Bosca Ceoil Blue - 3.0-stable

Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album goes stable!

After a little over a month of testing and additional improvements I'm happy to announce that the first release of Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album, a.k.a. version 3.0, is considered stable and ready!

Downloads

• Download for Linux (x86_64)
• Download for macOS (Universal)
• Download for Windows (x86_64)
• Download for Windows (x86_32)

Built from commit 9f01e4d2e0a867eaa1953d555669056102bfb5f3.

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What is Bosca Ceoil Blue?

Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album is a revival of the classic music making app Bosca Ceoil by Terry Cavanagh. It has a playful nature and is very easy to use, especially if you are not musically inclined!

You can see that for yourself right now, because Bosca Ceoil Blue is free to download and use, no strings attached. You will be welcomed by an interactive guide that will get you settled, and then — just start jamming :)

At its core Bosca Ceoil Blue is a step sequencer, meaning you work with a fixed beat and rhythm. You don't have to worry about getting the timing right, and can focus on the melody that speaks to you!

• Build patterns out of notes, and build your song out of the patterns.
• Choose from over 300 hundred instruments, arrange your tune across up to 8 polyphonic channels, pick a key if you want!
• Use the built-in scale limiter to give yourself a constraint and only allow harmonious notes.

And, when you're ready, export it to WAV or MIDI — to share with the world, or to use it in your other projects. It's great for small productions and gamejams!

Changes from Bosca Ceoil 2

The main goal of the first release of Bosca Ceoil Blue is to replicate all the things that make the original app so great and beloved. But, certain things definitely needed an improvement and touch-ups. So if you're familiar with the original Bosca Ceoil, here's a non-exhaustive list of new goodies:

• Native macOS support is back! While some extra testing is still required, we're enjoying cross-platform capabilities of the Godot game engine this time around. So many platforms are supported out of the box, including Linux and macOS.

• Confirmation dialogs when you may lose your progress. Bosca Ceoil is kind of infamous for having no guards when it comes to potential data loss from exiting the app or starting a new composition. This is all in the past now, and you will be prompted with a confirmation popup whenever data loss can happen.

• To go along with confirmation dialogs we also have the action history, a.k.a. the undo/redo system! With a press of a button, revert any recent action and restore your composition to its previous state. No mistake is final, and you always get a second chance.

• A new time track in the Arrangement editor will help you tune your songs to the exact length that you want. This is a small, but handy change when you have a specific target, or just want to know ahead of exporting what to expect time-wise.

• Speaking of exporting, all exporters and importers have been rewritten from scratch! While every external format is lossy and cannot exactly replicate the structure of a Bosca Ceoil song, an improved output can be expected for MIDI, MML, and XM.

• The advanced instrument tuning feature, which allows you to record instrument settings per note in a pattern, is now more obvious and features an additional visualization layer to inform you about the progression of recorded values. There is still room for it to grow, but this is already a start on the path to make it more user-friendly.

• Oh, and you can delete patterns now too, just like you could delete instruments before. Keeping your creative chaos orderly since 2024!

There are many more smaller touches across the board, but in general you should expect the app to feel very familiar and just as playful. Well, enough of that. Give it a try for yourself!

And if you experience issues, please report them as soon as you can.

Your Support

This project is free for everyone to use. But it still takes time and effort to maintain and develop free and open tools. Please consider supporting the project financially by donating via Patreon, or by leaving a tip with your download on itch.io!

Every dollar helps, so please consider donating even if it's a little. Thank you very much <3

Bosca Ceoil Blue - 3.0-beta2

Bosca Ceoil Blue is getting in shape for the stable release with beta 2!

This pre-release version contains a number of fixes to stability and GUI scale, smaller QoL improvements, and a major feature! Let's talk about them.

Performance and stability

After the release of beta 1 I've received a number of reports related to performance issues on Linux and some undetermined platforms, pointing to problems with the synthesizer. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to confirm these issues myself (even got a Pop! OS machine running for that!), however improving the synth had been on my agenda anyway.

Thus I dedicated some time to review the synthesizer and address a whole bunch of potential problems. A new version of GDSiON is being released alongside Bosca today!

Please let me know, with as many details as possible, if you still experience problems with the app. Slowdowns, hangs, freezes, cracks in the sound — all these can be signs of performance issues.

GUI scale and window management

Another major pain point with the first beta release was the GUI scale. Working on a high DPI display I miscalculated how the app will look on a normal one, compared to the original Bosca Ceoil. Beta 2 addresses this with a new set of scaling options, going above and below what was possible before.

If you accidentally pick a scale that doesn't fit your actual physical screen space, there is a check for this now as well. The app will make its best attempt to fit the UI into your screen and pick a scale that works, even if it's not a standard value. You can also input any value between 25% and 300% in the settings file, to fine-tune it to your special case.

