Beta testers needed / Play with my app! It's fun!

[Mark_Rocka]

I had a call with Ben yesterday about the app. He hit me with both barrels (in a good way.) I recorded the conversation, made notes, watched the recorded video again, made more notes, then got to work.

You won’t visibly see that many changes in the app, other than the chord footer, which no longer has the 1,4,5, 6m, 2, and 7 buttons. The Measures Per Tap option is gone. It now looks like this.

The biggest change is in what happens when you tap a chord button. It now changes the selected cell to that chord rather than adding a new measure. To advance to the next cell, either press the arrow buttons to the right of the A# button, or tap the Space Bar. Multiple taps of the space bar add the same chord.

If you change the chord, the variation automatically defaults back to its major. Keyboard arrow keys now navigate around the chord chart. The new system is designed for making keyboard entry faster and more intuitive.

Other changes in this release:

• There’s now an option in the Paused popup to change the behavior of the Spacebar/Pedal.
• When creating a new song, the first section is now automatically added with a note telling the user to use the Chord buttons at the bottom to add chords.
• Space bar and arrow keys behave differently in Edit View than other views.
• Added a Play/Edit toggle button to the left of the Key Signature drop down.
• In Edit View, the chord footer is automatically expanded.
• Backspace now deletes selected cell / cells and shifts everything left. Delete key keeps existing cell selected and moves cells left. Works more like a word processor.
• Copy / Paste / Delete should leave cells selected after used.
• Copy now works on a single selected cell.
• The Share Song button is now available on the Play View.
• “Songs” and “Lists” titles are now more visible on the Library page.

I’ve been bug testing it all morning. This is a serious update to the core functionality of the app. Let me know what you think.

[Mark_Rocka]

A big thanks to @Mike_R for reaching out and giving me details about his experience with the new chord entry system. He ran across some quirks I didn’t find, and made some suggestions I think really enhance the experience.

The tiny arrow buttons are gone, replaced by big red and green - and + buttons to add and delete measures.

Shift Selecting a line of cells no longer enters the copy / paste mode. If you select multiple cells, you can actually change the chord in all cells at once.

Building on that, I added the ability to CTRL (or Command) click multiple non-contiguous cells to do the same kind of editing.

There’s another new addition thanks to a request from @brentbeardsley. You can now use your browser’s Back and Forward buttons to navigate through the app to pages you’ve been to previously. No more instinctively clicking the Back button and getting thrown out of the app.

[Mike_R]

Wow! Buen trabajo mi amigo!

Seems super intuitive to me. Loving the changes!!!

[Mark_Rocka]

Good to hear Mike. I’m hoping you didn’t have to update the service worker this time?

[Mike_R]

Correct. It worked with a simple refresh.

[Mark_Rocka]

It has come to my attention that very few people actually use the Help and Tutorial files I worked so hard to build. The problem with that is that the app has a lot of unlabeled buttons, and if you don’t know what the symbols mean, you’re not using the app to its full potential.

So I’d like to introduce the Edit and Insert menus.

These menus do exactly the same things as the existing buttons, but they have descriptions of what the function is. What’s really cool about it is that if you use a button from one of these menus, after clicking it, that same button in the main view lights up so you can use it there in the future.

This is my way of tricking people into using the help info.

[Mark_Rocka]

This is an addition for the keyboard warriors requested by @brentbeardsley

Up until now, to enter chords on the chart with a keyboard, you had to enter them with CAPS. That allowed you to add a b for flat, d for diminished, etc. after the chord. Brent wanted an option to just tap a lower case g and have it automatically insert that major chord. So now that’s what you can do. CAPS waits for a modifier. Lower case adds immediately.

Additionally, you can use the 1-7 keys to enter the full scale chord inversions. For example, in G:
1 = G
2 = Am
3 = Bm
4 = C
5 = D
6 = Em
7 = F#dim

I can see this really fast tracking new song entry. Thanks Brent!

[Mark_Rocka]

What’s New — July 15

A few improvements just landed, focused on song structure and finding your tunes:

Intro sections
Name a section “Intro” and it’ll play once at the top of the song, then automatically get skipped every time the tune loops around. No more manually working around that first-time-only run.

Outro sections
The mirror of Intro — name a section “Outro” and it’s skipped on every pass except the last one . Loop the tune as many times as you like, then land on a proper ending.

Smarter library search
Search now looks inside each song’s Notes, Lyrics, and Resources — not just the title. Can’t remember a song’s name but you remember a line of the lyrics, or a note you jotted down (“the one in DADGAD,” “learned at the Tuesday jam”)? Just type it and the song comes up, with a little “matched in Notes” tag so you know why.

Auto speed-up now resets when you stop
When you use Auto+ to gradually speed up while practicing, the tempo no longer sticks after you stop — your song snaps right back to its real saved tempo. (Pausing keeps the faster tempo, so you can pick up where you left off.)

As always, thanks for testing — keep the feedback coming!

[Mark_Rocka]

@Mike_R made a great suggestion for a new game, which is now live. It’s called the Number Trainer. You can use it to build your knowledge of the Nashville Number System by identifying which chord goes with the number presented in the game.

