Today we are checking out Bosca Ceoil Blue, a port of Terry Cavanagh’s ( VVVVV, Super Hexagon, Dicey Dungeons ) beginner friendly music creation software. Bosca Ceoil was released for free several years ago (we covered it five years back) and was originally written using Flash. We are discussing it today because Bosca Ceoil Blue Album has been released. This is a port of Bosca Ceoil using the Godot Game Engine by Yuri Sizov with Terry’s blessing.
Bosca Ceoil Blue Album is described as:
Playful and intuitive pattern editor
Begin writing music quickly with a playful piano roll sequencer. Create patterns of notes and experiment with timing and tonality to find your unique sound. Adjust the scale to give yourself a constraint that ensures your music always sounds great!
Drag’n’drop-based compositor and arrangement editor
Just as playfully rearrange your patterns on the timeline, create variations and make adjustments. Use up to 8 channels to play multiple patterns and instruments in parallel. Block by block, build your multi-minute song!
Over 300 synthesizes instruments
Powered by a versatile software synthesizer, Bosca Ceoil Blue offers you pretty much any instrument you can think of! Don’t like how your tune sounds with a piano? Swap it for a guitar with a swift adjustment. If you feel adventurous, make sure to take a look at instrument tuning.
Ready for production and consumption
Export your creations to WAV and MIDI. Share them with the world, or use them for your next game or video!
Its not just a port of the original application though, new features have been added:
- 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 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.
- 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 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!
Key Links
You can learn more about the new Bosca Ceoil Blue Album and see it in action in the video below.