Song Rhythm Tracks and its companion ‘sampler’ apps have been out at release four (4) since late last year, and the final sampler, “Classic Country Music”, has just been released. The changes have been received well. Here’s a summary.
SetList Folding
Setlists are a great feature of the table design of Song Rhythm Tracks. They partition your collection of tracks into lists for various uses – personal or group practice sessions, gigs, or genres of music—anything you want. As one’s collection of tracks increases, it is nice to focus on just one setlist, and the ‘setlist jumping’ feature (blue up and down arrows ) is handy navigation. The “setlist play” feature is a favourite feature of mine. New for version 4 is the ‘setlist folding’ feature, which hides/reveals the setlists so their tracks do not appear in the table. This also affects searching: Results do not include tracks in folded setlists.
Audio Sharing
At last! I hear you cry. Now we have the standard iOS feature to share the audio file in whatever ways your device has been configured – AirDrop, Messages, Mail, Notes, Box, ‘Save to Files’, and ‘Save to Keep’ are just some on my iPhone.
Press the track’s share button on the app’s main table. We feel the mobile app is still the best player for these files because of its musician-friendly features – tempo control, arrangement details, large buttons and more. Still, if you want to use the backing tracks elsewhere, it is now easier to achieve, and we provide the arrangement details in MP3 tags if that helps.
Refreshed visual design
We’ve always liked the minimalist design and are trying to stay true to that. We included some animations to help see things like the duplication of tracks. We’ve also improved the dark mode. We moved to symbols-only for buttons some time ago, with good descriptions for each button in the in-app help files. One of the most noticeable changes is a rationalisation of colours; Now, everywhere in the app,
(i) rhythm selections and descriptions are always orange and
(ii) arrangement selection and descriptions are always green.
We feel this consistency helps navigate the app.
We have updated in-app guides and videos!
In-app guides are selected using the ‘?’ button with a left-right swipe for multiple guide pages. We’ve updated these and added video guides for making the most of the apps. We feel this provides the best help for using our apps.
Polished recent upgrades
We’ve also polished our recent upgrades so they shine. In all four apps, the list of tracks for each of the three samplers can be downloaded as setlists. Perform a setlist search for any of these names,
“Afro-Cuban Salsa”,
“Jazz and Blues”, and
“Classic Country Music”.
(Remember to save (with the ‘tick’ button) when you receive the successful download message)
You receive all the track definitions (in the “deferred” state), and you can choose to download any audio tracks at any time.
Holds and Pushes – We recently added “whole-bar holds” and “eighth note pushes” to the detailed user-defined arrangement facilities. We find the holds particularly useful for those songs that require them.
So those are the main changes for release 4.0. We are thrilled with them. We hope you are too. As always, please send your feedback to marketing@alive-drumming.org.