Check it out in the Games section. Thanks Mike!

[Mark_Rocka]

The Play View wasn’t always the Play View. It evolved from what was originally called “Jam Mode” which had the sole purpose of displaying large chord names at jams. It wasn’t even designed for playing songs initially, which is why it has been lacking, though I didn’t realize it.

Up until now, I clearly hadn’t given the Play View enough thought. An email from Michael Mundew, one of Katy’s students, pointed that out, so now the Play View has several more buttons that a user might want when playing a song, like Loop Selection, Arrange, Repeat Song, and Add to List.

Another small item… on songs with CAPO settings, clicking the CAPO button above the chord chart now automatically expands the capo settings in the side bar and gives it a brief highlight to make it easier to find.

[Mark_Rocka]

New addition this morning. If you want to select a few cells to loop, you no longer have to tap the Select button first. On a PC, just click and drag the mouse over the cells you want to loop. On a mobile device, tap and hold on the first cell for at least 0.4 seconds and then drag to the last cell to loop.

@Bhive clued me in to the fact that pickersguide.com is now doing something similar to JamTrainer with backing tracks. I briefly looked in to it. Not really that worried about it, but wanted to find out if any of you use that site, and if you have found anything useful that it does that JT doesn’t do yet.

[Mark_Rocka]

This morning’s updates aren’t very obvious. I got to thinking about how the the main Play button behaves. It was always starting the song from the beginning using the count in settings. The little green play button in the cell would start from the cell, but with no count in.

So now, the Play button starts from the selected cell. I think that’s fairly intuitive.

And not that anyone asked for this, but transpose buttons are now on the Lyrics View page as well. As long as you’ve mapped the chord chart to the lyrics, you can transpose the chord names above the lyrics. Seemed like something folks would ask for eventually.

[Bhive]

Is there still anything about the capo in jamtrainer?

This is what I was looking to do… play a song with chords from key of G, but I need to move it up 3 half steps to key of B-flat like I would with a capo. I can do that in jamtrainer and the band is playing in the right key, but is there a way at the same time I can continue to see G chords as it plays in B-flat?

[Mark_Rocka]

It sounds like maybe you have the “Show sounding chord names” option selected in the capo settings. Go into Settings / Song Settings / Capo and make sure that box isn’t checked.

If it’s not checked, tell me what song it is (if it’s a public song) and I’ll check it out.

[Mark_Rocka]

This update is mainly for @BanjoBen. After 2 past failures, I tried a different approach to allow playback to continue when backgrounding the app.

3rd time’s a charm. Go in to Settings Menu / App & Account / Accessibility / “Keep playing in background”

It’s worked great on the 2 devices I’ve tested it on, my PC and my iPhone.

I honestly don’t know that this should even be an option. Should I just make it the default with no way to turn it off?

[BanjoBen]

Great! I think it should be default, yeah.

[Scot]

I’ve been playing around with the song Mountains and Memories. The chorus includes a Bm, but there are no lyrics occurring during this chord. When I try to link the lyrics and the chords, the lyric linking tool seems to require the chords be assigned to the lyrics sequentially, and I don’t see any way to indicate there is no lyric associated with the Bm.

I’m very new to singing, and therefore very new to lyric/chord charts, so it’s possible I’m just doing this wrong? It’s also possible I’ve just got the structure wrong.

Here’s how I imagine it should be:

I’ve got (A)memories of mountains, that I have only seen in my (D) mind. (Bm) <——No lyrics here.
(E)Mountains that I’ve climbed in dreams, A mountain with her gentle mountain (A)streams.

As a work around, I’ve just associated the chorus with what I defined as the B part that doesn’t include the Bm.

[Mark_Rocka]

Hey Scot. I honestly tried to allow chords to be tied to spaces when the Link Lyrics to Chord Chart feature was first created. It caused all kinds of problems. Nothing I did seemed to work across the board. So the work around, at least until I figure something else out, is to put some text in the lyrics that the chord change can attach to. So a . or a - would be a place holder.

Or if you wanted to get fancy, hold down the ALT button on your keyboard, type 14 then release the ALT key and you get:
♫
That would be a really swanky place holder. You could then tie the Bm to that.

[Mark_Rocka]

Today was spent mostly refining the Lyrics View. We have a couple of new options:

• Expand to full screen
• Hide Chords

So if you expand to full screen, you can see way more of your lyrics. If your screen is big enough, you might even be able to see the whole song on a single page.

For example, I just bought this TCL NXTPAPER 14 for testing the app with.

Amazon.com

I’d say it fits all of the lyrics of most songs on a single screen when chords are turned off and it’s in the new Full Screen mode.

I also made the scrolling more intelligent when you have a song that’s had its chords linked to the lyrics. Now, if the lyrics all fit on a single page, the app won’t scroll. Makes it easier to keep your eyes in the right place.

Lastly, if you use the Scroll feature to just scroll the text, it no longer jumps out of the scroll view when it hits the end of the lyrics. It will now pause and wait for user interaction.

[Mark_Rocka]

How would you rather see chords on your lyrics page?

Option A, chords inline with the lyrics:

Option B, chords above the lyrics: