UPDATE: This blog post is for an old version of Bosca Ceoil, and is out of date! Bosca Ceoil v2.0 is available from here: boscaceoil.net

I made a thing! It’s a simple music creation tool, called Bosca Ceoil (pronouced “bus-ka kyo-al”, Irish for “Music Box/Accordion”).

I made this because I find other music programs really confusing and distracting. Too many panels, buttons and knobs! I wanted something really simple, something designed to work the way I tend to create stuff – a process that I suppose I could best describe as: make something super simple, and keep tweaking it until it starts to get good.

Bosca Ceoil is all about looping, and designed that way at its heart. Songs are built up from lots of tiny 16 note patterns – the intended workflow is that you loop over these single patterns until you have something you like, then you start making variations. If you approach it this way, you’ll find it’s pretty decent at doing that – but it’s not very good at other things, like say, long melody lines. It is what it is! I made it for myself, and the way I work, but hopefully some of you out there will find it useful too. It’s free, and open source under the FreeBSD licence. If anyone wants to port it/fork it, go for it! It’s on github here.

It’s a pretty simple program, and only takes about five minutes to learn how to use. Here’s a tutorial to get you started!

(if Bosca Ceoil is too much of a mouthful, feel free to just call it Bosca)