My daughter has started learning to sing. She'd been watching my son and me drum along to songs in SongCoach — dropping the kit out of the mix and playing over the top — and one evening she asked the obvious question: could she do the same thing with her voice, and sing along to a song with the vocals taken out?
That's this release. SongCoach v1.2.0 is out, and it grew almost entirely out of two things my kids wanted while practising.
Four stems, including vocals
Every song now separates into four rows instead of three:
- Full song — the reference mix,
- Drums — the kit on its own,
- Vocals — the voice on its own, and
- Backing — bass, keys and everything else, with the drums and vocals pulled out.
You blend them with a per-stem fader, so you can set up whatever you're working on. Mute the vocals and you've got a backing track to sing over; mute the drums and it's the whole song minus the kit; solo the vocals to really hear what the singer is doing. My daughter got her karaoke, my son and I kept our drum play-along — same song, everyone happy.
Markers — a heads-up for what's coming
The other idea came straight out of practising: you're playing along, and the big fill or the key change lands before you're ready for it. So now you can mark up a recording. Click the flag, click a spot on the waveform, and drop a marker — a line across all the stems with a small "i" badge — then name it: "guitar solo", "big fill", "key change". A live time tooltip follows your cursor while you place it so you can land it exactly, and you can click a marker's "i" later to rename or delete it. Markers are saved with the recording, so your annotations are there the next time you open it.
Bring your older recordings up to date
Anything you recorded before this release still shows three stems. Rather than make you re-record, there's a reprocess button in the player (the circular-arrows icon) that re-separates a song and adds the vocals and backing stems — it works from the full-song audio each recording already keeps, so nothing needs re-capturing, and your markers survive it. There's also a one-liner to upgrade the whole library at once from the source tree.
A bit of polish, too: the four stem rows sit on the clean light panel with each fader tinted its channel colour, and Apple Music mode's session panel gained a refresh control so finished songs turn up in the library without relaunching.
Still macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon, still free and open source. Grab SongCoach.dmg
from the releases page.