bandcue

Changelog

Changelog

Every release of bandcue, newest first, described by what it does rather than by what changed in the code.

2026.11.1 — 4 November 2026

Backing tracks in the cloud library

A MIDI track goes with its song. A MIDI backing track now goes to your cloud library with its song, including one you attached before this version. On one of your own songs it is yours, and your other phones get it. On a band’s song it is the band’s, and every member’s phone gets it. A track attached, replaced, edited or removed on one phone goes up within seconds and reaches the others at their next sync, and the web app plays the same track. A recording (mp3, wav and the like) stays on the phone it is on, as before.

Never replaced behind your back. When the band’s track and the one on your phone differ, your phone keeps playing its own, and the song’s backing-track card asks which one to keep: the band’s, or yours for the whole band. The Cloud screen says how many songs wait for that choice. A track is never swapped in the middle of a song.

Gear and Pro. The search for the XR16 and the HeadRush Prime stops when a Pro subscription ends, and starts again when it comes back.

2026.10.24 — 29 October 2026

Four fixes

PDF export. Two choices made quickly one after the other, say the notes and the paper, are now both kept; before, the second could put the first back as it was.

The sample songs. Turning the phone during the very first launch could leave the library empty for good, without the three songs a new install starts with. They now arrive whatever the phone does.

The HeadRush Prime. When the connection drops and comes back, the screen stays on the tab you were on instead of going back to Rig.

The XR16. After the connection drops, the mixer’s controls wait until bandcue has read the mixer again before they can be moved, so nothing is changed from values that may be out of date; and a read that misses some answers asks for them again.

2026.10.23 — 29 October 2026

Edit a MIDI track, more sounds, and the whole mixer and Prime

Edit a MIDI backing track. In a song’s Backing track sheet, “Edit the track” shows the parts the file plays, in order: repeat one, shorten it by a bar, take it out or add one more, so the track matches the sheet. Instruments has every track’s sound, with a picker that lets you hear each one before you choose. To fix the notes themselves, a drum grid and a piano roll edit a bar at a time, and copy a bar where you need it. The original file is kept, and going back to it is one tap.

More sounds, with Pro. Besides the sound bank every phone gets, you can download MuseScore General and a grand or an upright piano, each once, and hear a short preview first. The piano you choose plays every piano part, over the bank you choose for the rest.

Every slider, exactly where you want it. Open the row of any level or parameter to move it a step at a time or type the value.

The XR16, all of it. Each channel has its page: the input stage, the EQ drawn as a curve you can drag, the gate and compressor with how much they are pulling down, and the effects with their types. There are the groups and the scenes, the inputs and outputs, the monitor and solo, and a page to copy one channel to another.

The HeadRush Prime, all of it. Pick blocks and signal paths, organise the rig library and its setlists, set the footswitches and expression pedals, and reach the Prime’s own settings.

Any amp over MIDI. A song can send its rig, scene and tempo to an amp or pedalboard through a MIDI profile for it.

Safe on stage. A control that has not yet been tried on a real mixer or Prime is shown but cannot be moved, marked “Not yet tested”, until it has been. What a change touched can be put back as it was for as long as bandcue stays connected.

2026.10.21 — 19 October 2026

Reverb and EQ on MIDI backing tracks

Shape the sound of each track. In a song’s Backing track sheet, beside each track’s volume, a button says how the track is set and opens its sound: how much reverb it gets, from none to twice what the file asks for, and a five-band equaliser (60 Hz, 250 Hz, 1 kHz, 4 kHz, 12 kHz) drawn as a curve. Ready-made settings to start from — less boom, more presence, warmer, brighter — and “Solo while you adjust” to hear that track alone while you work on it.

And of the whole track. “Whole track” has the overall reverb and an equaliser for everything, before the limiter, so raising a band never distorts. “Use on all MIDI tracks” copies that equaliser to every other MIDI track on the phone, to suit the evening’s PA. Untouched tracks cost nothing, and moving a slider while the track plays does not click.

2026.10.20 — 19 October 2026

The words on the track, the band’s setlist, and the band’s faces

The words follow the backing track, line by line. In a song’s Backing track sheet, “Words on the track” opens a timeline that runs down the screen, with the bars and beats of a MIDI track or the waveform of an audio one beside it. Drag a line to where it is sung; open it to move it by a beat, a bar or 20 milliseconds. Or play the track and tap as each line starts, and a phone on its side gives you a target as tall as the screen. A karaoke file brings its own times: bandcue finds each line of your sheet in its words and tells you which ones to check. While the track plays, the sheet then moves line by line with it.

The band’s setlist, redrawn, in the app and in the web app. At the top, how long the set is against the time the band has, and how much is left. The songs are numbered, with their key and length; “Add songs” takes several at once from the band’s library or from yours, in the order you tap them. A song’s menu has a note only you see, moves it to the top or the bottom, or takes it out of the set; the setlist’s menu renames it, sets the time for the set, prints it, copies it into your own setlists or deletes it. When two of you change the same setlist at once, both changes land.

Faces in the band. The faces of the members, the photo each chose or their initials in their colour, now show beside every band, under its name, on the notes they sign and on the stage, with who is playing and who is not. Under every setlist and song of the band, who changed it last and when. They arrive with the band, for every band you are in.

MIDI tracks sound better. Cleaner cymbals and attacks, a reverb that leaves the bass dry, and more level without distortion. Through the phone’s own speaker, bandcue adds the harmonics that let the bass be heard.

A tablet held upright gives a song opened from the band’s setlist the whole screen.

2026.10.19 — 15 October 2026

The Prime over Wi-Fi, and your own buttons on the sheet

The HeadRush Prime over the network. No interface any more: bandcue reaches the Prime on the same Wi-Fi and finds it by itself, by its name or, when the name does not answer, by looking through the network. It reads the Prime back as it is: the rig loaded, the scene, the tempo, the blocks of the chain. The USB-MIDI way still works.

A screen for the Prime. Load a rig, pick a scene or make one from a free footswitch, choosing which blocks it turns on and off, switch blocks and turn their knobs, set the rig’s volume and the input gain. bandcue never saves a rig on its own: when the Prime holds edits not saved and another rig is about to load, it asks whether to save them, drop them or stay.

Adjust without stopping. A song’s ⋮ menu now starts with your gear. From there, from the gear line or from the new button in the play bar, a panel opens over half the screen: the song’s channels, the headphones and the main on the XR16; the scenes, the pedals, the volume and the tempo on the Prime. The sheet keeps scrolling under it.

Buttons on the sheet. Add buttons under the sheet that change scene, switch a pedal, load a rig, mute a channel or an effect, move a level by 3 dB or bring the song’s mix back, for this song or for every song. They show the gear’s own state: the scene playing is filled, a mute is red, gear that is off is grey and says so. On a tablet held sideways they make a column beside the sheet. The page turner can press the first two: Settings › Page turner, “Gear button 1” and “2”.

2026.10.18 — 15 October 2026

The whole mixer, and its levels live

Every channel. The XR16 mixer in bandcue now lists all sixteen channels and the aux input, not only the ones with a name on the mixer. Two channels linked in stereo are still one row.

Levels as they happen. Under each fader a thin bar shows the signal right now — channels, the main mix, the buses and the effect returns — green, amber when it gets loud, red near the top. It runs only while the mixer is on screen.

