# Changelog What changed in each version of Bodhrán, newest first. The version shows next to the title in the app; bump it at the top of `js/app.js` with every change that gets pushed (the last number for a fix, the middle one for a feature). ## 1.10.3 — 2026-10-06 - **Reels go up to 240.** The tempo is counted per crotchet, four to the bar, and stopped at 160: only 80 counted two to the bar, as players count a reel, where a fast session plays 104–120 (208–240 here). Asked for by a player of Session Buddies, which has the same change (1.23.4). The other types already reach a fast session. - **The drum damps at speed**, as a player's hand does: no stroke rings past three quavers. At a reel of 240 a full dum rang into the next tak, which rose only 3 dB over it (7 dB now); below a reel of about 195, a jig of 130 or a polka of 190, nothing changes. ## 1.10.2 — 2026-10-03 - **Each drum stroke lets go once it has rung out.** Every stroke ended with a little output left plugged into the drum. It is now unplugged when the stroke's last sound ends, so the browser can let the whole stroke go. Found while looking into Safari's memory growing over an hour of Session Buddies (1.22.0), whose instruments all did the same; whether it was the cause there is not yet known. ## 1.10.1 — 2026-10-03 - The **Sound check** line under Play is hidden, as in Session Buddies. It was there to find out why Safari once went silent, not for every day. It still measures, and `?soundcheck` at the end of the app's address shows it again. ## 1.10.0 — 2026-10-02 — A less electronic drum - **The dum no longer swoops.** Each down stroke used to drop almost an octave in its first 55 ms (from 148 Hz to the skin's 78), a pure tone with a triangle wave swooping under it: the recipe of an electronic kick drum, nearly all of it under 120 Hz, so a phone's speaker heard little but the click. A struck goatskin settles a few percent at most; now it settles 4.5% on a full stroke, less on lighter ones. - **It rings like a drumhead.** Under the fundamental, the next five modes of a round skin ring and die away, the higher ones sooner, each a little different from stroke to stroke as the tipper never lands in quite the same place; and the goatskin's own slap sits in its middle register, through the Tone control like the rest. The tak and the ghost are the same skin, lighter, as before. Listen for woodier, less zip. - Same loudness as before (measured on a reel at 112), the same balance of dum, tak and ghost, and about 4 dB more of it through a phone's speaker. - **No clipping at full volume.** The output limiter follows a smoothed level, so single samples ran about 0.8 dB over where it aims: at full volume and room the old drum came within 0.2 dB of clipping, and the new one, a touch more lively at the strike, went over. A fixed trim after the limiter keeps it clear; everything is 0.6 dB quieter, the balance unchanged. - Session Buddies (1.15.0) and the guitar demo (1.12.0) have the new drum too. ## 1.9.2 — 2026-10-02 The offline copy made safe on bad wifi (from the audit): - **A slow page no longer mixes old and new files.** Session Buddies or the guitar demo taking more than 2.5 s to load (pub wifi) was treated as offline, so it got its own files new and the shared ones (the drum, the patterns, the sound helpers) old from the app's offline copy: the very mix the offline copy is built to prevent, and a page that showed Stop with no sound. Now a page counts as offline only if it actually came from the offline copy. It is no longer fetched twice either. - **The offline copy can't be lost to two refreshes at once.** Two quick reloads could start two refreshes that deleted each other's copy, leaving none for the pub. Now they take turns, and each deletes only older copies. - **Opening the app offline by an old link works.** The saved index.html was the host's redirect, which can't answer a page load. Now the app's page is found with or without "index.html" or a ?query on the end. - **No copy saved mid-deploy.** The copy used to refresh the moment the app started, often seconds after an update, when the site can still serve old and new files side by side. Now the app asks for it 30 seconds after a clean start, and a new version of the offline code keeps the complete copy it finds. ## 1.9.1 — 2026-10-02 - Your sliders are remembered again: volume, tuning, tone, back hand, room, drone level, busyness, humanise and fills every. Each one was saved at its starting value as the page set it up, just before your saved value was read back, so every visit started from the defaults. Found by the audit. - The drone on its own now keeps the phone's screen on, as the drum does. A screen that locked itself took the sound with it. - Keeping the screen on is now shared by all three pages (`TRAD.keepAwake` in js/wake.js). Coming back to the page takes the screen back and wakes the sound after a call or Siri, for the drone too. ## 1.9.0 — 2026-10-01 — Swing you can set by ear - The Swing slider now reads as a player says it: the first of a pair of quavers against the second, from 50:50 (straight) to 70:30. It used to show a percentage of the engine's own measure ("62%"). - Hornpipes now start at 64:36, a little more swing than the 60:40 they had. In Session Buddies 60:40 sounded "devoid of the swing a hornpipe normally has", and 2:1 "almost slightly too much". Barndances stay at 57:43. - Each tune type keeps the swing you set for it. Before, it went back to the tune's own whenever you changed tune. - For a type that swings (the hornpipe and the barndance), the slider shows in Basic too. For the others it stays in Advanced, so you can still swing a reel if you want to. ## 1.8.1 — 2026-10-01 - Session Players is now called Session Buddies, at `/buddies/`. The foot of the page links there. ## 1.8.0 — 2026-10-01 — Green and gold - A new colour scheme, Irish without overdoing it: the amber and goatskin browns give way to deep green for what you press and what is playing, gold (from the bodhrán's rim) for names, and dark grounds with a hint of green. In the bar display, the dum strokes are green and the taks gold. The guitar demo, Session Players and the release notes share it. The icon stays the bodhrán it always was. - Every pairing of text on its ground reads at 4.5 to 1 or better, the usual standard; a check keeps it so. ## 1.7.1 — 2026-09-30 - The foot of the page now switches between the app and Session Players: "Bodhrán · Session Players", the page you're on shown in bold. ## 1.7.0 — 2026-09-30 — A longer count-in - The count-in now starts at **2 bars** (it was 1), time to start the drum and then pick up an instrument and a pick. A new **4 bars** choice gives more; none and 1 bar are still there, under **Count-in** in the Feel panel. - The bar counter counts the lead-in: "count-in 1 of 2", "count-in 2 of 2", then "bar 1 of 32", so you can see when the drum is about to come in. - If you had chosen a count-in yourself before, the app keeps your choice. ## 1.6.6 — 2026-09-29 — Safari's other way to the speaker - In Safari on a Mac, the app's sound now reaches the speaker through an audio element, the way a song or video plays, instead of straight out. With the sound check in place, a silent Safari tab said it was making sound, so Safari was losing it on the way. In that stuck tab the sound test's direct beep (A) was silent and the same beep through an audio element (C) played, and brought A back; a plain audio file (B) had done the same the two times before. Chrome and the iPhone are unchanged. - Tested in Safari's own engine: the sound reaches the speaker this way, the app still lets go of the speaker after Stop, and Play takes it back. ## 1.6.5 — 2026-09-29 - A **Sound check** line under Play, while it plays, says whether the app itself is making sound and how loud ("the page is making sound (−18 dB)"), or that it is making none, or that its sound has broken, or that the audio has stopped running. If it says it is making sound and you hear nothing, the sound is being lost in Safari, not in the app. Twice a Safari tab went silent while the Mac was playing its stream, and until now that couldn't be told apart. ## 1.6.4 — 2026-09-29 - In Safari on a Mac, the wake-up that each Play sends is now a second of sound, far too quiet to hear, in place of a twentieth of a second of pure silence. A Safari tab went silent again with 1.6.3; the sound test's plain one-second audio file got it