What's new

A user-facing digest. The full engineering record — every phase, every fix, every probed Verovio behaviour — lives in CHANGELOG.md.

1.2.0 — 2026-10-29

New

battuta on iPhone, iPad and Android: the same editor as an app for tablets and phones. Your scores live in battuta’s own folder (the Files app on iPhone and iPad) or in any folder you pick; share… sends a score anywhere. A MIDI instrument plugs in by USB or pairs by Bluetooth from the MIDI list, and on the iPad other music apps hear battuta’s playback. Files →
The on-screen keyboard, made for touch: a ⌫ always in reach under the ×, two lines on a screen held upright, one octave on a phone so the keys stay wide enough to play. On-screen keyboard →
The context bar folds into ⋯ when the window is too narrow for all of it, and on a phone the page view lays out pages as wide as the screen. Tour →
PDF reference (📄): load a score’s PDF with its OMR annotation files and each measure’s scan stands above its tile in edit view, with the caret’s system in a panel that follows it — matched by id, or in order. On a PDF — or its pages as images — without annotation files, draw the systems, click the barlines and split the staves yourself, zoomed from a quarter of the panel’s width up to four times; drag a system’s corners to resize it, and on a touch screen move the page with two fingers. The drawing is kept and exports as annotation files. The first step of the facsimile. On iPhone and iPad, reading a PDF needs iOS / iPadOS 26.2; the pages as images work everywhere. PDF reference →
Tenuto on =, beside the other articulations. Marks →
About battuta in the battuta menu: who made it, Verovio’s credit, and the licence of every component the app ships.
The folder view renames and creates: ✎ or F2 renames a score or a folder in place (an open tab follows its file); + score and + folder create in the marked folder, a new score opening at once. Folder view →

Changed

Accidentals are saved as they sound. Every note now carries what it sounds under the key signature and the measure’s accidentals (@accid.ges), so other MEI readers hear what battuta plays; a score’s <accid> elements stay elements. Note entry →
MIDI input is spelled by the key: under one flat, B♭ arrives as the key’s B and B as B♮; a white key is never spelled as a sharp of the note below.
Chords tie: t ties two chords pitch by pitch.
The bottom panel starts where the folder view ends, and the zoom popover opens over it.

For plugin authors

@battuta/api 1.2.0: the workspace’s writes (rename, createFolder, createFile — create-only) and home() (battuta’s own folder on a tablet or a phone), a band on the overlays point (room above every tile) and ctx.query.measureIds(). Writing a plugin →

1.0.0 — 2026-09-18

The first stable version. Underneath, battuta became a host: most features are now plugins, loaded only when something they declared happens, with a Plugins tab to turn each one off. Nothing about your scores changed — with every plugin off, an MEI file saves byte-identical. Plugins →

New

Pitch reference (🎙): load a recording of a score and see its pitch traced over every measure and over the whole file, against the written notes — where the take is sharp, flat, early or late, in cents. Play the take, or the written notes through MIDI, from a playhead that follows the caret. Detected in the editor; nothing is uploaded. Pitch reference →
Folder view (📁, desktop app): the scores in a folder you opened, in a panel on the left, click to open; the list follows the disk, and a score you have open that changes on disk is announced the moment it happens. Folder view →
The Plugins tab in the shortcut editor: every plugin with a switch and its state; off is immediate and remembered. Plugins →

Changed

Panels push, never cover. The side panel sits on the left below the header and moves the score right; a bottom panel pads the score so the last measures stay reachable.
MIDI playback delivers in order. Note-offs before note-ons at the same instant, whatever the timer does, so a synth is never handed a note it cannot release. battuta still sends plain notes on channel 1 and never a program change — what sounds is your synth’s choice. Playback →
The playback controls, the lyrics and harmony lanes, the reflection cycle, the on-screen keyboard and the format converters are plugins now. Same keys, same behaviour; each can be turned off.

For plugin authors

@battuta/api is 1.0.0. Manifests, activation events, commands as data, the query facade, slots, panels, lanes, overlays, formats, the audio, MIDI, view and workspace services — the surface is pinned by a report and grows one question at a time. Writing a plugin →

0.0.3 — 2026-09-12

A quality-of-life round: ten requests from the first release users, plus two fixes that fell out of testing them.

Writing music

Lyrics under the notes: l opens the lane, space or enter commits a syllable and jumps to the next note, - hyphenates a word across notes. Lyrics →
Repeats work in note input — they moved to alt + r, so closing a section no longer means leaving input mode. With nothing selected it puts an end repeat on the caret’s measure, and playback loops it. Repeats →
Group staves with shift + G over a block: none → brace → bracket, barlines following the symbol. Staff groups →
Numpad 0 writes a rest, completing the numpad’s duration row, and picking a duration now clears the dot — a new value starts plain, whether you change it with the digits or with alt + arrows.
6/4 joined the meter list.

Playing

Play through your MIDI devices: tick MIDI in the player row and playback goes to every connected output instead of the built-in piano — the same performance, with repeats, ties and articulations. On macOS and Linux battuta also appears as a MIDI source of its own, so listener apps hear it. Playback →
Transpose the MIDI by ±12 semitones, live, applying to the playback-MIDI export too. The written score and the built-in piano stay at pitch.

Getting around

The context bar is keyboard-drivable: F6 focuses it, arrows move and change values, esc returns to the score. Status bar →

Fixes

Dialogs that never appeared in the desktop app now do — the unsaved-work warning when closing a tab, the paste-differences question and the overwrite guard were all silently answering “no” for themselves.
Page view no longer clips braces and brackets at the left edge; pages render with proper margins.
macOS: alt shortcuts work (auto-beam among them) — Option composes letters into symbols there, which battuta was not accounting for.