Effects that read like the mixer. A switch on an effect flips with one tap, the delays’ factor and mode are buttons, and the names of the parameters for the reverbs, the delays and the chorus are the mixer’s own.

Fixed: the status bar seemed gone on the gear screens and in the guide (its icons were white on white), and long names in the mixer were cut short.

2026.10.17 — 15 October 2026

Your rig follows the song

Gear control (Pro). bandcue can now drive a Behringer XR16 mixer over the network and a HeadRush Prime through a USB-MIDI interface plugged into the phone. It finds them by itself: the mixer on the same network, the interface as soon as it is plugged in. Only the phone they are set up on sends anything — the other phones of the band leave your gear alone, even on a stage.

Each song, its own sound. A song remembers the Prime’s rig and the tempo, and a scene for each part — the verse clean, the chorus with the drive on. The rig and tempo go out when the song opens, the scene as the sheet plays into each part; scrolling back with a finger changes nothing. On a stage, the song the leader opens loads your own rig and mix.

The XR16 from the sheet. Levels and mutes, the monitor mixes on the buses, how much of each channel goes into each effect, the effects’ returns and their parameters, a delay in time with the song, and the names of channels and buses. Save the mix for a song and it comes back, with a short fade, every time the song opens. The type of effect stays in X Air Edit.

A tablet held upright opens the sheet full screen. On its side it stays beside the list, as on an open Fold.

Fixed: on a stage with “Anyone moves it”, the phone playing the backing track could show Play over a track still sounding, and a MIDI track did not play again after leaving a song and opening it again.

2026.10.16 — 14 October 2026

MIDI backing tracks, the sheet your way, and setlists on paper

MIDI backing tracks. A .mid, .midi or .kar file can now be a song’s backing track. Each instrument in it can be muted, soloed or turned down — mute the bass when the bassist plays, or the melody when somebody sings it. The track plays in the sheet’s key and at the song’s tempo without losing quality, the click is part of the same sound so the two never drift, and the parts are timed from the file itself, with no tapping. The sounds come from a General MIDI bank (GeneralUser GS by S. Christian Collins, 32 MB) downloaded once and then used with no signal, or from your own .sf2.

On a stage, one phone plays. The backing track plays on the leader’s phone only; with “Anyone moves it”, on the phone where play was pressed, and the others follow it.

The sheet your way. Choose the typeface of the words — Geist, Atkinson Hyperlegible, Source Serif 4 or Geist Mono — and what shows while you play: the bars, the clock, the position in the set, the next song, chords, notes, chord diagrams. Both are in Settings and in the sheet’s menu.

The words stay put. When play starts and the bars hide, the words no longer jump. On phones with a camera hole and rounded corners, the title and the clock keep clear of both.

A PDF of a song or a whole setlist, with or without notes and chords, in the key on screen or as written, in A4 or Letter. A setlist starts with a page listing its songs, keys and lengths. In the web app, the same through the browser’s print, and the typeface choice too.

Band songs and setlists. Take a song out of a band setlist, delete a song from the band (your own copy stays), or copy a whole personal setlist to a band. The web app can duplicate a setlist and copy it to a band as well.

2026.10.15 — 14 October 2026

The microphone, and covers that are not there

A microphone refused for good. Once Android stops asking for the microphone, following the tempo live used to offer a button that did nothing. It now says Android no longer asks and opens this app’s page in Android’s settings; back from there with the microphone allowed, the live tempo starts listening. The tuner has the same button.

Syncing a library with no covers is safe. The first sync of a library whose songs have no covers asked for each one, and every “none” counted against the host’s firewall, which could block your network for a day. Covers that are not there are now asked for in a way that never counts.

2026.10.14 — 13 October 2026

A first run that shows the app, and help where you need it

A new first run. Four short pages, each with a picture made of the app’s own pieces: the sheet that scrolls itself in time with the song, the songs you bring yourself, the library that works with no signal, and the whole band on one sheet. Then the diagnostics (in the Google Play build) and the terms. Adding songs, setlists, bands and the stage are part of the subscription, and the pages say so; reading, scrolling, the tuner and exporting stay free.

First steps in the library. On a new install, a card above your songs ticks itself as you play one of the three sample songs, tune, add a song of your own, make a setlist and bring the band. “How bandcue works” opens the four pages again, and it is in Info too.

Three tips on the sheet. The first time you open a song, the play button, the speed and the key are lit one at a time, with a sentence each.

Arriving from an invitation. If the app’s first launch comes from an invitation link, it starts with the invitation and the terms and goes on to the sign-in; the band page welcomes you once.

Before the microphone, and the first backing track. Following the tempo live now says why it wants the microphone, and that nothing is recorded, before Android asks. Adding a first backing track shows its three steps.

In the web app too. The same first run (with a page on keeping phone and browser in step), the first steps above your songs, the tips on the sheet and the invitation’s welcome.

A note on one letter stays put. If the words around a note on a single letter are gone, the note is set aside with the other orphans instead of jumping to the same letter elsewhere.

A busy service says so. When the service is restarting or a gateway answers for it, the app and the web app say “The service is busy right now” instead of “could not read the answer”.

A band is told when a member closes their account, as it is when anybody leaves.

2026.10.13 — 13 October 2026

Fixes from a full review

A note on a transposed sheet lands where you pressed. On a sheet transposed or played with a capo, the chords drawn are longer or shorter than the written ones, and a note long-pressed on a letter was kept one or two letters further on. It is now kept on the letter you pressed, and the dots of notes already there sit where they belong.

A tab is one row of bars, not six. Each string of a tab block used to add its own bars, so a four-bar riff read as twenty-four on the part’s label and in the scroll’s musical time.

Narrow phones with large text. The stage offer, the band guide, a setlist’s total and slots, the count-in buttons and the band checklist wrap onto a second line instead of squeezing each word to a letter a line. Chord-only lines keep their chords apart, and the editor takes a tap anywhere in its text.

The stage and the band pages. Moving from one band’s stage to another’s leaves the first room at once, a slow band page no longer shows another band’s songs, and nothing of an account comes back after signing out of it. A picture you chose is kept through an expired sign-in or a wifi login page, and band logos made with Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Figma or a PNG-to-SVG converter are accepted.

2026.10.12 — 9 October 2026

The scroll can follow your band

Listen to the room used to hear a tempo and offer to remember it, once. It now also offers Follow it live: for as long as the song is open, the sheet keeps to the tempo the microphone hears. A band that counts in at 100 and is at 106 by the last chorus has a sheet at 106 too. It waits for a steady tempo before it moves, glides rather than jumps, ignores a fill, keeps going through a quiet bar, and never changes the song itself — Remember is still there for setting the tempo once.

While it follows, the strip at the top of the sheet shows a microphone and the tempo it hears; tap it to switch following off. It stops when bandcue leaves the screen, and the microphone is only ever heard on your phone: nothing is recorded or sent.

2026.10.11 — 9 October 2026

The stage is a button, and a bar on every tab

Getting on your band’s stage is something you do: Get on, beside the band. It used to happen by itself when you opened a band, so nobody could tell from the screen whether they were on a stage. While you are on one, a bar over the tabs says which band, who is here and what they are playing, with the click on it, on every tab; tap it for the tempo, the members and Leave the stage.

