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!

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