0.0.2 — 2026-08-30

Validated on all three platforms, and the first release with signed macOS builds and one-command installs (Homebrew, apt).

The score’s own tempo

A ♩= tempo button beside the title sets the score tempo in the MEI (@midi.bpm): page view prints the marking, playback runs at it, and the speed select now reads × the score tempo. Playback →

Touch: the on-screen keyboard

A virtual keyboard for tablets (🎹, automatic on touch screens): a two-octave piano with multi-touch chords and an octave rail, sticky ctrl/alt/shift latches, a four-way digit pad, and one key per action — generated from your live keymap, so rebinds and new actions appear on their own. Keys relabel live under a latch to show what they will do. The on-screen keyboard →

Import & export

Import everything Verovio reads: MusicXML (plain and .mxl), ABC, Plaine & Easie and Humdrum kern all open — converted to MEI on open, as a new unsaved document so your source is never overwritten.
Export playback MIDI: battuta’s performed form — repeats and jumps expanded, tie chains merged, staccato/legato gates — as a .mid.
Export written-score MIDI, SVG pages, Humdrum kern and Plaine & Easie from the battuta menu. Files →

Safety

Session restore: the open tabs persist after every edit and come back on the next start — a crash or window close loses at most a second of work.
Close confirmation on dirty tabs; clean ones close silently.
External-change guard (desktop): saving a file another program modified asks before overwriting. Files →

Distribution

The macOS app is signed and notarized (Apple Developer ID) — no more Gatekeeper warning — and installable with brew install --cask vibetuned/tap/battuta.
A signed apt repository at battuta.vibetuned.com/apt for Debian/Ubuntu. Install →

Fixes from the validation round

macOS: musical glyphs no longer render as black squares. macOS ships no font for the Musical Symbols Unicode block, so the duration and mark glyphs (𝅝 𝅗𝅥 𝄆 𝄇 𝄐 𝄪) were tofu — battuta (and this guide) now bundle a small Noto Music subset that fills exactly those characters.
Windows: no more doubled MIDI input. A driver that registers the same device as two ports made every note arrive twice; ports are now deduplicated by device name on both MIDI paths.

The header, reorganised

Two rows: tabs and views on top; the score’s title, tempo and (in page view) the player below. File chores, exports and tools moved into one menu under the battuta name; the measure buttons retired in favour of numpad + − * and the on-screen keyboard. Tour →
Performance numbers are off by default everywhere.

Playback

A score player in page view — ▶ / ⏸ / ⏹, with the sounding note highlighted from the same timeline that drives the audio, and the view scrolling to follow. Playback →
Playback follows the form: repeat barlines, volta sets, and one dal-segno or da-capo jump with fine and To Coda. A mid-score D.C. now stops the first pass at the jump instead of running to the end. Repeats and form →
Ties, slurs and articulations shape what you hear — a tie chain sounds as one held attack, staccato shortens, slurred and tenuto notes sound full, unmarked notes detach slightly.
Tempo and progress: a 0.5×–2× tempo select that applies live, plus a clickable progress bar with an elapsed/total readout.

Notating the form

To Coda joined the o cycle, distinguished from the coda sign the way MEI does it — by the mark’s text.
Attack intensity on shift + i: sf → sfz → rinf → rfz. Marks →
3/2 joined the meter list.

Editing

Reflection cycle on shift + r: prime → inversion → retrograde → retrograde inversion, over a block, with the rhythm held fixed. Arranging →
Tie chains got smarter — tying a note that is already tied extends the chain instead of orphaning the first tie, and untying a link splits it into valid remainders.
Cross-staff slurs and hairpins: shift-clicking across staves selects an endpoint pair, which is what those spans need. Selection →
One selection model: shift-runs and mouse blocks now drive every action, each action taking the granularity it needs. r toggles repeats from a shift-run; ctrl + c copies a run’s full measure span.
Add staff below places the caret on the new staff, ready for entry.

Getting around

The view follows the caret — keyboard navigation and note entry scroll the caret back into view instead of leaving you hunting for it.
Row navigation: Home / End for the row’s start and end, PageUp / PageDown for the previous and next row, and Insert toggling note input both ways. Navigation →

The application

A score title editor in the header, which page view actually prints.
Toasts for errors, confirmations and refusals — with a × to dismiss, and selectable text so you can copy an error into a report.
A dirty marker (*) on tabs, computed from the undo stack, so undoing back to your last save reads as clean again.
Dialogs remember the last folder, including the open file… button, which used to bypass the native dialog entirely.
Separate QWERTY and AZERTY keymaps with a layout toggle in the shortcut editor, and persisted options — layout and zoom survive restarts. Keyboard reference →
macOS fixes: MIDI hot-plug now works (CoreMIDI needs a run loop pumped), and the grey Dock icon is gone — macOS 26 re-themes any icon with transparent corners, so the artwork is opaque edge to edge now.
AGPL-3.0-only license, declared in every manifest.

0.0.1 — first release

The first packaged release: Linux .deb and .AppImage, an app icon, and .mei file association, on top of a feature-complete v1 editor — tiled Verovio rendering, a text-editor caret and selection, reversible commands with byte-identical undo, keyboard and MIDI note entry, copy/paste with the duration validator, context editing, articulations and ornaments, voices, voltas, tuplets, harmony lanes and a rebindable keymap.