Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album is now generally available on Steam, ready for download and use.
If you don't know Bosca Ceoil Blue yet, it's a very simple sequencer that aims to be as unintimidating as possible. Just launch it, and within minutes you can have a nice little tune! With a bit of mastery, you can compose something truly majestic, using a broad set of synthesized instruments and a drag'n'drop pattern timeline.
Bosca Ceoil was originally made by amazing Terry Cavanagh, who you may know for his cult classic games like VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons. He had made this sweet little tool over ten years ago using Flash, which unfortunately made it pretty much unusable a few years later when that tech fell out of fashion. I adored original Bosca Ceoil and wasn't willing to let it die, so I remade it from scratch using modern tools, with cross-platform support and a bright future ahead!
Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album is a completely free tool, and it's also an open source project, made with the help of its community. There are no strings attached and no EULAs to sign. Just add it to your library, download it, and it's fully yours! Your support of the project's development is always welcome though <3
Coming up
Bosca Ceoil has proven itself to be a reliable tool for indie game developers and budding musicians over the years, and the release of The Blue Album last year has addressed a number of usability issues and provided a much needed polish, but this is not the end of the road.
Current release is but a stepping stone, acting as a bridge from the original version, maintaining full compatibility and offering a familiar experience. Now it is time to move past that bridge and onto the new lands, and work on features which may require us to deviate from the old functionality.
More instruments and more control over them? More flexibility to filters? Better management of patterns? MIDI inputs? An Android version?! The number of things I'm eager to work on is countless! As Bosca is an open source project, you can find an outline of upcoming features and fixes on the project's GitHub page. And feel free to add your ideas there as well!
Most of this work is targeting version 4.0, which indicates The Blue Album breaking away from the original Bosca Ceoil (i.e. new files will no longer be backwards compatible). Some features, however, can be released earlier with version 3.2. Either way, there are going to be more exciting releases for our little tracker and sequencer this year!
Stay tuned, and lots of love to everyone using and supporting the project!