A calmer Band tab

The Band tab lists your bands and your invitations, and nothing else. A band opens as a page of its own: its stage, who is in it, its setlists, and rows for its songs and its settings. A new band’s page lists what is left to get it ready — inviting somebody, a setlist, a song in it, getting on stage — with a button for the next step.

How a band works, in four pages

The guide is four short pages, each with a picture of the part of the app it talks about. Your account and a band’s settings are laid out like the rest of the app, and leaving the stage, leaving the band and signing out are three different words.

2026.10.10 — 9 October 2026

Autoscroll keeps to the song’s length

A song set to three minutes now takes three minutes. The autoscroll counted the lines at the top of the file that say the title, the artist and the key as part of the song; they are never on the page, so their share of the time was never spent and songs finished early, by a third with a long header. It now counts from the song’s first line, in the app and in the web app alike.

On a stage every phone works out the speed from the file by itself, so all the phones in the band should be on this version.

2026.10.9 — 8 October 2026

A note on one letter

A note goes on one character of the words, a letter or a space, no longer on a whole line or part. Press and hold the words: a mark appears on the character under your finger, and moving the finger moves it. Let go and a bubble opens right there, with the line around it and a field for the note. In a band it also asks whose note it is: yours alone, from you to the band, or the band’s.

The same note, the same letter, everywhere. A note written in the web app lands on the same character on the phone, and the other way round, and both describe it the same way: on the “k” of “Walking”, or between “Walking” and “home”.

Notes already written on a whole line or part are still there, and can still be changed and deleted. With a screen reader, every line has an “Add a note” action.

2026.10.8 — 8 October 2026

Tabs, as they are written

Tabs in drop C or C#, tabs with one dash between notes, and palm-mute rows stay tabs. A tab line used to need three dashes in a row and the string names of standard tuning, so the C, F and sharp strings, a riff written e|-0-3-5-| and a PM---- row fell out of the tab and were drawn as words between the lines that were kept.

The chord names written on top of a tab stay with it, over the notes they mark, instead of being read as chords for the tab’s first string.

{start_of_tab} and {end_of_tab} (or {sot} and {eot}) are read: every line between them is a tab, shown as typed. Both are in the editor’s All tags.

In the web app

The same tabs are drawn the same way in the browser. The web app also has a new look: a side panel on a computer, the cover beside the song’s title, the song first on a phone with the tools folded away, and a note opens in a bubble on the letter or the space you click.

2026.10.7 — 8 October 2026

Band notifications

When somebody changes one of your bands, you hear about it. A song added, changed or deleted; a setlist made, changed or deleted; a note for the whole band; somebody joining or leaving: the others in the band get a notification, and a tap on it opens the band. Never for your own changes, and never for the notes you keep for yourself on a band’s songs.

At most one every ten minutes per band, summing up what happened since the last one: “Ada and Marco added 2 songs and changed 1 setlist”. A notification says who and how many, never a song’s title, a setlist’s name or a note’s words.

On your phone, in your browser, and by e-mail. The Play Store version shows them as phone notifications, and the web app in your browser once you allow it on the Account page. If you have not opened the band ten minutes later, an e-mail follows with the same summary; if you have, it does not come. The F-Droid version has no Google services, so it gets the e-mails only.

Settings → Notifications turns the phone notifications and the e-mails on and off, and every e-mail ends with a link that stops them; mail apps that offer an Unsubscribe button stop them from there too.

2026.10.6 — 7 October 2026

Everything in 2026.10.4 below, which was a beta, reaches everybody with this release: backing tracks, and a stage that follows the track.

Pictures

A band can have a logo. The band’s owner sets it on the band’s page, and every member sees it beside the band’s name. You can have your own picture, on your account page: the people in your bands see it beside your name, instead of your Google photo or your initials. And every song can have a cover, from its menu. A cover fills the little square at the head of the song’s row in the Library, with the key still on a chip in its corner; it heads the sheet, and it is the picture on the lock screen while the song’s backing track plays.

Each of them can be a photo or an SVG. A photo is made small on your phone before it goes anywhere; an SVG stays sharp at any size, and the service strips anything in it that is not drawing. Pictures are free for everybody.

Most songs get a cover by themselves. If the song has a backing track and the file carries its album’s artwork, as most MP3s and M4As do, that becomes the cover, and your band sees it too. Otherwise the service looks the song up by artist and title at MusicBrainz and the Cover Art Archive, without your name or your band, and only takes a match it is sure of: a wrong cover is worse than none. A cover you pick yourself always wins. If you would rather nothing was looked up, turn off Settings → Covers → Look them up online.

How a band works

The first time you open a band, four short cards explain it: who is in it, how a song gets to it, how you play a song together, and what works without a network. They stay under Info for later. A band with no setlists yet, and a band that is only you so far, now say what to do next instead of showing an empty page.

A band’s setlists open from its Setlists tab, and can be deleted there, even when your phone does not have all of their songs yet: those are listed as not on this phone instead of being left out.

Playing together

With Join automatically off, you are now offered the song. That is what the setting always said, and until now a phone with it off simply heard nothing. When somebody in the band plays a song, a small banner asks Follow or Not now. It never appears over a song your own phone is playing.

The Band tab works without a network. Your bands, their members and your name are kept on the phone, so a basement with no signal shows the band you know instead of an empty tab.

Smaller things

2026.10.4 — beta, 4 October 2026

Backing tracks

A song can now carry its own backing track. Open the song’s menu, choose Backing track and pick an audio file from your phone — MP3, M4A, OGG, FLAC or WAV, up to 50 MB. bandcue keeps a copy, so the file can move or disappear from your downloads and the song still has it.

Press Play and the sheet follows the track. The line being played sits a quarter of the way down the screen and gets there when the track does, part by part: a long verse takes its time and a short bridge goes by quickly, as they do in the recording. There is no count-in, and the song ends when the track ends.

For that bandcue needs to know where each part starts, and you tell it once. On the beat is one tap on the first downbeat, with buttons to nudge it 20 milliseconds either way, for a song that has a tempo and the bars of every part. Part by part is a tap as each part starts. The timing is written into the song itself, so it goes with the song to your band and your cloud library, and a chord sheet app that is not bandcue simply ignores it.

The track plays in the song’s key and tempo. Transpose the sheet down a tone and the track goes down a tone with it; set the song’s tempo slower than the recording and the track slows down to match.

It keeps playing with the screen off, or while you glance at another app between songs, with the usual media controls in the notification and on the lock screen. It stops when you pause, when you leave the song, or when the track ends — and it only ever starts when you press Play.

Drag the sheet to look ahead. It stays where you put it for four seconds, then glides back to where the track is.

On a stage, one phone plays the track and the others follow it, with no audio of their own: every sheet in the room stays on the part being played. If the track was timed on the beat, the stage’s click lands on the track’s beats; the phone playing the track does not click.

Backing tracks are part of Pro, like PDFs.

2026.10.3 — 3 October 2026

Everything in 2026.10.2 below, which was a beta, reaches everybody with this release.