going, as it had the first time, and the old wake-up didn't. Whether the new one does is not yet known. - The sound test page (`/tests/sound.html`) has a new button, F, that plays just the wake-up, and says what to press, in what order, when the app has gone silent. ## 1.6.3 — 2026-09-29 - Stopped, with the drone off, the app now lets go of the speaker a few seconds after the last stroke, and takes it back on the next Play, so each Play starts Safari's sound afresh. Left running, a stopped tab kept its audio open, and the Mac from going to sleep on its own, for as long as it stayed open. (The half hour of Safari holding the speaker seen in the Mac's log that day turned out to be mostly an open YouTube tab, which holds it whenever a player is loaded.) It didn't cure the silent tab. ## 1.6.2 — 2026-09-28 - Fixed: in Safari, a tab left playing behind another tab in the same window stumbled. Safari slows a background tab's timers to about once a second, even while it plays, and the drum planned only a tenth of a second ahead. Hidden, it now plans five seconds ahead, straight away; back on screen, a tenth again. Stop still stops at once. - The bar display and counter now show the bar being heard, not the bar planned, so they don't run ahead of the music after coming back to the tab. ## 1.6.1 — 2026-09-28 - The fix for Mac Safari going silent after sleep now lives in one file, `js/wake.js`, shared with the guitar demo, so the two cannot drift apart. Nothing changes in how the app sounds. ## 1.6.0 — 2026-09-28 — Guitar backing demonstration - A separate page, `/guitar/`, plays The Kesh (setting 1 from thesession.org) with a synthesised guitar backing. It isn't part of the app. - Turn the guitar, the tune (a flute) and the bodhrán on and off; choose a lilting or a driving strum; set the tempo and how many times through. - The chord chart lights the bar being played, and each chord's shape is drawn, in drone voicings that keep D and G ringing on the top strings. ## 1.5.2 — 2026-09-28 - Release notes page at `/release-notes/`, linked from **What's new** in the About. - Offline, every page on the site now comes from its own saved copy. Before, any page other than the app itself came up as a broken copy of the app. ## 1.5.1 — 2026-09-28 - Waltzes now start at 64 bars (16-bar parts); every other tune type starts at 32. ## 1.5.0 — 2026-09-28 — Play it N times, then finish - New **Length** (16, 32, 48 or 64 bars) and **Play it** (until I stop, or 1 to 6 times) settings under the bar display. Each tune type remembers its own length. - On the last time through, the drum lands one final stroke on beat 1 of the tune's last bar and stops. - The counter follows the tune, for example "bar 13 of 32 · time 2 of 3". - Lowering the number part-way through ends at the end of the current time. ## 1.4.0 — 2026-09-28 — Basic and Advanced controls - A **Basic / Advanced** switch under the title. Basic is the default and shows the everyday controls: tempo, tune type, rhythm, bar display, count-in, volume and drone. - In Basic, each panel lists what it keeps back ("More in Advanced: …"), and tapping that line opens Advanced in place. - Hidden settings still work, and Basic flags any that have been changed from where they started. ## 1.3.3 — 2026-09-28 — Mac Safari silence fixed - After the Mac slept, a Safari tab could go silent while appearing to play, through any number of reloads. Pressing Play now wakes the sound. - Added a sound test page, `/tests/sound.html`, for tracking down silent playback. ## 1.3.2 — 2026-09-28 - The iPhone silent-switch setting no longer runs on the Mac. ## 1.3.1 — 2026-09-27 — B drone and small fixes - Added **B** to the drone roots. - Typing a tempo outside a tune type's range now shows the range instead of changing it silently. - Arrow keys move between tune types and between rhythms. - Count-in clicks are sent to GarageBand, on their own note (side stick, 37). - Changing tune mid-bar no longer resets your swing until the next bar. ## 1.3.0 — 2026-09-27 — Back hand - New **Back hand** control (off by default). Pressing raises the pitch and shortens the ring, following one arc across each phrase. ## 1.2.0 — 2026-09-27 — Finish - New **Finish** button (or the **F** key) plays to the end of the phrase and ends with one stroke on beat 1 of the last bar. Press it again to cancel. - Fixed: the count-in used to count as a bar of the tune, so every fill landed a bar early. ## 1.1.1 — 2026-09-27 — Fixes and more patterns - Fixed the slide's only fill, which played a whole bar squashed into two beats. - Added fills and busy bars for slides, barndances, hornpipes and slip jigs. - Stop now silences strokes that were already queued. - Changing tune waits for the next bar, and no longer plays the old tune's pattern under the new one. - The About text matches the current layout; the GarageBand panel on iPhone is one line. ## 1.1.0 — 2026-09-26 - Phone layout: the rhythm choice on the first screen, Play beside the tempo, and a pinned Play/Stop bar when scrolled down. ## Guitar demo The page at `/guitar/` had its own version number, shown next to its title. ### Guitar demo retired — 2026-10-03 - The demo is retired: Session Buddies does all it did, with any tune, and The Kesh opens there on a first visit. The old address says so and links to Session Buddies and the Bodhrán app. The demo's own code is gone; its guitar stays, as Session Buddies plays it, and so do the checks that try it. ### Guitar demo 1.12.0 — 2026-10-02 - The app's new bodhrán (1.10.0): no swoop, a skin that rings like a drumhead. ### Guitar demo 1.11.1 — 2026-10-02 - The phone's screen stays on while the demo plays (it could lock itself and stop the sound), using the app's shared helper. ### Guitar demo 1.11.0 — 2026-10-01 — A smoother guitar - The strings no longer start from a burst of random noise, the source of a metallic, "wire fence" edge, nor keep their top as they ring. Each now starts from a soft pick and loses its top as a real string does, set against a real steel-string G chord (Silcon, Wikimedia Commons; measured, not used): a third of a second after the strum its top (above 2 kHz against below 1 kHz) is -14.7 dB where the real chord's is -16.5 (the old strings: -9.6), and at 0.8 s -21.5, the same as the real chord's. At the strum it is 5 dB softer than before. The level is unchanged. ### Guitar demo 1.10.0 — 2026-10-01 - The green-and-gold colours of the app (1.8.0). ### Guitar demo 1.9.4 — 2026-09-29 - The same route to the speaker as the app (1.6.6): in Safari on a Mac, through an audio element. ### Guitar demo 1.9.3 — 2026-09-29 - The same **Sound check** line as the app (1.6.5), under Play. ### Guitar demo 1.9.2 — 2026-09-29 - The same Safari wake-up as the app (1.6.4): a second of sound too quiet to hear, in place of a twentieth of a second of silence. ### Guitar demo 1.9.1 — 2026-09-29 - Stopped, the demo now lets go of the speaker once the last notes have rung out, and takes it back on the next Play, the same as the app (1.6.3). Left running, it held the speaker, and kept the Mac awake, for as long as the tab stayed open. ### Guitar demo 1.9.0 — 2026-09-29 — DADGAD drones on D - In DADGAD, the open low D and the open top D now drone under every chord, the way DADGAD backing is known for: G, C and Em are played over the open low D (G/D 020000, Cadd9/D 032030, Em7/D 022020; D5 as before). The first shapes started G and C on their own roots, as in standard tuning, which is why the two tunings sounded alike. Measured across the A part, the low D now sits 5 to 11 dB under the whole guitar in every bar; before, it was 35 to 44 dB under in the G and C bars (standard: 35 to 56 dB under). The chord chart is unchanged. - The "Open strings ring through changes" switch is gone. It was heard in only two bars of the tune, and striking an open string again while it rang put two copies of the note on top of each other, which cancelled part of the sound (dips of up to 8 or 9 dB). The drone shapes do its job in every bar. "Open strings ring in sympathy" stays. ### Guitar demo 1.8.1 — 2026-09-28 - Ringing through made easy to hear: it was barely audible, because the left-out open string only faded (measured: 2.5 to 4.7 dB more of the low D over the C bar). Unmuted, an open string is still under the pick, so the down strums now sound it along with the new chord, a little more lightly: in DADGAD the open low D drones through the C in A-part bars 3 and 7, about 