Hey there! MIDI is not a save format, it’s an export format. While Bosca tries its best to convert to and from MIDI, it’s impossible to do this flawlessly as its capabilities are different from Bosca’s. Generally export to MIDI should result in a valid MIDI file. Import from MIDI is available, but it’s far from perfect and not every MIDI file can be reasonably imported into the app because.
You should use Bosca’s own format for saving your work, and use export formats when you want to take your music out of Bosca somewhere else.
Sorry, this is a minor update, so it cannot introduce any breaking changes. Original Bosca Ceoil and current version of Bosca Ceoil Blue do not support more than 16 instruments, so that has to stay for now. I’ll revisit this limitation in the next major update.
No, that’s not normal. There is nothing unique about the arrangement view that would make the music lag. So it’s likely that the whole app is having performance issues on your device in the arrangement view. Can you tell me more about your hardware? Your CPU, GPU, RAM? Could you also check in the task manager, or your system’s alternative for that, if Bosca is stressing your system too much?
Hey! The new update is pretty much ready and the first beta will be out early next year. But for now it’s a holiday break. Do you have some suggestions, though, for what you want to see?
All shortcuts are listed in the app itself, in the help section.
Hey! It allows you to record different filter and volume values for the instrument that the pattern uses across the duration of that pattern. It’s explained in more detail in the “Tips and Tricks” guide in the Help section!
Note that this is not the final version of Bosca Ceoil Blue 3.1, and there may be bugs, inconsistencies, etc. But if you can give it a go and let me know how it works for you, that’d be appreciated!
I had someone test it with a Chromebook, and it seems to work fine as a web app.
Hmm, there shouldn’t be any difference whatsoever whether you start the .exe from the File Explorer or from a terminal. Can it be that it’s your antivirus/antimalware software blocking it, perhaps? Not sure what else to suggest here, because that’s a pretty unusual circumstance.
If there aren’t any errors when running from the command line, we can only guess about the source of the issue. I guess you can try making a .bat file in the same directory to execute the same command line operation with just a click, so it’s less cumbersome.
Sorry if I can’t be of any more help, but I’m really confused by your findings.
Hey there! No, old Bosca doesn’t affect the new version in any way. Are you familiar with the command line/terminal for your operating system? Could you open it from the folder where you unzipped to and run Bosca Ceoil Blue this way? This should show some errors if the problem is with the app.
Yes, I definitely have plans to release on Android :) It’s all just a matter of adapting the UI and input handling for small touch-sensitive screens. The synth itself works perfectly fine on Android already.
For iOS I just don’t have the hardware to develop on. I can kind of just build for macOS blindly, trusting the engine’s support, as it is just another desktop application, but I don’t think this will work well for iOS/iPadOS releases, unfortunately.
I can’t promise a quick turnaround on this because this is a result of a design decision that I’ve made. For aesthetics reasons I wanted the app to have a vertical layout and fit on one screen as much as possible (so no scrollbars). Which unfortunately means a situation like your last screenshot is possible.
I do want to explore an alternative horizontal layout for it at some point, which I think will work for your case the best. Just not right now, as I’m switching my attention to another project for a bit. But I promise this will be sorted out eventually!
Hey there! I just released an update with a handful of hotkeys added for your convenience. They aren’t rebindable, but I hope they are sensible at least (for the keyboard especially). You can find them in the new settings menu!
Hey, I just updated the app so it should work well on your screen. Tested it on my other 1080p laptop, and made it fit the screen and be properly scaled!
But which text is too small for you? That’s not good, and I’d like to fix that.
Edit: It just so happens, I was working on an update for the last couple of days, and just released it. It introduces a GUI scale setting. Let me know if it helps with your issue!
Thanks! You didn’t miss anything, don’t worry. There aren’t keyboard shortcuts just yet, but there of course should be. Adding some for the piano roll and the randomizer makes sense to me.
Please stop posting the same question over and over. As I’ve said, I’ll get back to you on GitHub once I have time. I appreciate your desire to help, but spamming is not helpful.
That’s why I mentioned the IOManager class. That’s where the GUI is connected to the logic behind the export process. That’s where user interactions are handled, and then an exporter class handles the rest.
Exporters and importers are just classes coded in GDScript, which create either a string or a binary buffer according to the format specification, and write them to disk. You can find them in the io folder, and the GUI hooks are in the IOManager class.
Hey, thanks for the offer! The project is open source, so if you’d like to contribute just drop by the repo anytime and see if there is any bug that you’d like to fix:
For features, please open an issue or a discussion first if you have some ideas, so we can arrive to the solution together before committing to anything.
Hey, can you give me a bit more details? What operating system do you have? And what steps specifically do you attempt to take which don’t work? Would be very helpful if you could record a short clip on it too.