The song screen, tidied

The controls under a song were eight words of eight different widths in one row that wrapped wherever it ran out of room. They are now icons in two rows. The top row is playing the song: start, how long it lasts, and its tempo. The bottom row is two groups — what the band hears (down or up a semitone, the key, the capo) and what the page shows (chords, notes, the stage’s colours). An icon lights up when it carries something: the key it is written in, a capo on the third fret, a tempo somebody tapped.

Hold any of them to see what it does. A long press names the control and does nothing else, so nothing changes under your hands while you find out.

The chords and notes switches are on the song screen alone; the ⋮ card no longer repeats them.

Every tab, on every phone

On a narrow phone the name of the tab you were on pushed the last tab off the edge of the bar. The name is now left out where it does not fit, and every tab is always there.

2026.10.2 — beta, 2 October 2026

Your songs and setlists, kept

If you are in a band, syncing it could delete your own setlists from your phone and bring the band’s into your list, and the next sync undid it — losing the notes beside each song on the way. Your setlists are now yours and only yours, and a band’s setlists stay on the band’s page.

Songs and setlists are now saved so that a crash or a flat battery in the middle of a save cannot leave one empty. A song you write with the name of one you deleted months ago is no longer deleted by the next sync. If your subscription has ended, deleting a song no longer stops your other songs from arriving.

Chords as they are written

A song in a flat key is written with flats: Bb, Eb and Ab, not A#, D# and G# — also with a capo and when you transpose. [Chorus] and [Bridge] on a line of their own are the names of the sections, not chords. Sharps and flats typed as ♯ and ♭ are read, and x2 after a row of chords no longer turns it into lyrics.

On stage and on your wrist

The watch no longer greys its buttons two minutes into a song. Leaving the stage really leaves it — before, the phone kept following the leader — and Rejoin brings you back. Turning or folding the phone no longer puts you back on a stage you had left.

Small things

2026.9.24 — 29 September 2026

On your watch

bandcue comes to Wear OS — as a remote for the stage, not a second place to read the sheet. Start and stop the song, nudge the scroll back or forward, go back to the top or on to the next song in the setlist, and take or drop the lead with one tap. When your phone leads the band’s stage, every stand in the room follows your wrist. The count-in arrives as a buzz, so you feel it with your eyes on your hands.

It needs bandcue on your phone, and the remote is part of Pro: without it the watch says so rather than pretending its buttons work.

The cloud library says where it stands

Next to your account there is now a cloud. It says whether your cloud library is up to date, syncing, or has songs waiting to go up — or that the service cannot be reached, which on a stage with no signal is the ordinary case and is said quietly. Tap it and the cloud library’s page opens on the same answer, with the reason when there is one and the button to sync right under it.

Songs you change now go up on their own, a few seconds after the last change, and again when you come back to the app — not only when you open it.

Without Pro

Putting songs in the cloud library takes Pro. Without it, every song in the Library used to be marked To upload, for ever, with nothing saying that nothing was going to happen. Now there is no badge on the rows, and one line above them says why the songs stay on this phone.

Small things

2026.9.23 — beta, 29 September 2026

A band’s page, inside the Band tab

Opening a band no longer covers the whole screen: its page opens inside the Band tab, with the bar at the bottom still there. Back, the arrow at the top or a tap on Band returns to the list. On a Fold opened flat or a tablet, the list of bands and the open band sit side by side, and a song opened from the band’s files appears next to the band’s page, which stays on the tab you were on — also when you fold or unfold the phone.

The end of a song, always readable

The controls at the bottom of a song are one card now, and the last lines can always be scrolled above them: nothing of the song shows sliced around it. Back with the tempo panel open closes the panel, not the song — and the same for the key, the bars and a chord’s diagram.

Small things

2026.9.22 — beta, 26 September 2026

Your song, into the band’s setlist

Open one of your own songs and the bar at the top has To a band: pick one of your band’s setlists and a copy of the song goes into the band’s library, where everybody in the band can edit it and write on it. Yours stays exactly where it was. It lists the setlists of the bands whose page you have opened since starting the app, and a setlist you have just made is there straight away.

On a bigger screen

On a Fold opened flat or on a tablet, the account, the editor, the tuner and the band’s page now cover the whole window, rather than half of it beside the song that was open. And the bar at the bottom of a phone says which tab you are on.

Small things

2026.9.21 — beta, 22 September 2026

An invitation you can ask for again

An invitation to a band is a link, and only a link now. If the email with it is lost — or it is an old one, from when invitations were six digits, which open nothing any more — the invitation waiting for you in the Band tab has Send me the link again: a new link goes to the address it was sent to, and the one before it stops working. The owner’s Resend does the same, and now says it worked. Both are limited, so an address cannot be flooded with invitations from us.

Small things

2026.9.20 — beta, 20 September 2026

Asked to rate bandcue, at the right moment

Once a stage you’re already on gains a second phone — someone else’s device showing up beside yours, playing the same song off the same relay, which is the one thing this app is for — bandcue may ask you to rate it on Google Play. It never asks on a cold launch, never on the first check of a stage you just opened, and never while a sheet or the Info tab is open. Self-hosted builds have no Play Store listing to rate, so they ask nothing.

2026.9.18 — beta, 14 September 2026

Pro bought on Google Play, recognised by your account

If you pay for Pro through Google Play and you are signed in, bandcue now knows that the subscription is yours — not just on this phone, but for your account and your bands. Until this release it did not: signed in, Pro could switch itself off every time your bands loaded, and come back the next time you opened the app, and starting a band or playing together could ask you to subscribe when you already had.

There is nothing to do. The first time the app checks your account after updating, the purchase you made on this phone is attached to it.

Playing together now reaches its server at a new address. Nothing changes on screen, and older versions keep working.

2026.9.17 — beta, 14 September 2026

Keeping the right version of a song

When two phones change the same song, bandcue asks which version to keep. On a song your band shares, answering that question did not work: your choice was sent to the wrong place, refused, and the song was left looking as if it belonged to you alone. It goes back to the band now, where it came from.

The same screen used to show you the first few lines of each version — the title, the artist, the key — which are exactly the lines that almost never change. It shows where the two versions actually differ now, with a couple of lines before it so the change makes sense.

And two copies that differ only in things nobody can see — a different line ending, a space at the end of a line, an empty line at the bottom — are no longer a question at all. A space inside a line still counts, because that is where a chord sits over a syllable.

When something could not be saved, you hear about it

If saving to your library failed — a note on a band’s sheet, say — the reason was shown only on the library screen, which is never the one open in the middle of a rehearsal. It appears over whatever you are looking at now.

A restore from a backup says how many songs it could not write, instead of counting them as “already here”. And a song you deleted after taking the backup comes back, which is usually why you opened the backup in the first place.

Pro, described by what it does

Nothing in the app or on the store promises ten free songs or a single setlist any more. What Pro adds is making and changing things; reading and playing everything you have is free.

One address for bandcue

Signing in, your bands, Messages, feature requests and the supporters list all go through bandcue’s own server now, which passes what is not about your bands on to the service shared by the other apps. Nothing changes on screen, and you stay signed in. The privacy page says where each thing is kept.

2026.9.16 — beta, 9 September 2026

A note written on a band’s sheet stayed written

If you wrote a note on a song your band shares, it appeared for a moment and then vanished, and nothing said why. The service was refusing every one of them and the app was quietly taking them back off the screen. They are written now, and they reach everybody in the band.