9 dB under the whole guitar. A fretted string is still muted at a change. ### Guitar demo 1.8.0 — 2026-09-28 - Open strings ring through chord changes, with a switch to compare (on to begin with; remembered). A string the next chord leaves out is only stopped if it was fretted; ringing open, nothing holds it, so it carries on under the new chord, its sympathetic hum with it. In DADGAD, as D goes to C in the A part, the open low D rings on under the C (measured: 7 dB down over the C's first beat, where before it was cut by 39 dB). An open string struck again at the same note now carries on into the new stroke instead of being cut off and restarted. ### Guitar demo 1.7.0 — 2026-09-28 - Open strings ring in sympathy, with a switch to compare (on to begin with; remembered). On a real guitar the open strings hum along with the notes they share, and that is much of DADGAD's sound; without it, the two tunings differed only in which notes were played. Each open string is fed by how many of the other sounding notes it is in tune with, so neither tuning is favoured, and DADGAD, with more strings open, all D, A and G, comes out ringing about 4 dB more than standard across the tune, most of all on its open-fifth D. Chords now hang on 3-4 dB longer after a strum. ### Guitar demo 1.6.0 — 2026-09-28 - Bass runs taken off the page for now: no runs, no switch, no marks in the chart. The run data and the thumb-plucked string behind them are kept, with their checks, so they can come back. ### Guitar demo 1.5.0 — 2026-09-28 - Bass runs rebuilt as a thumb-plucked low string. The earlier run notes started from a burst of random noise, which gave them jagged overtones that jumped about from one to the next, part of why they sounded synthesised. Now each starts from the bend a thumb puts in the string, heard as its slope at the bridge, so its overtones step down in order; the string vibrates two ways at once, a shade apart, for a natural shimmer and a long tail; its pitch settles as a plucked string's does; and the guitar body's own resonances ring with it. Every run note is within a tenth of a cent of true pitch, and the runs sit a few dB above the strums. ### Guitar demo 1.4.2 — 2026-09-28 - Bass runs heavier and darker. They still read bright and a bit weak for a bass line. The string model itself was the cause: on a low note it takes almost nothing off the top as it rings (measured: the raw A string had more energy above 800 Hz than below 400). Run notes now come from a string with a damping filter inside it, so each trip round the string takes more of the top off, as a real one does, with its tuning worked out exactly. The attack is rounder, more thumb than pick tip, and the runs sit 2 to 5 dB above the strums instead of level with them. ### Guitar demo 1.4.1 — 2026-09-28 - The bass runs sounded like a piano. Picked alone, the soft strum voice kept its overtones as strong half a second in as at the pick (measured: no change at all), which is how a piano behaves; a guitar string starts bright and settles warm. The run notes now have a voice of their own: a firm, bright pick near the bridge that darkens as the note rings, a knock from the guitar's top, more low end, and more level (from 5 dB under the strums around them to about level). ### Guitar demo 1.4.0 — 2026-09-28 - Bass runs between chords, with a switch to turn them off (on to begin with; remembered). On the last beat before a change, three single bass notes walk up into the new chord in place of that beat's strum: G A B into C, D E F♯ into G, A B C♯ into D. They lead into bars 2 and 5 of each part, are marked "run" in the chord chart, and the Now panel names each one as it plays. Each sits where the tuning plays it: in DADGAD the walk into G starts on the open low D, in standard it climbs the D string to the open G. ### Guitar demo 1.3.3 — 2026-09-28 - Fixed: in Safari, the demo stumbled when left playing behind another tab in the same window, the same as the app. Hidden, it now hands the audio notes five seconds ahead, and Stop drops everything queued, guitar and flute as well as the drum. ### Guitar demo 1.3.2 — 2026-09-28 - Fixed: in Safari on a Mac, after the Mac slept, the demo could go silent while looking as if it played — the problem the app had in 1.3.3. The demo now wakes the sound the same way, from the same shared code. It already asked the audio to resume on each Play, and stayed silent, so it is the moment of silence played like a video that does the waking. ### Guitar demo 1.3.1 — 2026-09-28 - The bodhrán was buried under the bassier guitar: 4 dB under it overall, and its stick click, the part the ear picks a drum out by, 34 dB under the guitar in its band. Now it sits level with the guitar, with its click lifted (it came up to 20 dB under, plainly heard for a sound that short). The count-in clicks stay as loud as before. The app's own drum is unchanged. ### Guitar demo 1.3.0 — 2026-09-28 - DADGAD tuning (D A D G A D), now the starting tuning, with a switch back to standard to compare. The DADGAD shapes leave strings open: the top D rings through every chord and the open G through three. G and C carry an added ninth (Gadd9, Cadd9), D is an open fifth (D5), Em is Em7. - The shape diagrams follow the tuning, with each string's note under it and the strings that ring through highlighted. The switch takes effect at the next bar, so you can compare while it plays. ### Guitar demo 1.2.0 — 2026-09-28 - A volume slider for each sound — guitar, flute and bodhrán — beside its on/off tick. 100% is the measured balance with the guitar leading; each goes up to 200%. Changes are heard straight away, and the page remembers them. ### Guitar demo 1.1.0 — 2026-09-28 - A bigger, bassier guitar, more like a Martin dreadnought: a deeper body resonance and fuller low end, the mids scooped a little, a softer pick on the bass strings, and bass notes that ring on. Measured, the bass below 150 Hz came up by 9 dB against the rest; the guitar used to be loudest between 1.5 and 5 kHz. - The demo's own version number, next to its title and at the foot. ### Guitar demo 1.0.0 — 2026-09-28 - The first version: The Kesh with a guitar backing (released with app 1.6.0). ## Session Buddies The page at `/buddies/` has its own version number, shown next to its title. It was called Session Players, at `/players/`, until 1.8.0; the entries before that keep the old name. ### Session Buddies 1.27.2 — 2026-10-25 - **The mandolin plays on a first visit**, with the guitar, flute, concertina and bodhrán, so the first Play is the whole band (asked for; it was off to begin with since it came in 1.25.0). Anyone who has unticked it keeps it unticked. Its notes are built as sound first starts, as before: about a tenth of a second on a Mac. ### Session Buddies 1.27.1 — 2026-10-25 - **sessionbuddies.ceardlann.app opens Session Buddies too**, at the plain address, as the other two do (1.27.0). ### Session Buddies 1.27.0 — 2026-10-25 — The address stays plain - **Session Buddies is the site itself on its own addresses.** sessionbuddies.shedworks.app and sessionbuddies.ceardlann.dev show it at `/`, the address left as typed; 1.26.x forwarded them to `/buddies/`. A `/buddies/` link there (a bookmark from 1.26.x) comes to `/`, and your tunes and choices are the same at either, as it is the same site. The Bodhrán's own address is unchanged, with Session Buddies at `/buddies/`. - The page names every file it uses from the site's root (`/buddies/abc.js`, `/css/app.css`), not from its own folder, so it works at either address. A check starts it up away from `/buddies/` to keep it so. - A browser that opened one of these addresses while it still showed the Bodhrán (before 1.26.0) kept the Bodhrán's offline copy, which would answer a slow page load there with the Bodhrán. On these addresses only, the offline helper is now replaced by one that deletes that copy and removes itself. The Bodhrán's own offline copy is untouched. - `tools/worker-dev.mjs` runs the site on the Mac as Cloudflare serves it on these addresses, to check the Worker before it goes live; the checks page can now run a whole group (`tests/#Session Buddies`). ### Session Buddies 1.26.1 — 2026-10-25 - **sessionbuddies.ceardlann.dev opens Session Buddies too**, just as sessionbuddies.shedworks.app does (1.26.0), with its Bodhrán link going to the Bodhrán's own address. ### Session Buddies 1.26.0 — 2026-10-25 — Its own address - **sessionbuddies.shedworks.app opens Session Buddies.