Monthly Archives: September 2012

SongStarter 1.0 Released!

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After many months of development, I’m pleased to announce the release of SongStarter 1.0!

The new SongStarter 1.0 Release

SongStarter is an organic music production app for jamming. It’s a sandbox for musicians that lets you write music naturally by recording and layering loops.

We created SongStarter to give musicians a new way to write music. We love jamming away from our computers because it’s easier to get into a groove, but it takes more work to transcribe or record our ideas. But when we’re at computers, sometimes the complexity of a digital audio workstation is distracting, and we miss the flow of a real live jam.

SongStarter is a bridge between these experiences – It feels like a live jam yet captures all your ideas so they can be loaded into a DAW and produced later. All that’s left is for you to jam and experiment. So download the trial today and find out what you can make with SongStarter.

SongStarter is now available for purchase directly from the Oscillicious online shop, or you can download a free feature-limited trial.

End of Public Beta

Many thanks to everyone who downloaded the SongStarter beta and send us feedback. Several new features were added recently as a direct result of your comments and suggestions, including the external recording feature and improved instruments.

Here’s some of the changes in SongStarter 1.0 that were made after the last beta:

  • Added System Default soundcard on Mac OS X (especially useful on Mac OS X Mountain Lion)
  • Fixed the Freestyle Recorder going bonkers sometimes with the built-in instruments
  • New jam graphics
  • Added a slightly better loading indicator for instruments
  • Added a close button to the instrument picker (if you couldn’t figure out how to close it the first time, you weren’t alone!)
  • Reworked the loop recorder widget again so it paints short notes now
  • Added scanning for DAWs on Windows

The final beta release will continue functioning until October 2nd, but if you’d like to check out out these latest changes earlier, you can grab the SongStarter trial version.

We’re also currently working on SongStarter for Chrome, which is still in beta. We hope to offer an updated version with better instruments within the next few weeks, so stay tuned for more information about that as we get closer to a release.

New Graphics for SongStarter – Thoughts?

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I’ve been playing around with tweaking the layout and graphics for loop groups (“ideas” in SongStarter lingo), and here’s what I’ve come up with:

New Idea/Loop Graphics for SongStarter, coming in the next beta (or the 1.0 final!)

The new layout makes it harder to accidentally delete loops, and the mute buttons now have a proper icon. Additionally, I toned down the colours by making the background a dark grey, and made each group identified by just a strip at the top (instead of a solid background color).

One major constraint in the graphic design for loops and ideas has been the waveform/note canvases. We have nice multi-colour waveforms, but they only look good against a black background. Unfortunately, a black background clashes with SongStarter’s otherwise vibrant appearance, so we have to compromise.

In the old layout (below), we had a solid, colour background for each idea. However, I think it emphasized the blank space in each idea, and provided perhaps too much contrast with the note/waveform canvases still. On the other hand, they matched SongStarter’s bright appearance fairly well, and I liked that they were unique. (I’d like to think that interesting colours stimulate your brain a bit more than boring greys.)

VU Meter and Waveform View in SongStarter Beta 090912

The old idea graphics – Solid background colour, canvases outlined in white.

So, the new graphic design in the first screenshot isn’t perfect, and it’s still a compromise, but it’s a different compromise. I think it looks a bit more professional, helps make the note/waveform canvases look better, and still looks enticing.

Is it better? Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Bugfix Songstarter Beta Update

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Download the new SongStarter Beta for Windows and Mac OSX here!

Whoops, time for an emergency SongStarter beta update. The old desktop beta releases expired yesterday and redirected everyone to download the latest beta update from September 17th – except that I botched the beta activation code (again), and it turns out that updating wouldn’t actually reactivate your expired copy of SongStarter.

Today’s beta update should actually work and reactivate your copy of SongStarter until October 1st, and includes a number of other bugfixes from the last few days:

  • Fixed freestyle recorder tempo detection graphics (beat chooser)
  • Fixed buzzing bug if you tried to add a beat before previewing a freestyle loop
  • Fixed one rare assert (*cough* crash) on saving
  • Freestyle recorder properly restores the loop length when you bail on creating a freestyle loop
  • Freestyle recorder now wraps MIDI notes properly
  • One obscure Jam Setup bugfix
  • Fixed bugs in the project modified logic
  • But last but not least, this beta shouldn’t expire until it’s meant to expire. (Oct 1st, 2012)

New Instruments, New SongStarter Beta

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We’re pleased to announce another new beta update for SongStarter for Windows and Mac OS X! This update brings more bugfixes and new, great instruments:

New Instruments Coming for SongStarter by Oscillicious

Download the new SongStarter Beta Here

New Instruments in the September 17th, 2012 SongStarter Beta

The new instruments, which are part of the Jam Essentials collection, include:

  • Classic Piano
  • A revamped Studio Piano
  • Cello
  • Claves
  • Mute Guitar
  • Electric Piano
  • Organ
  • Tremolo Strings
  • Tubular Bells
  • Glockenspiel

So hit the front page and download the new beta update now!

