Week by week.

This is the first post here, so it covers everything since the start. Songcode began in August as eddy, a techno generator that ran on your own API key. This week it got a name, a second way to work on a track, its own sounds and a site.

In the app

• eddy is now Songcode. The mark is a stack of bars that reads as an S and as lines of code.
• The stems view shows a track as a mixer and a timeline. Each named line of the song gets a lane with its own mute, solo and level, and a piano roll or a drum grid underneath. You can add a stem, regenerate one with a direction such as “busier” or “follow the bass”, or draw the notes yourself. Note edits are written back into the code.
• The timeline takes you anywhere in the song. Click or drag the ruler to move the playhead, zoom into a section, and read the section names above the bar numbers on a full track.
• Play and pause share one button. Pause holds your place, and stop goes back to the start.
• The song menu in the stems view downloads every stem as its own WAV, or the whole mix as one.
• We redesigned the interface on one design system, with a layout for phones and narrow windows.
• While a track or a single stem is being written, the code view and the stems view show placeholders in the shape of what is coming.
• The model picker offers the newest models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
• Accounts are here. Sign in with an email and a password or with a link we email you, and reset a password by email.
• The speech bubble in the top bar sends us feedback from any page of the app.
• A link to a saved track unfurls with a card of its own: the track’s title over its code.

Sounds and genres

• The composer has 51 genres in nine families. Each one carries a written brief for the model: a tempo range, a default drum kit and how the style is built.
• Songcode has its own sounds: 53 instruments, four synthesised drum kits and one recorded kit.

The language

Songcode writes every track in ode, its own language for music. Until now ode said which note to play and how loud. From 13 November it also says how the note is played.

• A line can slur notes into one bow or one breath with (c5/8 d5 e5), and lead into a note with a grace note, d5/g.
• Seven ornaments go on a note after a colon: :trill, :mordent, :turn, :roll, :bend, :fall and :slide. A drum row takes f for a flam.
• Strings, winds and brass have more than one way of playing. pizz plucks a string part and arco picks the bow back up, in the middle of a line. Spiccato, tremolo, staccato and muted work the same way.
• Bowed strings, winds and brass are played, note by note. Each note swells in and sinks away before the next, quickly when it is loud and slowly when it is soft, the way a bow or a breath does it. bow 20% and breath 20% set it by hand: a low number blooms and fades, a high one speaks at once.
• Every pitched instrument has styles of playing, written between notes: stacc is short with no swell, spic bounces the bow, marc hammers, ten holds a note full, port pulses notes inside one bow or breath. Each has a plain word too (short, bounce, punch, held, pushed), so a guitar riff or a synth line reads the way that music is talked about.
• strum 20ms plays a chord’s notes one after another, as a guitar or a harp does. pedal chord gives a piano its sustain pedal. legato joins every note of a stem. Joined notes now cross over: one fades out as the next fades in, and a recorded string or wind note starts past its own attack, so a line no longer dips at every change of note. overlap 100ms sets how long they share.
• Two new voicings: shell plays the root, third and seventh, and smooth moves each chord to the nearest notes of the next.
• A stem can take chorus, phaser and three tone controls: lowshelf, highshelf and bell.
• tuning e -50cents, b -50cents at the top of a track retunes those notes everywhere in it, which is how quarter tones and pure thirds are written. There are 21 more scales, among them phrygian dominant, hirajoshi and pelog.
• pulse 20% leans a stem on the beat the way a player counts: the first beat of the bar a little louder, the notes between beats a little softer.
• A filter that moves now moves through a held note, so one long chord can open across a whole section. It used to change only when a note started.
• Everything above shows in the stems view and survives an edit there. Change a note in the piano roll and its slur, ornament or way of playing is written back into the code with it.
• Songcode writes with all of it. A generated string part is bowed and plucked, a piano uses its pedal, and a guitar solo bends.

New recorded instruments came with it: violin and viola sections, a bowed contrabass, bassoon, piccolo, tuba, recorder, ocarina, tubular bells, a dan tranh, a plucked double bass, an upright piano and an FM electric piano, plus a brush drum kit for jazz and ballads.

Around the app

• The home page is at songco.de, with a track you can play, edit and pull apart by stem in the page. The app is at app.songco.de.
• The app is in early access. Leave your email on the home page and we send an invite. We let new people in often.
• The blog opens with ten posts on how Songcode works, who it is for and how it compares.
• The docs are a 27 page manual with search, at docs.songco.de.
• The terms and the privacy policy are published. Under the terms your tracks belong to you with full commercial rights, and you owe Songcode no royalty, share or credit.

Fixed

• A song with many stems no longer cuts out in its busiest sections. The audio thread was running out of time, so a lighter reverb replaced the one that cost the most.
• Exports carry reverb from their first sample.
• Opening a saved track in the stems view no longer freezes the page.
• A drum written with a tuning is drawn as hits and opens in the drum grid. A long sound with no pitch, such as wind or a drone, is drawn at its length.
• Solo dims the lanes of the stems it silences, the way mute does.
• A stem that is added, duplicated or brought back by undo scrolls into view.
• On a shared track the top bar no longer clips download or pushes the more menu off screen. When the bar runs short of room, its buttons drop their labels and keep a tooltip.
• Long lines no longer show through the line numbers when the editor scrolls sideways.
• The code no longer jumps when the editor takes over from the streaming preview.