Song Rhythm Tracks has been available at release 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

Three setlists are shown on an iPhone. Two have been folded away. Each setlist contains the tracks of a sampler app.

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 really. As one’s collection of tracks increases, it is nice to focus on just the one setlist and the ‘setlist jumping’ feature (blue up and down arrows ) is a handy navigation. The “setlist play” (blue play triangle) feature is a favourite feature of ours. 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

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is ipad-air-srt-shareaudiofile.jpg

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’, ‘Save to Keep’ are just some on this iPad.

Press the track’s share button (pink box with 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, but 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 the rhythm and arrangement selections.

Refreshed visual design

The main table, shown here 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 in orange.

At Alive Drumming, we’ve always liked minimalist design and we are trying to stay true to that. We included some animations to help see things like duplication of tracks. We’ve also improved 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 or release 4 is a consistency of colours; Now everywhere in the app,
(i) rhythm selections and description are always orange and
(ii) arrangement selection and descriptions are always green.
We feel this consistency helps navigate the app.

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

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

In any app, simply 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 advice that the setlist, “Jazz and Blues” 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 at any time to download the audio for the tracks.

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 really happy with them. We hope you are too. As always, please send your feedback to marketing@alive-drumming.org.