** The bare domain opened the Bodhrán, as the site's root is the Bodhrán's page; a small Worker (`worker/index.js`, run only for `/`) now forwards it to `/buddies/`, keeping any `?query`. The Bodhrán's own address, bodhran.russellmagnuson.workers.dev, opens the Bodhrán as before. - On the new address the Bodhrán link at the foot goes to the Bodhrán's own address, rather than back round to Session Buddies. - Your tunes and choices are kept per address by the browser, so the new address starts as a first visit; a tune saved to a file opens there. - The live site no longer publishes git's own folder (`.git`), which the plain-folder deploy had been serving: nothing private was in it, as the code is public on GitHub, but it was never meant to be there. ### Session Buddies 1.25.2 — 2026-10-23 - **The Setting box fits a phone.** It took the width of its longest choice, so a tune with a long setting name (The Kesh's setting 27, "Fernando Durbán Galnares · has chords"; Whiskey Before Breakfast too) ran it out past the tune's card and made the whole page scroll sideways on an iPhone. It now shrinks to the card, and the page fits the phone. ### Session Buddies 1.25.1 — 2026-10-22 - **A mandolin you can hear on a phone.** On an iPhone the mandolin seemed not to work: it played (heard alone, with the sound check on), but its warm tone, nearly all between 300 and 1000 Hz, was lost on a phone's small speaker, which passes little below about 700 Hz, under the flute, concertina and guitar. Through a phone speaker's response it was 4.7 dB under the flute while the concertina was 1 dB over it. It now has a little presence, a lift near 2.2 kHz and a crisper pick, as a real mandolin's attack carries in a session: 1.9 dB under the flute on a phone, about level with it on full-range speakers, and its top against its bottom -17.5 dB, still far from the first version's twang (+5.5). Chosen by ear on the phone, from clips of the full band. ### Session Buddies 1.25.0 — 2026-10-19 — A mandolin - **A mandolin** in What you hear (asked for by a mandolin player): a fourth voice for the tune, off to begin with, playing with or instead of the flute and concertina and in step with them (the concertina's lilt when it plays, else the flute's), as loud as the concertina, 2 dB under the flute. - **Played as a mandolin player plays:** picked down on the beat and up between (a jig's D-U-D in each beat, a reel's down-up), up-strokes a touch lighter; a picked triplet in place of a roll or a cran (written or the flute's own); tremolo on a waltz's long notes and its last. - **Its sound, set against the player's own F-style mandolin** (a recording of The Kesh, setting 3, and its open strings), and chosen by ear over several rounds of clips. Synthesised, as the guitar is: each note a pair of strings a cent apart, starting from the bend a pick leaves, so the D and A strings are nearly pure and the E brighter; a quick drop of about 10 dB in the first quarter second, then a long ring; a faint pick scratch and a pitch a few cents sharp at the pick; a small body strongest around 400 Hz. And a player's touch: no two picks alike, each a shade off in time, strength and pitch, a note stopping when its own string is picked again and an open string ringing on under a run. The first version, from the guitar's strum, was "too twangy" (5.5 dB more above 2 kHz than below 1 kHz across a tune, against the real mandolin's -25; now about -26), then "like a piano" (no quick drop), then "too clean a strike" in runs. ### Session Buddies 1.24.0 — 2026-10-17 — The flute ornaments as a player would - **Ornaments: Player's own**, beside As written and Off (asked for by a flute player). The flute keeps whatever the setting writes and adds ornaments where an Irish flute player would, so a setting that writes none (most of them) is no longer played plain: - **rolls** on long notes on the beat: a long roll on a dotted crotchet (a jig's), a short roll on a crotchet (a reel's); - **crans** on long low Ds, and now and then Es: a flute cannot roll its lowest note, so the D is cut by G, then F#, then E, one on each quaver (three in a crotchet); - **cuts** between repeated notes ("e**dd**"), and with Plenty, now and then on a bar's first note. **A few** or **Plenty** sets how many. The choices differ each time through, so it never plays a part the same way twice running, but a bar is ornamented the same whenever it is worked out. Too short to fit at the tempo, an ornament is left out, as before. The concertina keeps to the plain notes. Kept with your settings; As written stays the start. ### Session Buddies 1.23.5 — 2026-10-06 - **A fast reel's flute runs legato, not clipped.** At 240 the flute sounded "a bit clipped": about half its notes were tongued, each with a swell, a release and a gap of fixed length, so at 240 it spent 18% of its time in the gaps between notes, against 12% at 120. Chosen by ear from two versions: at speed the tongue is lighter (its swell, release and lead in step with the notes) and the gap before a tongued note smaller; and above a reel of about 205 only beats 1 and 3 are tongued, the rest slurred, as flute players take a fast reel (a repeated note still takes the tongue). At 240 it now spends 8% of its time in the gaps. Nothing changes below a reel of about 195 or a jig of 130. ### Session Buddies 1.23.4 — 2026-10-06 - **Fast session tempos.** Asked for by a player: "still pretty slow at 160". The tempo is counted as the page shows it (per crotchet for a reel, four to the bar), so a reel's 160 was only 80 counted two to the bar, as players count one; a fast session plays 104–120 that way, 208–240 here. New tops, with a little headroom over a fast session: reels 240 (160), jigs 145 (130), hornpipes 140 (120), slides 170 (160); polkas, slip jigs and waltzes already reached it. At a reel's 240 the flute still plays its written rolls: the note between a roll's cut and tap may now be as short as 35 ms (50 before), which a short roll at 240 needs (45 ms); below that a roll is still played as the plain note. And the bodhrán damps at speed, as a player's hand does: no stroke rings past three quavers. At 240 a full dum used to ring into the next tak, which rose only 3 dB over it (7 dB now); nothing changes at the tempos the page had before (a jig to 130, a reel to about 195), only the new top speeds and the fastest slides. The Bodhrán app's reels go to 240 too, with the same damping (1.10.3). ### Session Buddies 1.23.3 — 2026-10-04 - **A first visit opens with The Kesh, setting 3** (ceolachan's, with its rolls and turns), in place of setting 1. It is kept in the page, so it is ready with no search, and says "Setting 3" before the tune's other settings arrive from the Session. A tune you have on the page is kept. ### Session Buddies 1.23.2 — 2026-10-04 - **The guitar starts in standard tuning**, on a first visit and after Reset settings (DADGAD until now). A tuning you have chosen is kept. ### Session Buddies 1.23.1 — 2026-10-04 - **The concertina is on to begin with**, playing the tune with the flute as at a session. It was off on a first visit; anyone who has ticked or unticked it keeps their choice, and Reset settings now turns it on. Its recordings start loading at the first tap on the page. ### Session Buddies 1.23.0 — 2026-10-03 — Paste ABC, in place of Open a PDF - **Paste ABC** (where Open a PDF was) opens a box to paste a tune in ABC into, from thesession.org's ABC view, a tune book, anywhere. **Use this tune** builds it as if it came from the Session: its title, rhythm, meter, note length, key, notes and any chords it has are read from its header and body (the type from R:, or else from the meter). Several tunes pasted at once are offered to choose from; a tune without X: or T: still reads. It can be favourited or saved like any other and comes back after a reload, without asking the Session for other settings. - **Open a PDF is gone**, at the user's request: pasting is simpler and always readable, where a PDF's notes usually could not be read. pdf.js is no longer fetched. A tune opened from a PDF under 1.22.0 still opens. ### Session Buddies 1.22.0 — 2026-10-03 — Open a PDF - **Open a PDF** (next to Open a saved tune) plays a tune from a PDF as if it came from the Session: the backing, chords, chart and everything else built for it. What can be read depends on what the PDF holds: - the tune written in **ABC** (printed from