This new beta release takes us very close to a final 1.0 release, and we’ll be focusing solely on bug fixing for this final development sprint. There’s a couple more known issues that we need to iron out over the next two weeks, but this latest beta is a huge improvement over our first beta release back in August.

The new instruments are not quite ready for the Chrome version of SongStarter yet, but we’ll be updating it over the next few weeks as we start to wrap up the desktop version of SongStarter.

Stay tuned for the final release, and in the meantime, happy jamming!

SongStarter Beta Updated – Now with External Recording

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The new SongStarter icon.

We’re pleased to announce that a new updated beta of SongStarter is now available.

Download the updated SongStarter now from our SongStarter page.

This update adds two new features and a slew of bugfixes that take us closer to a final 1.0 release:

External Audio Input Recording in SongStarter

Input devices (soundcards, microphones, etc) now appear as instruments in today’s SongStarter Beta update.

External Audio Recording

Each recording device on your computer now appears as an instrument in SongStarter, and allows you to capture audio right into the loop recorder. This is handy for recording from instruments like a guitar, layering quick vocal ideas, or even for beat boxing. As an added bonus, if you have Soundflower (Mac) or Virtual Audio Cable (Win) installed, you can now record audio from other programs into SongStarter.

VU Meter and Waveform View in SongStarter Beta 090912

The new VU Meter for recording and Waveform View in SongStarter Beta 090912.

Clicking an input device “instrument” displays a VU meter in place of the piano keyboard and when you record, you see a waveform visualization drawn instead of notes. We think this design keeps the SongStarter just as fast and fluid as before, but creates another useful way to help you brainstorm for music production.

External recording also works with the Freestyle Recorder, for automatic hands-free recording. It works by listening for background noise and then triggers recording when there’s a large deviation from that. It’s not perfect, but you can create some cool rhythms and jams if you create a loop out of your recording. We hope that we can work on the triggering mechanism more and make it more reliable, but for now, play with it and let us know how it works for you.

New Loop Recorder Note Visualization

While we were reworking the loop recorder visuals to support waveform drawing, we rewrote the way note rendering works too. Instead of the “scrolling notes” visuals that the previous betas had, we’ve changed it so that a white marker (the vertical line in the screenshot) tracks the playback/recording position and paints notes on the fly. This new technique always remains in sync with the audio and now matches the appearance of loops when they’re copied to ideas. One remaining issue is that sometimes very short notes don’t get visualized, although everything you play will always get recorded.

New Loop Recorder Note Visualization

The new Loop Recorder note visuals in today’s SongStarter Beta update.

 

Other Bug Fixes and Changes

  • Latency improvements on Windows. We now prefer WASAPI audio devices on Windows Vista and above, and this gives us better latency out-of-the-box for all Windows users. We also show the audio API in the preferences beside the name of the device.
  • Fixed problem with only getting silence from certain input devices. (If you downloaded SongStarter before today, you’ll want to update.)
  • Added a tiny bit more info to the Help screen. More to come…
  • Moved preferences to the options menu (Windows).
  • Default save path is now Documents/SongStarter
  • Remember the last save path.
  • New and improved icon! (at top of the post)
  • Confirmation before hitting “back” and resetting a project. Better integration of projects with each platform (Win/Mac/Chrome).
  • Fixed a rare crash on startup.
  • Freestyle Recorder now tells you what state it’s in (Idle/Recording/Waiting). There’s a short wait time of about 1 second after any audio recording, just to stop it from triggering again too quickly.

Known Issues

  • Recording is not yet supported in Chrome. Right now the APIs we need don’t exist in Native Client yet.
  • Very short notes don’t paint in the loop recorder widget. However, they’ll always be recorded.
  • Confirmation is missing before closing the application.
  • Still a handful of cases where the loop recorder length buttons are in the wrong state.

That’s it for now, but there’s more bugfixes to come as we keep polishing. Lastly, if you’re playing with SongStarter, leave us a comment and let us know how it’s working for you!