Today I am pleased to share that Capo 4.7 is now available: Get Capo 4.7 for macOS on the App Store Get Capo 4.7 for iOS on the App Store Lead Sheets The biggest feature of this release is exclusive to the Mac . Capo can now produce publication-quality printouts or PDF files using the chords and sections that you set up in the project. You can try this out today if you have an active subscription.…
My research uncovered a few ways that software could support musicians' interactions with recordings. Some of my findings pointed at features Capo already had, but I didn't recognize their importance when they shipped. For example, I recommended that software should allow musicians to easily trigger the playback of a few notes at a time—Capo's Transcription Playhead already offers that…
Just before I started grad school in 2022, I began picking away at the "Keyboard and MIDI Overhaul" project that was meant to improve Capo's support for MIDI controls and extend them to iOS. It was an ambitious project, and it ultimately spawned a little domain-specific language (DSL) for configuration. Keyboard and MIDI controls are "power-user" features, and a combination of configuration files…
The Mac Pro is now officially dead —but it's been dead to me for years. I ordered my first quad-core Mac Pro in early 2008, and later got an 8-core 2013 Mac Pro. 1 These two Macs helped me bootstrap the OpenCL spectrogram kernel that put Capo on the map. During the "dark period", while we all waited for the follow-up to the trashcan Mac 2 , I decided to go hard when I configured my iMac Pro: 18…
I cannot express how big of a deal it is for Capo to let users print chords. It is easily the most-requested feature. Fortunately for my users, I am not one of those people that says "printed charts are silly" and ignores the feedback. Heck, I bought a binding machine and printed most of the research papers I read during grad school. But unfortunately for my users , I care a lot about quality…
The recent loss of access to my Campaign Monitor account was quite the fire-under-my-ass wake-up call that I needed to revive the SuperMegaUltraGroovy Newsletter . After I spent some time taking it on the chin , waiting for my inner critic 1 to end his tirade, I buckled down and got to work trying to rebuild this project from the ground up. Why this matters The newsletter really serves no purpose…