gabergg

Hi HN! I'm Gabe, the creator of Songcraft.

I shared early versions of Songcraft on HN, and I'm so grateful to the community for the feedback. I've incorporated a ton of these ideas and others. Songcraft is now fully collaborative as well :)

I'd love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you may have. Please drop a line here or via Intercom on the site, or shoot me an email @ gabe@songcraft.io!

I run an online collaborative songwriting platform (https://songcraft.io). With the quarantine, I'm going to be pushing to launch a matchmaking system for songwriters looking for collaborators. I've already heard from a bunch of people who are looking for new ways to collaborate on music.

If you're in this space at all, I'd love to chat!

This is really great! For your progressions section, are all of the progressions added manually? It would be cool to have a way to generate or manipulate them more flexibly.

I'm the founder of Songcraft (https://songcraft.io), an online songwriting platform, and we've tackled some of the same problems. It'd be great to connect! My email is in my profile if you're up for a chat.

Hi HN!

I'm Gabe, the creator of Songcraft.

I shared early versions of Songcraft on HN, and I'm so grateful to the community for the incredible feedback. I've incorporated a ton of those ideas, and I recently did a major rewrite to simplify the editor and make writing collaborative in real-time.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions you may have. Drop a line here or at gabe@songcraft.io.

I've really enjoyed working with Tone.js! Many of Songcraft's (https://songcraft.io) audio features are powered by Tone.js. It's been a great way to manage loops, samples, etc. It makes it quite easy to do things like playing notes or chords in time with a looping metronome. Generally really nice for managing a global audio track with volume, mute, etc as well.

That's really interesting. When I was exploring implementing standard notation, I also came across ABC notation. If/when I take on standard notation, I think ABC notation would be very reasonable to implement for import/export. Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you so much. That's the balance I'm aiming for, but there's still room to improve!

Exactly my thoughts! I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad direction to go, I just want to make sure I do it the right way.

Hahah I was wondering if anyone would enjoy the reference. Thanks for checking it out =}

I’m really excited to look into some of the publishing and community-based features that might be possible. I’m not sure I would want to tackle tab hosting on the scale that UG does, but it’s definitely not out of the question.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks very much! I’d always love to hear any feedback after you get a chance to check it out!

Entire song playback isn't live yet, but it's coming very soon! There have been a ton of requests today, so I'll be prioritizing it.

This is very helpful feedback, thank you. In a couple places, I mention that the $4.95/mo rate (Launch discount) is for the first 3 months of your subscription before it changes to $8.95/mo. I need to make this more prominent, and I absolutely need to clarify the info on backups, plan-switching, etc.

I'm working on a FAQ, but I'll also leave some clarification here:

Songcraft Basic is always free, and your existing songs will never be locked or lost, even if you downgrade from Pro to Basic with more than 3 songs. You can always export any song as plain text.

Comparison info on the plans can be found at https://songcraft.io/plans.

Please let me know if you have other questions!

You can add any chord you want! Just click anywhere on a chord line and enter the chord you like (or click on an existing chord and type to change it). You will also get recommended chords for that location in your song as part of the autocomplete. The theory tools on the right are just meant as an alternative way to add chords / progressions that sound great with your song, plus some goodies like transposition.

I really do want a way to incorporate roman numerals, especially with the progressions. I need to find a way to do it without cluttering the UI, but I love the idea.

Thanks so much!

I wanted to launch with a simple pricing model, but I'm working on developing a longer term (annual/lifetime) plan to sit alongside the monthly one. I think that's an important point.

A user could also disable their subscription for longer periods of inactivity, but that's obviously not ideal for a regular but infrequent project (e.g. a couple days per month).

The progressions from the generator are based on manipulations of common patterns in scale degrees.

The chord recommendations in the editor are predicted from a recurrent neural network.

There are lot of improvements that I'm excited to make in both of these systems!

I actually might do that. It's been the top feature request of the day. I'll look into it this week and see if I can ship something useful to tide us all over until I can improve it.

That’s a great question. I held off on tackling standard notation because there are some existing solutions out there for composing standard notation. I decided to focus first on what seemed like an unmet need in the space.

That being said, I plan to bring in standard notation as an option after adding timing control. I think Songcraft could do some amazing things with conversion between tabs and standard notation, lead sheet generation, full play throughs, etc. All that is feasible, and I’m excited to get to that point!

I love hearing how everyone addresses this problem in their own way. I hope you enjoy Songcraft, and would love any feedback you have!

MIDI support is on the roadmap! Export and import should both be feasible, as is live MIDI input. Thanks so much for giving Songcraft a shot.

That's a super interesting process! I haven't heard of using spreadsheets to track this kind of thing. It sounds like you're sort of building a spreadsheet-based lead sheet.

Thanks for checking out Songcraft. Let me know if there are features it's missing that would make it useful for your method!

This is an incredibly important feature to me. It's coming, but I want to be sure to get it right. It will also enable some other really useful features like entire song play-through. Thanks for the feedback!

This would be really interesting to explore. You can already export a pure-text version of your song (under Share), but it would be amazing to have a more reliable document that included things like metadata as well. Thanks for the thought!

I think there are a lot of benefits to a web app here including:

  - Cross-platform support
  - Collaboration and sharing, especially with unregistered users
  - Speed to get off the ground as a new user
  - Automatic updates for fixes + features
  - Integrated live support
  - Great open-source community

The largest downside for me is less robust offline support, but that's improving. I'd be curious what the most important missing pieces are for you. Would love to minimize those downsides!

Yikes! Hopefully the site will hold up to HN traffic. Was this on the landing page? If you let me know where you saw the error, I can take a look. Thanks!

Entire song playback isn't live yet, but it's coming! It's a really important feature to me, and I want to get it right. I could enable it in a very simple form, but I think it will be much more useful if I can ship it with powerful tempo/timing control.

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks for the kind words!

That's a great point about the demo. I'm hoping to put up a more polished demo in the near future (with the help of more a talented video editor than I), and I'll definitely include the audio.

I would love for Songcraft to fit into that space to take those ideas to fruition. I've been there with the pile of riffs and parts - I feel your pain!

Thanks for checking it out!

Thanks so much! Yeah, there are some great tools for composing, and some good stuff for individual features (RhymeZone, Hookpad, etc). I was surprised that I couldn't find anything quite in this category.

Thanks so much! I appreciate any and all feedback :)