After several months of development version 3.1 is ready for testing! Everyone is invited to help ensure that this release is as solid as it can be before we officially break open champaign. In a week or so, if no major issues are found, we’ll be celebrating the stable release of Bosca Ceoil Blue 3.1.

So, what is there for you to test? Here’re the highlights:

• Bosca Ceoil Blue is now available in your browser!
• Major improvement to GUI scaling of the app
• Reworked controls and many new shortcuts
• New editing tools and less restrictions for composing
• Reworked and improved export/import workflow
• An assortment of bugfixes and tweaks

Read on for more details about these changes, or just hop straight to the downloads and enjoy them firt-hand!

Remember, this is a beta release. It should be stable and better in every regard compared to 3.0, but with more eyes some unforeseen problems may appear. If you experience issues, please report them as soon as you can.

Bosca for Web

Yes, we are officially back! Classic Bosca Ceoil has been available in the browser thanks to its Flash roots, and because of these same roots this version is no longer accessible. Release 3.1 is the perfect time to rectify this historic mistake. Please say hello to Bosca for Web, which is now available in its beta state alongside all of the desktop releases:

• https://humnom.net/apps/boscaceoil/beta/

All you need is a compatible browser (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Opera, etc. will do), and internet access. No installation and no compromise on the features! Unfortunately, Safari is not supported due to restrictions enforced by Apple. But on the flipside, it now works on your Chromebook.

Better GUI scaling

Continuing with the theme of platform support, the way the app is scaled across all desktop platforms have been improved. It should no longer appear too large, struggling to fit a 1080p screen. If you have a standard DPI screen, you can keep the GUI scale at 100% in the application settings, and everything will remain crisp and well-fit. If you use a hiDPI screen and use system scaling, you might want to play around with that setting a bit, increasing as needed.

Note that if you’ve used Bosca Ceoil Blue before, your existing settings will be applied as is. So if you used 75% GUI scale before to fit Bosca to your 1080p screen, make sure to change that value to 100% after opening version 3.1!

New control scheme

Version 3.1 makes more GUI elements scrollable. For instance, you can now use your mouse wheel to scroll the pattern and instrument lists. (PR #30 by genderfreak). The mouse wheel is a natural candidate for scrolling, as it’s used for this purpose in the majority of applications. However, previous versions of Bosca Ceoil used it for different purposes. In the pattern editor the mouse wheel could be used to change the size of the note cursor, and in the arrangement editor it would change the zoom/scale of the timeline grid.

To keep things intuitive, this had to be changed, which deviates from the control scheme present in previous versions of Bosca. Now, wherever you want to scroll, the mouse wheel — without any modifier keys — can be used. To change the note cursor size, you must hold Ctrl alongside scrolling the mouse wheel. To change the arrangement timeline scale, you must similarly hold Shift.

Just so easy mistakes can be avoided, you can no longer remove notes with Ctrl + Left Click. Use the right mouse button instead (which was always a thing). And you can still use keyboard for the aforementioned actions. There are actually quite a few new shortcuts available in this version, and a few new tricks to help you work on your music more proficiently.

Check out the shortcut list in the help menu for an exhaustive list of shortcuts and input options!

Less restrictions for composing

A couple of limitations have been lifted in 3.1:

• BPM can now go from 10 to 450 with 1 unit increments, allowing for both way higher tempo and more granular adjustments.
• You can now create notes as long as 128 units, where previously the maximum length was limited to the pattern size.

The latter turns Bosca Ceoil Blue to be more on par with the original Bosca Ceoil. In the original app you could make notes of any size, with upper limit enforced. Initially, I attributed this to an oversight since usability when working with such notes was lacking (a loooot of mouse wheel scrolling). But I was made aware that this is actually something that many of you need, so as a compromise I settled on the new upper limit, 128. Let me know if this seems reasonable to you!

To help you work with notes of variable sizes there is a new interaction available — you can use Ctrl + Left Click to set the size of the note cursor to the size of the existing note. Clicking on an empty space will reset the size back to 1.

New editing tools

Here’s a cool thing: you can now select and copy notes between patterns! Hold Shift and then click and drag across the pattern, and you’ll see a selection rectangle. Drag it over the notes, noticing as they change color, then press Ctrl + C to copy. As you would expect, pressing Ctrl + V pastes copied notes. Insert them into a different pattern, or just duplicate the notes on the same one — it’ll simply work.

Another cool thing is the new instrument randomizer (PR #34 by SirLich). While you could previously delete and recreate instruments over and over to experiment with a random one, now it’s available at a press of a button. You can find the dice icon in the instrument panel and click it to your heart’s content!

When arranging patterns on the timeline, you can now hold Alt while dragging to create a variation when you drop. In fact the old Middle Click shortcut has been removed in favor of Alt + Left Click. The reason for this is technical, but in short, Godot doesn’t allow to handle drag events started with anything but the left mouse button. So I decided that it’s better to have consistency than to preserve the old shortcut here.

Oh, and finally, if you’re from a part of the world where people don’t call notes after the Latin alphabet, there is also an option to use the Doremi notation!

Export and import improvements

There has been a number of fixes and internal changes in pretty much every exporter. On the MIDI side, exports should now correctly store the time signature, especially for songs which do not use 16-note patterns. During imports we cannot reliably deduce the pattern size, a concept that doesn’t apply to MIDI files, so instead you can now configure the size manually as a finishing step. MIDI imports should also result in a little more reasonable songs now.

FastTracker 2 XM exports are also improved, with a better approach to rendering samples and fixes to volume/velocity.

There is a new feature available to all exporters in 3.1: you can specify exact bars that you would like to export, enabling you to extract parts of your song into an external format. So, for example, if you have a track that has an intro part and a looping part that you’d like to mix in some other tool (or at runtime in your game, perhaps), you can render out partial WAVs now!

To help with all these new export and import options, the workflow has been reworked. There are now shiny and new popup windows that help you set up the export or import, and also give you some extra hints, such as compatibility and limitations of external formats.

Bugfixes and tweaks

Last, but definitely not least, are many fixes and under the hood improvements.

• There is no more forced compression.
• Note previews now work correctly with drumkits and different keys.
• Drumkits no longer permanently erase notes in various cases.
• When notes are removed as an indirect result of your actions, there is a warning now.
• Instrument recording doesn’t skip the first note anymore.
• Notes are properly cut off when pausing/stopping/previewing.
• Popup windows are now moveable and won’t close accidentally.
• Instrument names have been cleaned up and made more homogeneous.
• Help has been updated with new information and better descriptions.
• Credits and shortcuts are now proudly listed in their own popups.

And probably something else that I’m forgetting!

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