Note that some blurriness in texts and icons can be noticeable with non-default scales. This is something that I hope to improve in a future version of the tool. From my testing, it's not really a deal-breaker right now, but please let me know if you have any issues!

Action history, a.k.a. Undo Redo

This should've been on my TODO list from the very beginning, but better late than never! The original Bosca didn't have any system to undo and redo your changes, even when destructive actions were performed. This naturally results in lost progress and time, and can be a very annoying issue. The Blue Album added a couple more destructive actions to the mix, for consistency. But that meant even more edits can be dangerous and result in annoyances. Of which I was quickly reminded by multiple people :)

This is fixed now! Bosca Ceoil Blue beta 2 allows you to press Ctrl + Z to undo your last action and Shift + Ctrl + Z to redo it. Last 40 actions are remembered, which should be sufficient to let you fix a recent mistake quickly. I am all ears for what you have to say about this change! Bigger history? Bugs? Some changes that I missed which aren't tracked? Do let me know.

Small things

Some other minor improvements were made here and there. But you probably want to hear about another thing that I initially missed. You can once again preview notes by clicking on the left sidebar with note names! If you have instrument recording enabled, the value of the currently played position is respected when you click.

To redeem myself a bit here, Bosca Ceoil Blue, even beta 1, has a feature that aims to help you in a similar way. If you pause the playback, placing notes on a pattern also lets you preview them. In this case the note length is also respected, of course. Notes that you preview from the sidebar are played with the default length. Although, now that I think about it, should it play with the length of the note cursor instead?.. I'll wait for your feedback!

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If you experience issues, please report them as soon as you can.

Downloads

• Download for Linux (x86_64)
• Download for macOS (Universal)
• Download for Windows (x86_64)
• Download for Windows (x86_32)

Built from commit 344d8b8f5ee1514f8190cec64c2c5249754c9e0d.

Your Support

Please consider supporting the project financially by donating via Patreon! Every dollar helps, so please consider donating even if it's a little. Thank you very much <3

Bosca Ceoil Blue - 3.0-beta1

Welcome to the first release of Bosca Ceoil in years!

Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album is a port and rework of the classic music making app by Terry Cavanagh. It has a playful nature and is very easy to use, especially if you are not musically inclined!

You can see for yourself right now, because Bosca Ceoil Blue is free to download and use, no strings attached. You will be welcomed by an interactive guide that will get you settled, and then just start jamming :)

Bosca Ceoil Blue features a pattern-based step sequencer compositor. Build patterns out of notes, and build your song out of the patterns. Choose from over 300 hundred instruments, arrange your tune across up to 6 polyphonic channels, pick a scale and a key if you want! And, when you're ready, export it to WAV or MIDI — to share with the world, or to use it in your other projects. It's great for gamejams!

Changes from Bosca Ceoil 2

The main goal of this project so far was to replicate all the things that make the original app so great and beloved. But, certain things definitely needed an improvement and touch-ups. So if you're familiar with the previous release of Bosca Ceoil, here's a non-exhaustive list of new goodies:

• Native macOS support is back! While some extra testing is still required, we're enjoying cross-platform capabilities of the Godot game engine this time around. So many platforms are supported out of the box, including macOS.

• Confirmation dialogs when you may lose your progress. Bosca Ceoil is kind of infamous for having no guards when it comes to potential data loss from exiting the app or starting a new composition. This is all in the past now, and you will be prompted with a confirmation popup whenever data loss can happen.

• A new time track in the Arrangement editor will help you tune your songs to the exact length that you want. This is a small, but handy change when you have a specific target, or just want to know ahead of exporting what to expect time-wise.

• Speaking of exporting, all exporters and importers have been rewritten from scratch! While every external format is lossy and cannot exactly replicate the structure of a Bosca Ceoil song, an improved output can be expected for MIDI, MML, and XM.

• The advanced instrument tuning feature is now more obvious and features an additional visualization layer to inform you about the progression of recorded values. There is still room for it to grow, but this is already a start on the path to make it more user-friendly.

• Oh, and you can delete patterns now too, just like you could delete instruments before. Keeping your creative chaos orderly since 2024!

There are many more smaller touches across the board, but in general you should expect the app to feel very familiar and just as playful. Well, enough of that. Give it a try for yourself!

And if you experience issues, please report them as soon as you can.

Downloads

• Download for Linux (x86_64)
• Download for macOS (Universal)
• Download for Windows (x86_64)
• Download for Windows (x86_32)

Built from commit 15acb45360b443cbb73d43c19af896670a476c21.

Your Support

Please consider supporting the project financially by donating via Patreon! Every dollar helps, so please consider donating even if it's a little. Thank you very much <3