Song Rhythm Tracks has been available at release four (4) since late last year, and now the final sampler app, “Classic Country Music“, has just been released. The changes have been received well. Here’s a summary.

SetList Folding

Here is the app on an iPhone showing three setlists, with two having been folded away. The three setlists contain tracks of ‘sampler’ apps.

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” (blue play triangle) feature is our favourite feature. New for version 4 is the ‘setlist folding ‘feature, which hides and reveals the setlist so its tracks do not appear in the table. This also affects searching: Search results do not include tracks in folded setlists.

Audio File Sharing

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At last! Now we have incorporated the standard iOS feature to share the high-definition MP3 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 (pink box with an up arrow) 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, clear display of arrangement details, large buttons and more. Still, if you want to use the backing tracks elsewhere, it is now easier to achieve, and we include the arrangement details in MP3 tags if that helps.

Track definitions can still be shared by pressing the share button from the track definition page – the one with the rhythm and arrangement selections.

Refreshed visual design

The main table, with search enabled, shows the track’s rhythm in orange and its arrangement in green.


The selection page now has headers for the arrangement aspects of (i) Song Form, (ii) number of introduction bars, (iii) number of repeats of the form and (iv) number of ending bars. Arrangement details are in green, and rhythm selection is in orange.

At Alive Drumming, we’ve always liked 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 descriptions for each button in the in-app help files (accessed via the ( ? ) button).

One of the most noticeable changes of release 4 is the consistency 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, followed by a left-right swipe to access the 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.

Sampler Tracks available via setlist sharing

In all four apps, the list of sampler tracks for any of the three samplers can now be downloaded as setlists.

A new setlist is configured with the name “Jazz and Blues “, with 5-second gaps between tracks when playing setlists.

In any app, perform a setlist search (using the blue hour-glass button from the setlist definition screen) once you have configured any of these names,

  1. “Afro-Cuban Salsa”,
  2. “Jazz and Blues”, and
  3. “Classic Country Music”.
Popup advises that the “Jazz and Blues” setlist is being searched for and downloaded if found.
Go ahead, press the “OK”.
Great! The setlist of that name was found. Press OK and then the blue ‘tick ‘to save it.


(Remember to save (with the blue ‘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 the audio for the tracks at any time.

Holds and Pushes

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 requiring them.

So those are the main changes for release 4.0. We are delighted with them. We hope you are too. As always, please send your feedback to marketing@alive-drumming.org.