[bús-ka kyó-al] — a music box.
Bosca Ceoil: The Blue Album (or Bosca Ceoil Blue, for short) is a simple and beginner-friendly app for making music. Using a step sequencer you can create anything from a simple beat to a complex melodic piece — with huge selection of synthesized instruments!
Bosca Ceoil Blue is a modern port of Terry Cavanagh's Bosca Ceoil, and attempts to preserve everything that made the original so approachable and intuitive. And just like the original, Bosca Ceoil Blue is absolutely free and provided under a permissive open source license, should you need to modify it.
If you find a usability issue or a bug, please file a report. If you don't have a GitHub account, you can also reach out on Discord.
- Download for Linux (x86_64)
- Download for macOS (Universal)
- Download for Windows (x86_64)
- Download for Windows (x86_32)
You can also get the project from itch.io. Web and Android versions are planned in the future.
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!
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!
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.
Export your creations to WAV and MIDI. Share them with the world, or use them for your next game or video!
Yes, the new version is fully compatible with the original Bosca Ceoil and should be perceived as the next major release in the series. In fact, the first release of The Blue Album is versioned 3.0 to indicate just that. This version should sound the same, loads all existing .ceol files, and has every feature of the original.
This also means that tracks created with The Blue Album 3.x can be loaded back into the original Bosca Ceoil, if you so desire. Future releases of Bosca Ceoil Blue are likely to introduce changes and features incompatible with the original, whenever that might be necessary. However, you will always be able to open and edit existing .ceol files in every future version of the tool, with your songs being automatically converted to the newest format.
Original Bosca Ceoil is a great tool for budding musicians and game developers. It's almost perfect, but can still benefit from some UX enhancements and improvements to its composing features. It's also using an outdated technology stack which makes it hard to impossible to run it on modern systems, namely macOS and web.
The goal of the Bosca Ceoil Blue project is to make Bosca Ceoil more accessible to today's users and also to new contributors. We achieve this by reimplementing the entire application with a more modern set of tools, as a Godot engine project.
A general-purpose game engine like Godot gives the project means to run on Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as on web and even mobile phones — almost hassle-free. It's also a popular tool among many game developers, which should make Bosca Ceoil Blue an inviting project for new collaborators.
Your participation is welcome!
Whether you can test the project and report bugs, or you can work on improvements and missing features, please don't hesitate to reach out.
- For bugs, please consider creating a bug report in the Issues section of this repository.
- For features, please start a thread in the Discussion section of this repository.
- For work coordination, or just to chat about the project, please join our Discord server.
The project is being developed using the latest available build of Godot 4.3. As this version of the engine is still unstable, some bugs unrelated to this project must be expected.
To work on Bosca Ceoil Blue you need to:
- Check out this repository, or download it as a ZIP archive.
- Get the latest release of GDSiON 0.7 and extract it into the
binfolder in the project root. - Open and edit the project with Godot 4.3.
This project is provided under an MIT license. Original Bosca Ceoil application is provided under a BSD-2-Clause-Views license.
If you're spreading the word, sharing your experience using Bosca Ceoil Blue, sharing your creations made with it with the world — you're a great help already!
We'd like to make sure that the project receives necessary attention for as long as possible. If you're comfortable with it and want to help, please consider supporting the project financially:
- The best way to do this is to become a supporter via Patreon.
- You can also leave a one-time tip with your download on itch.io.
Every dollar helps, so please consider donating even if it's a little! Thank you very much <3