thesession.org's ABC, or a tune book typed in ABC): its title, rhythm, meter, note length, key, notes and any chords it has are read. A PDF with several tunes offers them to choose from. An `.abc` text file opens the same way; - the tune drawn as **notes on staves** (from notation software, or a printed page): a browser cannot reliably read notes drawn as shapes, but the title is nearly always text, so the page looks it up on the Session; - a **scan or photo**: there is no text in it, and the page says so. The PDF is read in the browser, with Mozilla's pdf.js (fetched from cdnjs the first time a PDF is opened), and goes nowhere. A tune from your file can be favourited or saved like any other, and comes back after a reload; it does not ask the Session for other settings. - **Each note lets go once it has rung out** (a drum stroke, a flute or concertina note, a guitar string and its sympathetic ring): each used to end with a little chain of sound left plugged into its instrument. Found while looking into Safari's memory growing over an hour of play (about 5–6 MB a minute, measured in the Safari engine); in a bare test page this kind of change kept Safari's memory down, but on this page the growth could not yet be shown to stop, so that is still being looked into. - The checks page can run just some checks: `tests/#part of a name`, more than one separated by `|`. ### Session Buddies 1.21.2 — 2026-10-03 - **A new icon**, chosen from three: the session's instruments in silhouette (a flute, a bodhrán and a guitar) on the bodhrán icon's wooden face and gold ring, in place of 1.21.0's guitar soundhole. It is the icon at the top of the page and on a phone's home screen. - A check that sometimes failed by chance now counts the bodhrán's fills over 32 phrases, not 8 (where 1 run in 14 failed with nothing wrong). ### Session Buddies 1.21.1 — 2026-10-03 - **No more slowing down like a tape on a Mac.** Playing Sí Bheag Sí Mhór in Safari, after a while the whole sound slowed and dropped in pitch while the chords on the page kept time, until Stop. In Mac Safari the sound went out through a hidden audio player (added in app 1.6.6, when a Safari tab went silent after sleep); with four instruments and the room playing, Safari's audio can falter for a moment, and that player made up the gap by playing slower, and stayed behind. Session Buddies now sends its sound straight to the speaker, as every other browser does. Each press of Play still makes the short near-silent sound that woke a stuck tab before. The Bodhrán app, lighter and not affected, keeps the hidden player. ### Session Buddies 1.21.0 — 2026-10-03 — A tidier top, and choices that fold away - **The top of the page is laid out as the app's:** its own icon beside the name and version, a one-line tagline under them, and an About button on the right. The icon is drawn in the bodhrán icon's style (the same dark ground, gold ring and wooden face) with a guitar's soundhole and strings; it is also the icon a phone shows for the page on its home screen. The paragraph of explanation that sat at the top is in About now, with a few steps for getting going. - **What you hear folds away.** Once you are happy with the choices, Hide (at the top of the panel) or Done (at its foot) folds them into a few lines saying how each is set: who is playing (and their level, if not 100%), the melody, the guitar's strum, tuning and ringing strings, the bodhrán's style, busyness and back hand, and the backing's feel. Tap the summary or Change to open them again. Open or folded is kept, through a reload too; it starts open, and Reset settings opens it. Folded, the page on a phone is about a third shorter. ### Session Buddies 1.20.0 — 2026-10-03 — Back hand, and a waltz bass that walks - **The bodhrán's back hand**, as in the app: a Back hand slider in the Bodhrán section (off, light, moderate, a lot; off to begin with, kept). The other hand presses the skin from inside, the pitch rising (up to a fourth) and the ring shortening, in one slow arc over each four bars of the tune: open at the top, pressed hardest about 70% through, let go across the fourth bar, so a fill falls in pitch into the next phrase. In Full each arc goes a little deeper or shallower, as a hand never quite repeats; in Simple it is the same every time; not in Pulse, and not on the closing stroke. - **A waltz's bass walks between the root and the fifth.** The oom of the waltz's oom-pa-pa was always the shape's lowest string; now it is the chord's root on one bar and its fifth on the next, from the first bar of each time through, each on the lowest string of the shape that has it. ### Session Buddies 1.19.2 — 2026-10-03 - The setting you were on could still say "[object Object]": chosen from the faulty menu while 1.18.3 to 1.19.0 were live, it had been saved that way (and so might a favourite or a tune played lately). Every tune is now tidied as it opens, and saved tidy from then on. ### Session Buddies 1.19.1 — 2026-10-03 - The Setting menu, filled in from thesession.org after a reload (1.18.3), named each setting's poster "[object Object]": the Session's answer went in untidied. Now it names them, as a search does, and so does the credit line for a setting chosen from it. ### Session Buddies 1.19.0 — 2026-10-03 — Ornaments on the flute - **The flute plays the rolls and cuts a setting writes.** The tune reader used to read past them (about one popular setting in five writes rolls, one in twenty grace notes) and play the plain note. Now, under one breath and in the tune's lilt: - a **long roll** (~ on a dotted crotchet, mostly jigs): the note, a cut (a flick to two steps above) on its second quaver and a tap (a softer dip to the step below) on its third, the note again after each; - a **short roll** (~ on a crotchet, mostly reels): the cut on its first quaver and the tap on its second; - a **grace note** ({g}, the way a cut is written): a 26 ms flick on the note's time, taking its time from the start of the note. Every note still starts where it did. A roll too short to fit at a fast tempo is played plain. - **Ornaments: As written or Off**, under Melody, kept with your settings; the line under it says what the setting writes ("This setting writes 4 rolls"). The concertina keeps to the plain notes, as two players seldom ornament alike. ### Session Buddies 1.18.4 — 2026-10-03 - The **Sound check** line under Play is hidden. It was there to find out why Safari once went silent, not for every day. It still measures, and `?soundcheck` at the end of the page's address shows it again. ### Session Buddies 1.18.3 — 2026-10-03 - **My tunes stays as you left it.** It opened at every load if you had any tunes; now it is open or closed as you last left it (closed to begin with), and Reset settings closes it. - **The Setting menu after a reload.** A tune brought back from this browser's storage (the one left on the page, one of your tunes, or The Kesh on a first visit) held only its own setting, so the menu could not switch until you searched for the tune again. Now its other settings are fetched from thesession.org once it has opened and added to the menu; the setting on the page, with your chord changes, stays as it is. Offline the menu stays as it was. A tune opened from a saved file keeps to the file. ### Session Buddies 1.18.2 — 2026-10-03 — Your settings kept, and a clean reset - **Every choice comes back after a reload.** Which instruments are ticked went back to guitar, flute and bodhrán (the concertina unticked) at every reload; now they are kept like the rest. Ticked from last time, the concertina's recordings start loading at your first tap on the page. (Tested by setting every control away from its start and reloading: nothing else was lost.) - **Another setting of the same tune keeps your tempo.** It went back to the type's starting tempo (from the audit, B39). - **Reset settings**, at the end of What you hear: every choice back to how it starts, from the tempo, "Play it" and count-in to the instruments, their volumes, melody, strum, backing feel, bodhrán, swing, tuning and sympathy. The tune on the page, your tunes and your chord changes are kept, and Undo brings it all back (until the next reload). - A reload always runs the newest code: the site asks the browser to check every Session Buddies file each time, as it did before. ### Session Buddies 1.18.1 — 2026-10-03 - **The bodhrán no longer leans toward a snare drum.