Notes on your own songs were never affected, which is most of why this went unnoticed: the notes on the test band’s sheet had been put there by hand, so what anyone had ever watched was notes being read.

Notes look like what they are

Each note is a bubble with its point resting on the word it is about, drawn in the colour of whoever wrote it. Two people writing on the same line get two bubbles, one above the other, each still pointing at its own word — before, a line with several notes showed a single mark with a number in it, in one person’s colour, and a list underneath.

They sit above the line now rather than below it, because a note is read before the bar it is about: “count four” arriving underneath the words you are counting into has arrived too late. If you would rather the words never moved down the page, there is a switch in Settings.

To correct a note, or to rub it out, hold it. The two little words that used to sit on every bubble are gone.

Two gestures that were in each other’s way

A chord’s shape is a double tap now, and holding a chord still works. One tap opens the notes on that line — anywhere on the line, including over a chord, because a gesture with an exception nobody can describe is not a gesture anybody learns.

And the song no longer starts because you touched the page. It starts from the button, from a keyboard, or from a page-turner pedal. A stand gets touched for every other reason there is.

If you are learning the song

There is a mode that draws a small fretboard over every chord that has one. It is off unless you ask for it: it costs width, the words spread to make room, and somebody who reads chord names does not want six diagrams on every line.

2026.9.14 — beta, 6 September 2026

The band’s folder is back, and it is in Settings

Point bandcue at a directory you already sync — Drive, Nextcloud, Syncthing, a shared OneDrive — and that folder is the band’s book: one ChordPro file per song, readable without this app, with no account, no membership and no server of ours in the way. Whoever can see the folder is the band.

It came off the Band tab on 30 August, when that tab became the people in it, and nothing took its place. So for a week bandcue had a feature this site, its brief and its own rules all call the default, and no way anywhere to reach it. It matters most where there is no alternative: the version served from the F-Droid repository does not carry the cloud library, which leaves the folder as the only way a band there shares a book.

The screen is the one it always was. Which directory, and whether it can still be opened — bound and readable are not the same thing, and a provider that has signed you out leaves a name the app can print and a folder it cannot read. What is in it, what is only on this phone, and the two buttons. Pushing and pulling are taps and never a background sync: a pull leaves a song you already have exactly as it is, because two versions of one song is the band’s decision.

A setlist can be changed, not only made

Rename it. Add songs and take them out. Write the note you want beside each one — count in 4, capo 3, second chorus twice — set the slot you have been given, and delete the set when the gig is over.

Until this release a setlist could be made, duplicated and dragged into order, and nothing else. No rename, no way to add or remove a song, no way to delete one at all — and the two things the tab has always drawn, the note on a row and of 45:00 · 6:20 to spare, could be set from nowhere. The running total against the length of your slot is the question this screen exists to answer, and the length was not askable.

The order stays where it was, on the tab, under a finger. Everything on the new screen writes as you use it: there is no Save button, because a screen that loses a note to a back gesture is worse than a few more writes to a small file.

Your setlists are in the cloud library too

One written on the phone is on the web and on your other device; one written there is here. The name and the order travel, because that is what the library holds — the per-song notes and the slot stay on this phone, where they belong: a note on a song in a set is one player’s.

A setlist deleted anywhere goes everywhere, and a phone that has never synced deletes nothing. If two people change one setlist between two syncs the library’s version stands and yours is kept beside it as a copy: nothing is written over, and two orders side by side is a thing anybody settles in ten seconds.

Drawn at the right size, and reachable

Chord diagrams were drawn at about a third of their size on any modern screen: the fretboard followed the screen’s density and the nut, the strings and the finger dots did not. A diagram here is read as an instruction and on a stage it gets played.

The keyboard no longer covers the bottom of the editor — the one screen whose entire content is a text field. The screen that asks which of two versions of a song to keep can be scrolled to its own buttons. The tempo pad and the key picker no longer close when a tap misses the button, which on the pad was throwing away every beat you had tapped.

Fixed

What Pro sells is what Pro is

Scrolling that follows the bars is free — it is the autoscroll doing its one job — and the Pro screen was still listing it. Two features that are designed and not built, transposition that knows instruments and help when two edits collide, say “Coming” the way the watch remote already did. More than one setlist and duplicating one for the next gig are what they have always said they were, and are now actually asked for: the ceiling is on making a new setlist, never on the ones you already have, and an install that already had a second one keeps them.

2026.9.13 — beta, 6 September 2026

Songs scroll in musical time

One speed for a whole sheet is only right for a song whose parts are as long as they are tall, and no song is: a chorus of four bars written over eight lines and a solo of thirty-two written over two are the same music at the same tempo and nothing like the same height. So a sheet scrolled at one speed reaches the solo far too early and crawls through it, then runs at the last chorus.

Now a sheet can say what it has always known. {time: 4/4} is read as the time signature — which is what it means everywhere else, and what bandcue read as the song’s length until this release — and each part carries its own bar count, taken from the bar lines it already has or written down with {bars: 8} for the sheets from a chord site that have none. Where every part says how long it is, each one gets the share of the song that its bars are of the song’s bars, and covers its own stretch of the page in exactly that time.

A drag still takes over immediately and the scroll carries on from where your finger left it — it is a speed and never a position, so nothing drags the sheet back to where a clock thinks it ought to be. One part short and the whole sheet scrolls evenly, as before: a song that scrolls right for two verses and wrong for the chorus looks like a song that scrolls, and finds out on a stage.

There is a screen for filling the bars in, from the tempo pad, and it says whether the song has enough for the scroll to follow it. What it writes goes into the sheet itself, so the band gets it with the song.

The tempo, heard instead of tapped

Listen to the room on the tempo pad, off until you press it, with a level meter and a reading that settles while it listens. It offers a tempo on a button and never applies one: an octave is a guess by nature, since 90 and 180 are the same evidence.

It hears when things happen and not what they are. Recognising words would be continuous speech recognition, offline, over a band playing, which is not a thing a phone does — and Android’s own recogniser wants the network, which this app is built not to need.

Your account has a screen, and signing out asks about the songs

The circle in the corner opens it: who you are, what a band calls you, the addresses on the account, what you have paid for, and a way out that says what it does. It used to lead to the Band tab, where the way out was a second button inside the box that opens when you tap your own name — so a phone signed in as the wrong person had no way out anybody could find.

Signing out ends the session and disconnects the cloud library, and nothing is deleted anywhere by either. What is left is the phone itself, which holds every sheet that was pulled down — so the confirmation asks, with the two numbers that decide it: how many songs are on this phone, and how many of those the cloud library has never had a copy of. Those last ones have nowhere to come back from, and the screen says so rather than reassuring you with a sentence that is true of somebody else’s phone.

Five switches for a phone on a stand

Full screen on a song, the screen kept on for the whole app rather than only for a sheet, the time in the corner the status bar was hidden from, where you are in the set — 3 / 14 — and the next song a press away. All of them off until you turn them on: it is a mode for a gig, and a first launch that hid the clock and held the screen awake would be assuming things about somebody who has not played a note with it yet.

A note goes where you put it

Hold a finger on the words and the word under it is marked; move the finger and the mark follows; let go and the note opens, attached to those words rather than to the whole line. A note has always been anchored to a quote — that is how it finds its place again in a sheet somebody else has been editing — and until now the phone could only ever quote a whole line, because the gesture could not say anything finer.

