We're very excited to announce the release of Planning Center Music Stand 2.0, our biggest update yet! There's a lot of great new stuff in this update, so we wanted to give you some detail of what has changed.

Brand New Design

After spending so much time getting our Projector iPad presentation app pixel perfect, we wanted to put the same amount of love into Music Stand. Plus, we had just added some great features to Projector that we knew we were going to add to Music Stand, including plan editing and linked sessions. So we took the time to give Music Stand a fresh new look that took some of the lighter elements and made them dark so that your iPad isn't as bright when you're on stage and the rest of the lights are off. Based on your feedback, we also made it easier to see what key each song is in.

Full Plan Editing

We've added a new 'Edit Plan' button to the main screen that allows you to add items, headers, and songs to your plans. From the new Edit Plan popup, you can drag items up and down to reorder them, or add new items by tapping or dragging the 'Add New Item' bar from the bottom of the box to any spot in your plan. After adding an item, you can link it to any song in your Planning Center Online Song database, choose the appropriate arrangement and key, and all the files attached will be available in your plan. To learn more, check out this lesson from our online manual.

Sessions: Linking Multiple iPads to Control Page Turns

The coolest new feature is that you can now link iPads together to remote control page turns! From the master iPad, create a session from the new sessions tab in the Plans popup, and then join that session from other iPads. The master device's header bar turns green, and all connected clients turn red. When you are viewing PDFs, the master device has a green iPad icon in the top right, and connected devices have a red one. The master device can even see a list of connected devices and handoff control to any one of the clients. Oh, and if clients are logged in as the same user as the master, they'll even automatically refresh when new annotations are made! For instructions, check out this lesson from our manual.

2-Page Landscape View

Earlier this year we added the ability to wirelessly send your music to a display connected to an AppleTV. The external display would show two pages side-by-side, even though the iPad was showing one. We've now added that same ability to show two pages when you rotate your iPad to landscape mode. If your pages are already in landscape, it will only show one page full screen, but if you are viewing portrait pages, you'll now see two at a time. If you have multiple iPads linked through a session, they'll stay in sync even if one is Portrait and the other is Landscape.

Toolbar Icons

When in PDF view, you can tap once on the screen to bring up the toolbar. The old toolbar was getting a little crowded, so we changed the audio and zoom buttons into icons to leave room for future buttons. We also removed the settings button that set custom foot pedal options, since it usually only needs to be done once, and moved the foot pedal options to your iPad settings app.

What About Android?

We can't post anything about Music Stand without getting some questions asking when it will be coming to Android. We still don't have an answer for that, but our Android users will be happy to know we just hired our first full-time Android developer! It's going to take a while for anything to be ready, but we can now officially say, "We're working on it!"

Learn More

To learn more about all the features of Music Stand, check out our updated advertising page at http://www.planningcentermusicstand.com or our comprehensive online manual.