** It went through a 9 dB lift around 2.5 kHz, from the guitar demo, added when the drum was nearly all low thump and could hardly be picked out against the guitar. On the new drum (1.15.0) the lift only tipped it toward a snare: five times the share of its sound above 1.5 kHz, for 0.4 dB more loudness, and more of a snare than the app, which has none. Now it has none either; its level is raised 0.5 dB to keep its place against the guitar, and its stick still sits 10 dB under the guitar in its own band, easily heard (the old drum's sat 34 dB under). ### Session Buddies 1.18.0 — 2026-10-03 — Choose how the bodhrán plays - **Full, Simple or Pulse**, as in the app, under Backing feel while the Bodhrán is ticked. It always played Simple, one plain bar for the tune type. The choice is kept. - **Full** (where it starts) phrases like a player, as the app's Full does: the pattern changes from bar to bar, weighted by **Busyness** (sparse, through steady, to busy), with a player's small scatter in timing and weight. Session Buddies knows where the tune's phrases fall, which the app cannot, so a fill comes most often at the end of each phrase of the tune and sometimes half way through it; a fill's triplets stay even. - **Simple** is the one plain bar it played before; **Pulse** one low stroke per beat, weighted where the dance falls. ### Session Buddies 1.17.0 — 2026-10-03 — A flute player, not a keyboard The flute sounded "a bit like it's coming from a keyboard". Three reasons, each changed, with every note still starting exactly when it did (the timing, the lilt and playing together with the concertina are untouched): - **Slurred, not every note tongued.** Every note was tongued and let go at 82% of its length: in a reel, about 50 ms of silence between every two notes, as a keyboard player lifts each key. Now, as an Irish flute player mostly does, it tongues the note on each beat (and a repeated note, or one after a rest) and slurs the rest into it under one breath: a jig's DUM-da-da, a reel's pairs. A slurred change keeps the breath going (the level dips 3–5 dB as the fingers change the note) and the new note is heard on its time; a tongued note stops the air for a moment. - **A wooden flute's tone.** It was nearly a pure tone, the same on every note. Now the low octave has a reedy edge (the second harmonic about 7 dB under the note at low D) and the second octave is near pure, as on a wooden flute; and the breath is part of the sound, a fluff of air around the note and a little hiss, under every note (about 30 dB under it, more in the low octave), not only a puff at the start. - **A note that lives.** A tongued note scoops up into pitch from just under, its overtones blooming in over a few hundredths of a second; the breath wanders a little in level; a long note swells and eases. The pitch stays put, so it stays in tune with the concertina; the light, late vibrato is as before. - Trimmed so it plays as loud as before in the mix (measured on The Kesh). The guitar demo's own flute is unchanged. ### Session Buddies 1.16.0 — 2026-10-03 — Waltzes - **Waltzes can be played.** Search for one as for any tune; it counts three crotchets to the bar, starting at 116 (60–180). - **The guitar backs it oom-pa-pa** (Lilt, where it starts): the bass note alone on the first beat and the chord on the second and third, as a session guitarist backs a waltz, the chord changing at most on the third beat. Driving plays the whole chord on every beat with an up-strum after the second and third, fuller, for the dancers. The bass note stands 1–4 dB over the chord after it, a waltz's lean on 1. - The flute and concertina lean on the first beat and lilt their quavers a little (53:47 on the flute, 54:46 on the concertina); the bodhrán plays the app's plain waltz, and the count-in counts three. ### Session Buddies 1.15.0 — 2026-10-02 — A less electronic drum; the concertina loads safely - **The app's new bodhrán** (1.10.0): no swoop, a skin that rings like a drumhead. Listen for woodier, less zip. - **One lost recording no longer loses the concertina.** Its 34 recordings loaded as one bundle: one lost on patchy wifi lost them all, and the old synthesised "keyboard" concertina played for the rest of the visit, with nothing said. Now each loads on its own and is tried a second time; what arrives is kept; a note whose recording is missing is borrowed from a neighbour (as unrecorded notes already were) or, if none is near, played by the stand-in; and the missing ones are tried again when you next press Play. A line under the mixer says when the stand-in is playing. - **The stand-in is no longer 12 dB too loud.** While the recordings load on a slow first visit, the synthesised concertina stands in. It played at its own old level, 12 dB over the recordings (the concertina was turned up to suit them), so the first bars came in loud and buzzy over everything, then dropped and changed sound. It now plays at the recordings' level. ### Session Buddies 1.14.0 — 2026-10-02 — Backing feel - **Backing feel**, under the strums: Straight, A little, or With the tune (where it starts). Since 1.6.0 the flute and concertina lilted over a guitar and bodhrán playing dead-even quavers, so their off-beats did not meet: in a reel at 100 the melody's landed 30–42 ms after the up-strum and the tak, in a jig 12–16 ms (the audit; the jitter you heard in 1.7.2 was 27 ms). With the tune, the guitar and bodhrán ride the melody's own lilt (the concertina's when it is ticked, else the flute's, and still so when you untick both to play the tune yourself). A little goes half way, a touch steadier than the tune; Straight is as before. The beats themselves stay put. In a hornpipe the backing already swung with the Swing control; with the tune it now also takes the concertina's slightly harder swing. The choice is kept. Try them on the same tune and keep what sounds right. - **Even triplets in every tune.** The lilt bent triplets in reels and jigs: The Silver Spear's "(3AAA" came out 0.73, 0.67 and 0.60 of a quaver, the last note rushed. Now they play even, as players keep them, as hornpipes already did. Ordinary quavers keep their lilt. ### Session Buddies 1.13.0 — 2026-10-02 — Finish, and your turn - **Finish** (the button under Play, or F). While a tune plays, one press plays on to the end of this time through and closes the tune there, with the closing strokes and the last note held. If that time's last bar is already on its way, it goes round once more. Press again to carry on. With "Play it" on "until I stop", it is how to end a tune properly instead of cutting it off. - **Lowering "Play it" mid-tune now ends it properly.** Set to "once through" during the second time, the music stopped dead with no closing chord and the page stayed "playing", showing Stop, until you pressed it (audit B5). Now it ends at the end of the time through it is in, like Finish. - **Your turn.** A new Melody choice: Every time (as before); Taking turns (they play the tune once, you the next time, and so on); You play B (they play the A part, you the B part and any others); You play A (the other way round). The guitar and bodhrán carry on throughout. The lead-in at the end of their bar is still played, so they bring you in. On your turn the melody is silent, or plays along quietly (about 10 dB down) as a guide: you choose. Now shows "your turn" when it is. Both choices are kept. ### Session Buddies 1.12.3 — 2026-10-02 Reading the Session's tunes right (from the audit; each fix tried on all 1,249 settings of 56 popular tunes before and after): - **No more lost parts.** A second ending closed by a plain bar line before the next part's `|:` marked that whole part "ending 2", so it was never played. Off To California #17, The Swallowtail #23, The Lark in the Morning #21 and The Musical Priest #19 played only their A part; nine settings in all get their missing bars back. - **Only real chords count as chords.** Quoted text was taken as a chord if it started with A–G, so "Ending" became an E chord and "Chorus" a C. Now only a whole chord name counts ("Em7", "D/F#", German "D/H"), not a word or a part label ("A'"). And a setting's own chords are used only when they cover the tune (a chord in at least a quarter of its bars, and in each part of four bars or more); otherwise the chords are chosen from the melody. The Star of Munster #19 was strummed on E major throughout, and The Silver Spear #9 on D for all 32 bars, from one stray "D". Bars before a setting's first chord are now chosen from the melody too. - **The last time through ends on the tune's own last note.