Fixed

A stage started as “anybody can move it” moved nobody’s sheet. Every phone was allowed to move it, which is the point of that arrangement, and each of them reported where it was without applying what it was sent. A phone follows now unless it started the stage, and it follows even then under “anybody”, because that is not two leaders — it is none, and the last move wins.

A tap during a song brings the controls back. It was meant to and was undone on the very next frame, so the only way to reach them was to stop the song. A pedal could stop working when the phone was turned on its side, and a phone that lost signal for a moment could drop off the stage it had just rejoined.

Signing out lets go of the cloud library, so the next person to sign in on a phone opens their own — and signing back in is a sync rather than a question about every song. Dragging a song in a set could move a different pair, and a set’s running time counted songs that are not on the phone. A zipped book with the same song in two folders comes in whole. The tuner keeps the screen on while you use it, and an advert can no longer play on from the browser after the app has drawn its own list of search results over it.

The count-in counts seconds, which it did not: three seconds took two and a half. It is a choice of none, one, two or three now, because nobody counts a song in for six.

2026.9.12 — beta, 5 September 2026

A first run, and the terms are part of it

A new install opens on three short steps: what bandcue is, the two diagnostics switches, and an acceptance of the terms of service and the privacy policy, which the Start button is disabled without. The terms page has always said that installing the app means accepting them — that was the ordinary arrangement for an app whose songs never left the device, and it stopped being enough when the cloud library arrived.

The diagnostics question is part of that flow instead of a sheet that opened on top of your library a second after the app did. An update does not put a first run in front of anybody who has already used the app.

2026.9.11 — beta, 5 September 2026

Signing in with Google says what happened

Every failure was a silent no-op, identical to closing the sheet yourself: a phone that cannot do it at all said nothing, and the button looked broken for a reason nobody could see. Now the screen says which it was, and offers the address-and-code way in.

The account moved into a bar

The circle used to float over every screen, which is why the search field on the library was shortened to make room for it and no other screen was. It is in a bar now that every screen sits under, and the search field has its full width back.

2026.9.10 — beta, 4 September 2026

Housekeeping

Nothing in this release changes what the app does. It brings a years-out-of-date piece of Google’s own code up to date — a piece only the store build carries, and one Google had started warning about. The F-Droid build never carried it at all, and differs from the last one only by its version number.

2026.9.9 — beta, 4 September 2026

The app asks about diagnostics, and usage statistics are on

Crash reports and usage statistics are both on when you install bandcue, and the app puts the question on screen once, on the first launch, before you have used it: two switches and what each one sends. Leave them, or move either — they are in Settings for ever afterwards.

Usage statistics were off by default until now. The reason for changing is not that the old reason was bad — they do carry the Android Advertising ID, and bandcue logs no events of its own — but that every app in this family now answers this the same way, and a switch you are shown before you have used the app is a fairer thing than a switch nobody mentions. The privacy page says all of this, including the argument for the old default.

The F-Droid build contains neither, and never has.

2026.9.8 — beta, 4 September 2026

Fixed: the first question the app asks had an unreachable button

On a tall phone, the sheet that asks about diagnostics on the very first launch put its own button below the bottom of the screen, and would not scroll far enough to bring it up. Back still closed it, so nothing was stuck — but the only control on the first screen anybody sees was invisible.

New pictures on the store

Taken from this build, and in Italian for the Italian listing instead of Italian captions over English screens. There are tablet ones for the first time, which show the layout a wide screen actually gets: the library open on the left and the song on the right.

2026.9.7 — beta, 3 September 2026

The demo account behaves like an account

The library a store’s reviewers are handed used to refuse every change. That was meant as a safeguard — its address and code are written down in a review form — and it had a cost nobody saw until it was measured against the form itself: a reviewer who opened it and added a song would have been told no, and your phone, signed into it, quietly stopped uploading.

It takes changes now, like any other library, and it is put back to its five songs every night. Nothing you do to it is permanent, and nothing you do to it fails.

2026.9.6 — beta, 3 September 2026

Your library and the cloud are the same library, both ways

Delete a song here and it leaves the cloud. Delete it on another phone and it leaves this one. Until now a deletion travelled in one direction only, so a song you had thrown away came back on the next sync and looked like a bug in your own memory.

There is no room any more, only your band

The six-character code is gone, and so is the idea it belonged to. The Band tab lists the bands you are in; open one and you are looking at the songs and the setlists that belong to it.

Open one of those songs and bandcue asks whether the band is playing it together. Say yes and everybody else’s phone tunes in on its own and starts scrolling with you — same tempo, same place on the page. Whoever starts it chooses who may move it: only them, or anybody in the band. That choice is remembered, so the way your band works becomes the way it opens next time.

While you are on the band’s screen you can see who else is there, live.

One account, one library

“Connect to a library” is gone, and so is the 64-character secret it asked for. Sign in — with Google, or with a code sent to your address — and your library is simply there. Nothing to paste, nothing to write down, nothing to lose.

Find a song without leaving the app

bandcue can search Ultimate Guitar and draw the results itself: artist, title, and how many people voted for that version. Pick one and you read it before you decide whether to keep it. The results that are not text at all — Guitar Pro files, official tabs, Power tabs — are left out, because they were what broke this the last time you tried it.

Nothing is fetched on your behalf and nothing is saved until you say so. What the app does is what it has always done: it hands you the song you went looking for and lets you keep it.

The phones on your library, and the ones that are not

The free plan syncs one device. That was a trap rather than a limit: clearing an app’s data gives a phone a new identity, the old one kept the slot forever, and the only ways out were paying or starting again. You can now see the devices on your library and take a slot back.

There is also a dot on your account whenever something on this phone has not gone up yet — a song written on a train is still only here, and the app says so instead of implying otherwise.

Smaller things

A coloured ring around your picture while your subscription is live. The library indexes by title or by artist, with the letters down the left to jump by. You can pick what a band calls you, and whether they see your first name or all of it. A new install starts with Amazing Grace, When the Saints Go Marching In and Silent Night.

And the web app speaks Italian. It opens in English, which is what it is written in, and offers the switch once if your browser reads Italian.

Fixed

Your Google picture appeared one launch late. Editing a song did nothing at all — the sheet was drawn on top of the editor. A song could not be deleted, though Settings said it could. The account button sat five points above the middle of the search field. And the first sync after signing in cancelled itself, so a library that should have arrived did not.

2026.9.5 — beta, 2 September 2026

The free trial says what it costs

Seven days free, and the screen said little more than that. It says the rest now, in the place where you decide: that the free days are the whole of Pro with nothing held back, what it costs a month or a year once they end, that it renews on its own, and that cancelling in Google Play before the last free day costs you nothing.

Diagnostics, with a switch each

Settings has a Diagnostics section now, and the reason it exists is a mistake rather than a feature. The Play build has been sending crash reports and usage statistics since August, from first launch, with no way to turn either off — and this page said there were none. The page was corrected; these are the switches that make the correction true.

Crash reports are on. A report carries a stack trace, a device model and an app version — nothing about you, and never your songs — and it is what makes an app stop being broken.

Usage statistics are off. They carry the Android advertising identifier, and bandcue records no events of its own, so what turning them on would send is Google’s automatic collection and nothing that was asked for.