No, this is a hard limitation of this app. For the synthesizer that the app uses this handling more tracks in polyphony is not a problem, but this might not be the case for various external formats like MIDI. So for now I don’t have plans to allow for more tracks, 8 seems like a good middle ground for the target audience of Bosca.
Hey! All documentation is available in the app itself in the “Help” menu, including all the shortcuts available to you. There is, though, no shortcut to copy notes between patterns, because there is no way to select notes in a pattern. Adding such behavior is a bit of a problem, as the click and drag behavior in the pattern editor is already rich with functions for mouse buttons and modifier keys.
Hey there! You should give the updated version a try, as it introduces undo/redo and unsaved changes checks so you don’t lose your work permanently! Has shortcuts for saving too.
I’ll be working on the web version soon, which should be fully compatible with Chromebooks! Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to develop and test a native Chromebook app, so I can’t make any promises about that. But I guess we’ll see if maybe the Android version just works :)
The Android version requires some rethinking of the UI, so it will take some time. I’m working alone on this, plus I have other projects going on, so my plans for the Android version are for some time next year.
Custom instruments can come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and Bosca aims to be simple and beginner friendly. So it’s a conscious choice to not have a way for importing new instruments, because that can get complicated very quickly.
Instead, I’d rather we fill in the gaps in the presets that the tool provides, if there are some instrument types that are missing. Do you have any particular suggestions?
I like the idea of more advanced effect/filter setups. I think that they were added as they are for simplicity, to test it out. There are code comments in the original Bosca that suggest some unresolved issues, which leads me to believe there was a plan to do more with them.
That said, I can’t promise this any time soon. This kind of change would require modifications to the file format, which makes it a breaking change. So I’ll have to revisit it later when I consider the next major release (4.0).
Yeah, I didn’t know about that feature in the original (or perhaps I had forgotten about it). But kind folks at Bosca’s subreddit reminded me about it, and I’ve already implemented it for beta 2 which should be out some time next week!
Hey again! I’ve got myself a Pop OS install on an old laptop, and after playing around for a bit I couldn’t reproduce any problem like you describe.
Would you mind giving me a bit more details? Namely, what’s your operating system and hardware spec? Were you doing anything specific in the moment it started to get crunchy? Any particular instrument, effect, filter and volume setting? Can you reproduce the issue or was it a one-time thing? Does it happen with different patterns after some time or is there anything that they have in common?
Details like that will give me a better starting point to keep looking, and maybe other users would then be able to confirm. If you have a GitHub account, I’d appreciate this info to be provided as a report there:
https://github.com/YuriSizov/boscaceoil-blue/issues
This helps keeping track of every issue in one place. But also don’t feel like you have to do all this work. I’ll be testing it on Linux more now, and may end up repeating your experience at some point with my tools at the ready.
Yes, I will work on undo/redo soon! But what shortcuts are missing? There are plenty of them, at least for things which don’t need to be mouse-driven :) Or do you mean you want to reassign them? For that I don’t have any specific plans at this time.
I would be ill-equipped to give anyone music lessons :) Besides, with Bosca you cannot create just about any kind of music. Bosca Ceoil is a step sequencer, your music will have a distinct rhythm to it, which you cannot escape. Orchestral music that you reference, from Sunshine and Inception, is simply impossible here. You’d need a much more powerful DAW to have that level of control over the melody and composition.
Bosca fits a particular niche. When getting to know it, I think it’s better to approach Bosca not from the perspective of “I want to realize some very specific idea from my head” but rather as a box full of classic LEGOs. Akin to a step sequencer, you are working on a grid with LEGOs, yet you can create some impressively complex structures after gaining some experience. You need to learn the limitations and what the tool can achieve, which will shape your ideas for what you can make with it.
It’s not a limitless tool (as if anything is, right?), but it’s also not overwhelming. You have few simple rules which you have to follow, but that can be good for creativity in certain ways. Once you learn what this tool can do, you can be efficient at solving particular problems with it and getting the result in the niche that this tool excels at.
I don’t have any specific plans for extending its musical capabilities, but this particular feature has been requested elsewhere. My current concern is how to expose pitch bending without losing the simplicity of the app. Like, there are many things which can be done on the technical level, but can also detract from the experience that Bosca aims to provide, y’know?
I’ll look into how Beepbox does it, maybe that’ll give me some inspirations!
What you need is a synthesizer. Godot has support for generated audio streams, but how it is generated is up to users to implement. This is what Bosca uses. It has a custom software synthesizer and it produces data for the Godot’s audio stream to play back.
You can totally make an editor plugin similar in functionality to Bosca Ceoil. You can probably even adapt the app itself into a plugin relatively easily. The app is just a bunch of fancy UI on top of the synthesizer, but you can make whatever you want with the synthesizer. It’s also open source and free to use :)
This creates a very strong argument for not having a music editor as built-in functionality.
