What’s new

Saving your work

• Fixed: some saved files could not be opened again. Tonograph now repairs what it safely can when opening or importing, and will not write a file it could not open again. Anything it repaired is listed in the Warnings tab.
• New, Open, the Recent Files list, the sample scores and opening a file from Finder or File Explorer now ask before replacing a song with unsaved changes.
• “Don’t Save” also discards the auto-saved copy, and recovering an auto-saved song is more reliable.
• Edits made while a song was being saved were marked as saved.
• If the score fails to draw, you can return to the Welcome screen instead of seeing a blank window.
• With both the paid and the free version installed on the same Mac, Tonograph asked for your keychain password every time it started.

Notation

• The tempo mark at the start of the song was missing.
• Fixed grace note stems, bends on tied notes, trills, forced beaming, key signatures of transposing instruments, whole rests in empty bars, chord diagrams in the score, tremolo picking slashes, repeat counts and the direction of stroke arrows.
• Fingerings, accidentals, slide lines, dynamics and bend values and arrows overlap less.
• Note names on the fretboard now show the pitch that actually sounds, including the capo and transposition.

Playback

• A bar with both a repeat end and D.C. now plays the repeat before jumping back. The sample score “Lágrima” now plays at its full written length.
• Loop playback of a selection repeats until you stop it.

Editing

• The score follows the cursor when you move it with the keyboard.
• You can enter notes in empty bars, and new bars keep the clef of the previous bar.
• Pasting into a bar of rests replaces only as many rests as the pasted notes last.
• In the second and later voices, pressing → in the middle of a song moves to the same voice in the next bar instead of adding a bar.
• After using the toolbar or the inspector, keys sometimes didn’t reach the score.
• Entering a note by clicking the standard notation, reducing the number of strings or deleting a bar could leave the song in a state that couldn’t be saved.

Plug in your guitar

A new set of features uses input from an audio interface or microphone. Turn on audio input under Settings › Audio first. On macOS and Windows, you’ll be asked for microphone permission the first time.

• Tuner: Open it from the edit palette and tune your strings to the tuning of the track under the cursor.
• Play through the pedalboard: Hear what you play through the track’s pedalboard. The Audio Input section of the left panel has an input trim and a meter, and Settings shows a breakdown of the latency. You can also use a smaller audio buffer to cut the delay (takes effect the next time you start Tonograph).
• Audio note input: Play a note and it’s placed at the cursor, which then moves on. It works with single notes and tells from the tone which string you played.
• String calibration: Measure the tone of your own guitar’s strings so audio note input picks the right string more often.
• Audio commands: Play a position you don’t normally use (1st string, 21st fret by default) to open a dial, then pick a rest, a note value, a cursor move or undo with the open strings — without taking your hands off the guitar. Off by default.
• Real-time recording: Play along with a click and get a score quantized to quarter, eighth or sixteenth notes.

Export and import

• Export MIDI and audio (WAV). The WAV file is rendered with the Resonance Engine, exactly as you hear it. The same exports are also available as tools for AI clients (MCP).
• Open .gpx files, the generation before the .gp format. Save the song as .tonograph or export it as .gp.
• PDF export can now use landscape, and it remembers your paper and other settings.

Interface

• A new online manual. Open it from the Help menu, or from the “?” in a dialog’s title to jump to the matching page.
• The Welcome screen and the inspector have been redesigned.
• Pedalboard presets can be saved to and loaded from JSON files, and switching presets is smoother.
• The fretboard’s TONE knob now rolls off the highs per track, and its VOL knob mirrors the volume of the track under the cursor. The fretboard also remembers its zoom.
• On a grand staff piano, notes from both staves now light up on the virtual keyboard.
• Drum velocity now changes the tone as well as the volume.
• The sample scores “Rosewood Letters” and “Scarlet Engine” have been rearranged with fingerings you can actually play.

Changed behavior

• What happens when a bar’s length changes is now two settings, “Push Overflow to Next Bar” and “Fill Short Bars With Rests.” Both are off by default. In 1.0.0 this was on from the start, so turn them on under Settings › General if you want the old behavior. While they’re off, the meter in the edit palette and marks on the score tell you when a bar is too long or too short.

Fixes

• The whammy bar could sound deeper than written. Whammy is now also drawn the way Guitar Pro 8 draws it.
• Fixed overlapping or misplaced tuplet numbers and brackets, bend arrows, harmonic brackets, chord diagrams at the top of the score, and rests in multi-voice bars.
• Minor key signatures showed names like “Cm” for A minor.
• In single-track view, the playback cursor stopped when a track other than the first was shown.
• The Delete key didn’t remove the notes of a beat on piano and drum tracks.
• “Show All Tracks” didn’t bring back tracks that had been hidden from the multi-track view.
• Canceling the print dialog reported that printing had failed.
• Dropdown menus and the Recent Files list can now be used with the keyboard.
• Other small fixes to the display and wording.

Free version

• Save and export buttons can now be pressed, and they show what the paid version offers.
• Checks for a new version automatically once a day.
• Sends anonymous usage data (which features are used). It never sends the contents of your songs or file names. You can turn it off at any time under Settings › General. The Privacy Policy lists exactly what is sent. The paid version sends nothing.