The F-Droid build has neither and cannot: it contains no Google libraries at all.

Three songs to start with

A new install arrives with Amazing Grace, Scarborough Fair and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, so the first screen is a sheet rather than an empty list. All three are long out of copyright — the test for what ships inside an app is not whether a song is well known but whether anybody owns it. They are ordinary songs once they are in: edit them, transpose them, delete them. A deleted one stays deleted, and Settings puts them back.

2026.9.4 — beta, 2 September 2026

Sign in with Google works

It has been in the app since August and had never once appeared. The build was missing the one setting the button needs, so it was compiled out of every release — including the ones on Google Play — and nothing anywhere said so. That is deliberate, as a rule: a sign-in button that cannot work is worse than no button. It is also exactly why it went unnoticed for weeks.

Signing in brings your library with it

A cloud library used to be reached by one thing: a 64-character secret the app showed you once, which nobody — including us — could ever give back. It still works that way if that is how you started. But if you have an account, your library now follows it: sign in on a new phone, or in a browser, and it is there.

The F-Droid build has no Google button and will not get one — it contains no Google libraries at all, which is the only promise worth making about a build you did not compile yourself. The address-and-code sign-in works there, and reaches the same account.

2026.9.3 — beta, 2 September 2026

A new look for the icon

The mark is one blue gradient from end to end now, where it used to be dark ink with a blue accent on it. And it sits where the eye reads it as centred: the family framed its icons by a rule worked out on paper until now, and that rule has been replaced by one measured against a person moving each mark until it looked right.

The status bar and the navigation bar follow bandcue’s own theme instead of the phone’s, so a dark app no longer sits under light system bars.

2026.9.2 — beta, 1 September 2026

A new icon

The mark is the same one. What changed is how it is placed: every app in this family now frames its mark by a single rule — centred so the space around it is even all the way round, and stopping the same distance short of the circle a launcher masks with. Ten icons that were each framed by hand now line up with one another on a home screen.

The blue is a gradient rather than a flat tone, and there is a dark copy of the icon for dark surfaces. Nothing else changed in this release.

2026.9.1 — beta, 1 September 2026

Three things the Pro screen said were coming

Import a whole folder. Point at a directory and everything in it — and in the folders inside it, four deep — comes in at once. Every other way in is one gesture per song, which is an honest price for one song and an absurd one for the forty you arrive with. What comes in is decided by reading the file, not by its name: chord sheets are kept under every extension and none, so what gets skipped is the photographs, the recordings and the archives, and everything else is opened.

A widget on the home screen. The songs you had open last, one tap from the stand. That tap is the thirty seconds before a set, which is the one moment nobody wants to go looking. It reads the same files the library does, so it cannot tell you something the app would not.

A PDF beside a song. The horn part, the road map, the chart somebody handed you on paper. It travels with the song and opens in whatever reads PDFs on your phone, and it never turns into an entry of its own — the library stays chord sheets, because scrolling, transposing and reading chords are things you can only do to text. It is copied when you attach it, so it still opens at the gig and not only at the rehearsal where you picked it, and it is never written into the folder the band shares.

The fourth thing on that list, the watch remote, is still coming.

The app was never talking to its own store

On F-Droid this was the worse half: the ten-song limit was being enforced on a build that has no way to take money at all, so it could not be lifted by paying, by asking, or by anything else. On Google Play the Pro screen came up with no prices — “Google Play did not answer with a price” — and a subscription bought on another phone was never found. One missing call, and it had been missing since the app first had a Pro screen.

2026.8.16 — beta, 31 August 2026

Crash reports, on the Play build

A crash on somebody else’s phone used to be a crash nobody could see. The Play build now sends one when it happens. The F-Droid build sends nothing — it has the report screen, which asks first, and that is the whole of it there.

2026.8.15 — beta, 31 August 2026

The icon is on white again

It spent a few hours that day on the pale grey the rest of the family uses, and came back. Beside the white tile Android draws around an icon the grey read as dirt — the kind of thing you settle by looking at a home screen rather than by reading a palette. The drawing itself did not move.

2026.8.14 — beta, 31 August 2026

Pro can be bought

The app had named its products for a while and had no way to sell them: the only Pro anywhere was a line on the account screen telling you whether you had it. There is a proper screen now, under Info — what it costs, what it opens, and what stays free whatever happens.

It is under Info and nowhere else. A prompt to buy something has no business appearing on a screen somebody is reading from on a stage.

Seven days free, monthly or yearly, and the app reads that number from the store rather than claiming it.

Four of the nine were not built

Batch import, PDF attachments, the widget and the watch remote were behind the paywall and did not exist. They said “Coming” first rather than last, because the screen draws a tick beside every line and a tick three words ahead of a contradiction is a tick that wins. Three of the four arrived in 2026.9.1.

2026.8.13 — beta, 31 August 2026

A song you already have

Share the same sheet twice and it is recognised as the same song, instead of sitting in the library twice.

An import that outlives the screen

Reading a photograph of a page takes seconds on an old phone, and fetching one from a chord site takes as long as that site does. Backing out while either was running used to throw the work away silently. Now it finishes, and tells you when it lands — unless you are looking at the app, in which case the song simply opens in front of you.

A guitar tab is a grid

It was being read as chords, and it is not.

2026.8.12 — beta, 30 August 2026

A tuner

Under Settings → Tools. Guitar and ukulele, off the phone’s microphone, accurate to about a fifth of a cent. It listens for the note’s period rather than for the loudest frequency, because on a low E the loudest frequency is not the note. The microphone is asked for when you open the tuner and never at launch, and it is let go the moment you leave.

Tap the tempo, and set the key

Four taps on the beat gives a bpm, and it is written into the song. Where the sheet has bar lines the app can work out how long the song runs and offers that as one more tap — offered, not applied, because a length that is wrong is a scroll that arrives at the last chorus a verse early. A sheet with no bar lines says so instead of guessing.

The key is a fact about the song, so it goes into the file and the whole band gets it. The guess from the chords is one tap away. What stays on your phone is the capo and the transposition, which are facts about you.

A pedal that scrolls by lines

One to twelve, four by default. Counted in lines and not in pixels, so four then four is eight lines however tall they were.

A second address on one account

Sign in with Google and attach the address you have always used here — one subscription, one set of bands. Both are needed: the session says whose account it is, and a code sent to the mailbox says the address is yours.

An invitation reaches you with the app closed

It is the one thing here that has to. An invitation is somebody else’s action at a moment you cannot predict, and until it is answered the band is a person short. Checked every six hours on an alarm that never wakes the phone, said once, and not at all when nobody is signed in.

Notes open themselves when the scroll starts

Nobody taps a marker on a stand. They all open as the scroll begins rather than one at a time as it reaches them, so the sheet grows once before anybody is reading it instead of nudging the line under your eye downwards every few seconds. Hiding notes still wins over all of this.

And

Screens slide instead of replacing the app between two frames. The icon is new — chords over lyrics, in the colours the other nine apps here use — and there is a status-bar icon drawn for that size instead of a launcher icon shrunk into it. The bar under the sheet wraps instead of pushing the notes toggle and the stage theme off the right edge of an upright phone, which is the shape that screen matters most in. Closing a sheet and immediately tapping the library no longer starts the count-in on the sheet that was closing. And the tuner reads zero cents on a string that is in tune, which it did not quite do.

