Capo touch 2.7: The Control Strip

• Chris Liscio

We've released another great update to Capo touch—just in time for the iPhone X launch!

I have been experimenting with the Control Strip feature for quite a while now. We designed this organization of controls as a way to handle the growing complexity of the Advanced Playback features in Capo touch.

What's the Control Strip? In the Heads-Up Display in Capo touch, you'll now find a strip of controls where the old playback speed slider used to be. You can switch the current set of controls by tapping (or swiping, or long-pressing) the Control Strip Selector to the left of the time display.

The older UI that we offered was extremely difficult to extend, and there was no place for a button that toggles the Transcription Playhead on and off. Heck, the old UI was extremely difficult to use, so it needed a replacement ASAP.

With the approaching launch of the iPhone X, I now had an extra reason to replace the old Heads-Up Display because—in addition to being hard to extend and use—it was not built in a way that would cooperate nicely with the iPhone X layout changes. Perfect timing!

Fortunately I already had a mostly-complete cross-platform (wink, wink) implementation of the Control Strip available to me. So this release would consist primarily of cherry-picking code from one branch to another. The process didn't take very long at all because I already did much of the heavy lifting and architecting months ago.

[Fun fact: The updated speed and key sliders that were introduced in Capo touch 2.5 came from the existing Control strip implementation as well!]

So here we are, and the Control Strip is now out in the wild. As mentioned before, the Transcription Playhead now appears in Capo touch thanks to this improvement. I was also able to (finally!!) introduce a separate pitch slider that allows for fine-tuning the playback pitch in the way it should have been done all along!

But that's not all, of course. As I said earlier, the Transcription Playhead and fine-tuning pitch sliders are now available in Capo touch. I also fixed the region looping UI so that it matches the macOS product more closely. Furthermore, a long-requested Mixer has been added to give you control over the song's playback volume to better hear the click of the metronome! You'll find further details in the "What's New" description on the App Store page.

And if you've not already done so, grab a copy of Capo touch 2.7 and give it a try!