** Many settings write a lead-in back to the top at the end of the last bar, and on the last time it became the final note, held for a bar over the home chord: The Silver Spear ended on a G over a D chord. Now that written lead-in is left off: a quaver or two at the very end in the pickup's place, never a held note, and not if the tune ends better with it. Over the popular settings, the endings landing on the home chord go from 32 of 100 to 85, and none is worse. - **Between times, a bar is played as written.** Its written lead-in was cut and the pickup added on top, so The Silver Spear's "B2 AG" came out "B2 A A". Now the pickup replaces it only when it is the same notes. Your chord changes kept: - **A chord you change is kept, played or not.** A tune went into "Played lately" only when you pressed Play, so chords changed and then a search were lost. Now changing a chord puts it there. - **"Back to the chosen chords" can be undone.** Afterwards the button reads "Undo: put my chord changes back", until you change a chord or the tune. ### Session Buddies 1.12.2 — 2026-10-02 Your work kept safe (found by the audit): - **Searching a tune you have opens your copy.** Before, it was fetched fresh and stored over your copy in My tunes, so a favourite's chord changes were lost. Now a match you have is marked "★ in your favourites" (or "in played lately"), and opening it brings back your setting, your chord changes and your tempo. "Back to the chosen chords" still starts afresh. The same goes for choosing another setting you have a copy of. - **The setting number sticks.** A tune reopened on setting 3 (by a reload, from My tunes or a file) was stored as setting 1, and after another reload said "Setting 1"; the file name and credit followed it. - **Opening one of your tunes keeps your page settings.** It brought back the guitar tuning, strum, count-in and "Play it" from when it was starred, so an old favourite switched DADGAD back on without a word. Now only what belongs to the tune comes back: its chords and tempo. A saved file still comes back exactly as saved. ### Session Buddies 1.12.1 — 2026-10-02 - The phone's screen stays on while a tune plays. Nothing held it before, so with the phone put down to play along, Auto-Lock could dark the screen and stop the backing. Coming back to the page takes the screen back and wakes the sound after a call or Siri. (The app's shared helper, js/wake.js.) ### Session Buddies 1.12.0 — 2026-10-01 - **My tunes**, in Find a tune, so the tunes you play are a tap away instead of a search: - **Favourites:** ☆ Favourite by a tune's name keeps it there, listed by name; tap again (or ✕ in the list) to take it out. - **Played lately:** each tune you press Play on goes to the top, the last twelve kept, with when ("today", "yesterday", "3 days ago"). - A tap opens one with no search and no network: the setting you had, with the chords you changed. A chord you change is kept in your copy too. The list folds away once you pick, and opens by itself when you come back to the page. - They are kept in this browser. Safari can clear a site's storage if it goes unvisited for a while, so **Save my tunes to a file** writes them out, and **Open a saved tune** brings them back. ### Session Buddies 1.11.0 — 2026-10-01 - A hornpipe has a Swing control (under the strums): from 50:50, straight, to 70:30, starting at 64:36. 1.10.1's 2:1 was "almost slightly too much". The guitar, bodhrán and tune all follow it, the concertina a shade harder as it leans in every tune; triplets and notes written dotted still play as written. It is kept for next time. The Bodhrán app's Swing slider works the same way (app 1.9.0). ### Session Buddies 1.10.1 — 2026-10-01 - Hornpipes swing properly. 1.10.0 swung them 60:40, as the app's bodhrán does, and The Boys of Bluehill sounded devoid of the swing a hornpipe normally has. The guitar, drum and tune now swing 2:1, the triplet feel. - A hornpipe's triplets stay even, as players keep them. Swung, the three notes of Bluehill's "(3Bcd" went 0.8, 0.6 and 0.6 of a quaver; and the swung quaver now falls just where a triplet's third note does. Any beat a setting writes other than in plain quavers (a triplet, a dotted pair, semiquavers) is played as written, so a setting written dotted (`B>A`) is not dotted twice. ### Session Buddies 1.10.0 — 2026-10-01 - Hornpipes, polkas, slides and slip jigs can now be played, as well as jigs and reels. Each has its own meter and tempo range, count-in, closing strokes, two strums (Lilt and Driving) and the app's plain bodhrán pattern for it: - **Hornpipe** (4/4, from 80 bpm): swung long-short, about 60:40, in the guitar and drum as the app swings it, and in the tune's straight quavers too. Many settings write a hornpipe dotted already (`A>B`); those notes are played as written, not dotted twice. The last bar closes on three strokes, as a hornpipe ends. - **Polka** (2/4, from 120 bpm): oom-pa strums, the Driving one pushing the ups between the beats; a little lilt, dotted pairs as written. - **Slide** (12/8, from 115 bpm): four beats a bar, leaning on 1 and 3, and a lilt a touch stronger than a jig's. The chords follow a slide's phrase: four of its long bars, as each holds two of a jig's. - **Slip jig** (9/8, from 105 bpm): three beats a bar with a jig's lilt. A bar's second chord comes in on the third beat (half way was mid-beat). - Tried on a real tune of each: The Boys of Bluehill, The Britches Full of Stitches, The Road to Lisdoonvarna and The Butterfly. The chords chosen for the slide match its setter's own on 11 of 16 half bars. Waltzes, barndances, mazurkas and the rest are still listed but not yet playable. ### Session Buddies 1.9.0 — 2026-10-01 - A first visit opens with a tune ready to play. Someone pressed Play before finding a tune and nothing played. Now The Kesh (the Session's setting 1, the tune the guitar demo plays) is on the page from the start, with a note saying it is there to start you off and that any other jig or reel can be found above. It is kept in the page, so it needs no search or connection. A tune left on the page last time still comes back instead. ### Session Buddies 1.8.0 — 2026-10-01 - Session Players is now **Session Buddies**, at `/buddies/` (the page's files, `buddies.js` and `buddies.css`, renamed with it). The old address says so, links to the new one and goes on there by itself after three seconds, so bookmarks still work. Your last tune, volumes, tuning and other settings carry over, and files saved before the rename open as before. - The description at the top now mentions the concertina: the flute plays the melody, and the concertina can join it or play it alone. ### Session Players 1.7.4 — 2026-10-01 - The concertina's long notes are steadier. A note held longer than its recording is looped through its steady part. The loop began in a small dip just after the attack, and its join was a rough match, so held notes wavered with every pass, twice a second. Now the loop starts once the note has settled, and the join is matched more closely and blended. The level is evened out a little more closely too, keeping the reed's life. The twice-a-second waver is about a third to a half smaller in level on most notes, and on F♯4 it dropped from 18 cents to under 2. - The F♯4 recording wobbles on its own, ±11 cents five or six times a second, as much as the flute's old vibrato. F♯ is in every D and G tune. It and three milder ones (A♯3, A♯4, G♯5) are now played from a steady recorded note a semitone away, retuned. `samples.json` records how much each recording wavers. ### Session Players 1.7.3 — 2026-10-01 - The concertina no longer sounds warbly beside the flute. The concertina itself holds steady, to a cent or two. The flute was the cause: every note over 0.4 s wavered ±9 cents, five times a second, from a third of a second in. In unison against a steady reed, that beat. With the concertina ticked, the flute now plays with no vibrato. Alone it has a light one (±4 cents), on notes of 0.6 s or more, coming in after a quarter of a second, as an Irish flute player would. ### Session Players 1.7.2 — 2026-10-01 - The flute and concertina together no longer sound jittery. The flute's notes swell in over 30 ms, so each was heard 27 ms after its time, while the recorded concertina's are heard right