exported from the app, not redrawn for this page.

Sending a program to a colleague

On the concert list, long-press a concert and choose Share concert. That sends the program itself — not a PDF — and a colleague who also has Concert Timer can open it and have the whole evening ready to time.

Language

Concert Timer speaks eleven languages and has no language setting of its own — it follows your iPhone, so it is already in your language the first time you open it.

To read it in a different language from the rest of your phone, open the iPhone's Settings, find Concert Timer (under Apps on recent versions of iOS), and choose Language. Useful on tour, when the programme is in one language and your colleagues work in another.

English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Japanese. If a term reads wrong in your language, write to me — corrections from people who do this work are always welcome.