2026.8.11 — beta, 30 August 2026

Who is in the band

Band → Who is in the band. Start a band, and invite people to it by email. Invitations addressed to you arrive on the same screen, with accept and decline. An owner can see who is in it and take somebody out; anybody can leave; one address can be in several bands.

An invitation goes to an address, not to an account. Most of the people you would ask have never installed any of this, and being told to find an account first would be being told to do the impossible. The invitation waits at the address for as long as it takes.

Joining takes the six digits out of that email. Proving your address says the mailbox is yours; the digits say you read the message that was sent to you. Saying no needs nothing — refusing something you were sent is not a claim.

None of it gives anybody your songs

Whoever can see the shared folder is still the band, and that has not changed. Leaving a band here takes no folder away from anybody, and joining one hands over nothing. The list of names lives in a different service — the one that already knows how to send you a code — and it has never seen a chord sheet. bandcue’s own service holds a library against a device id and never against a name, and this release keeps it that way.

And nobody has to sign in. A shared folder and a room are the whole of playing together, and neither has ever needed anybody’s name.

2026.8.10 — beta, 30 August 2026

Playing together

Band → Playing together. One phone opens a room and reads out six letters; the others type them in. From then on the room is on one song and one line: whoever is leading turns the page for the band, and a stand that joins in the third verse lands in the third verse.

Reach down to look ahead and the sheet stops following you until you let go. Looking at the next verse is something you did on purpose, and a page that dragged itself back under your thumb would be unusable.

One tempo, counted on every phone

The click does not come over the network. What crosses it is a tempo map — a bpm, a bar length, and the instant beat zero fell on the room’s clock — and each phone works out its own beats from that. Nothing is sent per beat, so nobody’s click can drift behind somebody’s wifi.

Each stand shows how well its clock is lined up, and says so when it is too loose to click on. Two clicks twenty milliseconds apart are heard as two clicks, so a phone that can only place the beat to within forty says so rather than counting confidently in the wrong place. A Bluetooth speaker gets its own warning: the delay is in the speaker, not in the room.

What the room does not carry

Never a sheet. It carries a file name your own folder already has, a line number, a key and a tempo. The songs stay where they are, which is the same answer bandcue gives everywhere else.

And the six letters are not a password — anybody holding them can see the room’s line and its tempo, which is exactly why nothing that could identify what you are playing goes through it.

2026.8.9 — beta, 29 August 2026

The page turner works

Settings → Page turner. Choose what a press does in each direction — a page, the scroll, the next song, or nothing — and press your pedal into the box at the bottom to see what it is actually sending. That last part is the point: pedals are set by a switch on their underside, in modes named in a leaflet nobody kept, so “it does not work” becomes “it is sending Media next” in one press.

The volume keys are the part that was missing. Most pedals come in the mode that sends them, and until now bandcue never saw them at all — Android turns them into a volume change before an app is asked. bandcue takes them now, but only while a sheet is open, and only while you leave the setting on. Everywhere else in the app they stay the volume, and if you play a backing track from the same phone you can switch even the sheet back.

2026.8.8 — beta, 29 August 2026

Bringing a book over from another app

“Open a backup” is its own route on the Add songs screen now. Somebody arriving from another song book app is not looking for a file — they are looking for the name of the app they are leaving, and the row says which ones bandcue reads.

A .bin opens. Those backups are usually the app’s own database, so bandcue reads it as one: it looks through the tables for the one that actually holds chord sheets, and takes the titles from beside them. Nothing about it is assumed — a file that turns out not to be a song book imports nothing at all rather than three hundred rows of nonsense.

And a file bandcue cannot read now says so. It used to do nothing, which looked exactly like losing your song.

2026.8.7 — beta, 29 August 2026

No byline on the Info tab

The author’s name and their personal site have come out of the Info card. What it says now is what the app is, which version you have, and where its own site is — which is what anybody opens that screen for.

2026.8.6 — beta, 29 August 2026

A cloud library, if you want one. An optional backup and sync, from Settings → Page turner & backup. A library is reached by a secret your phone keeps, which is never stored, so nothing in the database says how to open one. Free holds ten songs on one device; Pro lifts both, and what you are paying for is storage rather than anybody’s song.

Written on 29 August, this entry promised that songs were encrypted on the phone with a phrase we were never told. That design was dropped on 30 August and never shipped — the service can read what you put in the cloud library. The entry has been corrected rather than left standing, because a changelog is read as a description of the app you have. What the service does and does not do is on the privacy page.

The same library in a browser, at bandcue-app.gpm.name. Organise it, edit it, transpose it and write your own notes on it with a screen and a keyboard; it decrypts in the tab. A browser counts as a second device, which is why it is part of Pro.

Nothing about any of this is required. With it switched off — or with no signal at all — the phone has your whole book and your whole scroll, exactly as before.

2026.8.5 — beta, 29 August 2026

A tablet layout. At the width of a tablet the sheet stops covering the window and takes the right half, with your library or your setlist still on the left: you can line up the next song while the current one is in front of you. The bar at the bottom becomes a rail down the side, with the name of every screen next to its icon.

On a phone nothing moves.

2026.8.4 — beta, 28 August 2026

The app does the job now. The first three releases were a shell with five tabs saying what they would be; this one puts songs in and scrolls them.

Songs get in four ways — shared from your browser, pasted, opened as a file, or typed in the editor — and bandcue still fetches nothing itself. What you paste can be a chord site’s plain text, with the chords sitting above the words, or ChordPro; both are read, and the text you gave it is kept exactly as it arrived, so a sheet that comes out wrong is never a song that is gone.

A SongbookPro backup opens whole, songs and setlists, with each song’s key, capo, length and the key you were playing it in.

The sheet scrolls itself at the length you set. Not a speed: you say how long the song runs, so a larger font or a transposition that reflows a line does not change how fast it moves. There is a count-in, a tap pauses, the controls get out of the way while it runs, and it stops at the last line.

Transposition and capo are per song and stay on this phone. The file keeps the key it was written in, because the folder it lives in is the whole band’s.

The stage theme: black paper and amber chords, for a screen on a stand two metres away.

Hold a chord and it shows you where it is, on a guitar and on a ukulele.

Setlists with the running total against the length of your slot, drag to reorder, and the next song a tap away on the sheet.

The band’s folder: point bandcue at a directory you already sync and that folder is the book — one ChordPro file per song, no account and no server of ours. Export is a zip of ChordPro, always available and always free.

Also: any HID page turner works, and the bar at the top is gone — every screen opens with its own name and the bar was saying it twice.

2026.8.3 — beta, 28 August 2026

A new look, shared with the other apps here: paper and slate, one accent, one typeface, and thin rules where Android puts shadows. Everything reads a size larger. The colours no longer follow your wallpaper — these apps have one design now rather than two half-maintained ones.

2026.8.2 — beta, 28 August 2026

The Info tab and the cards every screen is drawn on are shared with the other apps here: same blocks, same spacing, the app’s own mark above its name, and which build you are running beside the version.

2026.8.1 — beta, 28 August 2026

The first build: the shell, the navigation and the Info tab. Nothing showed a chord sheet yet.