on it: a flam on every note. The flute's swell now starts early, and each note of both is heard within a few milliseconds of its time and of the other (the flute 5-6 ms, the concertina -1 to 5). This also puts the flute on the beat with the guitar and drum, where it had always sat a touch behind. ### Session Players 1.7.1 — 2026-10-01 - No more momentary clash between the flute and the concertina. Their notes carried over differently: the concertina's old note, held a touch past the next and dying slowly (tuned for the synthesised one), sat against the flute's new note for about 130 ms at most changes in The Sunny Banks, often a second or a third apart; and with their different lilts, their notes between the beats started up to 12 ms apart. Now the concertina's note ends as the next begins and its reed stops as quickly as a real one (20 dB down in 35 ms), and playing together the flute takes the concertina's lilt, so they start every note as one. On its own the concertina still flows (a dip of under 5 dB between notes), and its repeated notes are crisper. ### Session Players 1.7.0 — 2026-10-01 — A real concertina, a smoother guitar Feedback from a mandolin teacher: the guitar "sounds like someone hitting a wire fence with a pole", and the concertina "too much like a keyboard". - The concertina now plays recordings of a real one: the notes of a modern 30-key Anglo concertina with steel reeds, G3 to B6, cut from a recording by Alwayswonder on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0, credited on the page and with the samples). Each is retuned to A=440 (the instrument sits up to 28 cents sharp), starts as the reed speaks (the recording's slow swell, a demonstration's, is left out), and is held as long as the tune needs by looping through its steady part with its slow fade evened out, so long notes don't pulse. The lilt, weighting and carry-over still shape it. The recordings (596 KB) load when you tick the concertina. - The guitar is smoother: see guitar demo 1.11.0, which it shares. ### Session Players 1.6.1 — 2026-10-01 - More lilt, and most on the concertina, whose bellows give it more bounce: a jig's first quaver of three is now held 12% long on the flute and 16% on the concertina (8% on both before), and a reel's pairs go 55:45 and 57:43 (53:47 before). The concertina also leans harder on the beat (0.92 on the beat against 0.60 between, where the flute has 0.89 against 0.66). Each follows its own lilt: playing together their beats meet, and the notes between sit a few thousandths of a second apart, as two players' would. ### Session Players 1.6.0 — 2026-10-01 — The tune lilts - The melody, on the flute and the concertina alike, is now phrased the way a player phrases it rather than dead even. In a jig the first quaver of each group of three is held 8% long and the other two share the difference; in a reel each pair of quavers goes a little long-short (53:47); the beat itself still lands on time. Beat notes are leant on, the first of the bar most, the notes between lighter, the last of a jig's three lifting into the next beat, with a gentle swell over each two-bar phrase and a little of a real player's unevenness, so no two times through are quite the same. The guitar and drum stay steady under it. - The flute's line in the mixer reads "Flute (the tune)", like the concertina's. ### Session Players 1.5.1 — 2026-10-01 - The concertina's notes now carry over into each other, as they do when the bellows keep the air up through a phrase. Each note is held a touch past the next one's start and dies away over a twentieth of a second, with a trace of bellows air under it. Before, the short notes were detached and every note cut off: measured, the sound fell to silence (85 dB down) between every two notes; now it dips about 1.5 dB. A repeated note, like the two Ds of "edd", is still struck twice (a 13 dB break). - It sounds less like a machine: the reed wanders slightly in pitch and level as bellows pressure does (randomly, about a cent and a third of a decibel, not a vibrato), bends up into pitch as it speaks, and speaks brighter when pushed harder. A held note's level used to sit dead still (0.11 dB); now it moves 0.2 to 0.3 dB. - Fuller for carrying over, its level comes down to stay just under the flute. ### Session Players 1.5.0 — 2026-10-01 — A concertina - A concertina for the tune: a fourth line in the mixer, with its own tick and level, off to begin with. Tick it with the flute for the two in unison, as at a session, or untick the flute to hear it alone; untick both to play the tune yourself. - It is a free reed, synthesised: a rich, reedy tone (its overtones up to the fifth within about 10 dB of the note, where the flute's are 58 dB down), one reed to a note tuned dry, a few cents off true at random as a real reed is, quick but not clicky, with a breath of air as each note opens, and the short notes bouncing. It sits just under the flute. ### Session Players 1.4.0 — 2026-10-01 - The green-and-gold colours of the app (1.8.0). ### Session Players 1.3.1 — 2026-10-01 - A tune the page brings back by itself on reopening no longer says it came "from a saved file"; only a file you open does. - Fixed: saving again a tune opened from a file recorded it as setting 1, whatever its setting; the number shown and the file's name were wrong too. ### Session Players 1.3.0 — 2026-10-01 - The tune you pick is shown clearly where you found it: its name fills the search box and stands out large under it, with its type, key and which setting is playing ("Jig · 6/8 · G major · Setting 1 of 44 by Jeremy"), the setting chooser and the link to it on thesession.org beside it. A tune opened from a file says so. Clicking the search box selects the name, so a new search is just typing. ### Session Players 1.2.1 — 2026-09-30 - The foot of the page switches to the bodhrán app ("Bodhrán · Session Players"), as the app's now switches here. The link to the Kesh demo is gone from it. ### Session Players 1.2.0 — 2026-09-30 - Once you pick a tune, the other matches fold away under one line ("19 other matches for “kesh”"), which opens them again. Left open, a long list pushed the tune, the Play button and the chords far down the page. A new search opens the list fresh. ### Session Players 1.1.0 — 2026-09-30 — Chords that know the shape of a part - The chords chosen from the melody now follow the shape of a part: two four-bar phrases, the fourth bar resting on the cadence chord (the dominant in a major key, the chord a step below home in dorian, mixolydian and minor tunes), and the eighth going from it to home. Hearing only the notes, the page had put Em and Am under The Kesh's bar 4s, where a backer plays D. Now 6 of 8 bars of the A part match the guitar demo's hand-chosen chords (5 before) and 5 of 8 of the B part (4 before). Across six popular tunes only bar 4s changed: the Silver Spear's B part now rests on A, Banish Misfortune's on C. - Reopening the page brings back the last tune with the chords you changed, and the rest chosen afresh, so it hears improvements like this one. A saved file still comes back exactly as saved. ### Session Players 1.0.0 — 2026-09-30 — The first version - Name a tune and it is found on thesession.org, fetched, and given a backing: the guitar (standard or DADGAD), the bodhrán, and the melody on the flute. Untick the flute to play the tune yourself. Jigs and reels for now; other types are listed but can't be picked yet. - Choose any of the tune's settings. Repeats, first and second endings, pickups, triplets, rolls and dotted notes are all read as written. - Chords come from the setting if it has them (few do), otherwise they're chosen from the melody, bar by bar, from the chords usual in the tune's key and mode. Tap any bar to change its chord, for the whole bar or each half; the change holds every time that bar comes round, and is marked with a dot. - **Save to a file** keeps the tune, the setting and your chords; **Open a saved tune** brings it all back with nothing fetched. The last tune is also kept on the page between visits. - A two-bar count-in by default (one, two or four), tempo, times through, strum, tuning, sympathetic ringing, a level for each sound, and the sound check, all as in the guitar demo. Behind the scenes, the automated checks at `/tests/` grew from 36 at 1.1.0 to 71 at 1.6.0, and each new one was shown to catch the fault it guards against. Earlier history is in the git log.