Band Companion
An app for bands that records rehearsals and turns them into study material: takes filed by song, A/B looping, pitch shifting and categorised markers.
Band Companion is an app for bands that records rehearsals and turns them into working material: every song in the repertoire has its own takes, filed by date, along with everything needed to study it. It is the project we have in hand right now; the first version ships for Android, with the web client to follow.
Recording without thinking about it
You pick the song, press record, and the app keeps recording with the screen off. When you stop, the take shows up in the list straight away and the tempo analysis runs separately: once it finishes, the BPM is folded into the file name. If you already have audio from old rehearsals on your phone, twenty files import at once into a song.
A player for studying, not for listening
A waveform accurate to the millisecond, gapless A/B looping, and pitch (±12 semitones) and tempo (0.5×–1.5×) that move independently of each other. Markers carry a category and an author — “mistakes to fix”, “good moments” — and filter by both; during a rehearsal you drop them with a Bluetooth pedal, without touching the phone.
Deciding which take is the one
Every take is rated from 0 to 5 and one is flagged as the song’s definitive one, so when you come back three months later you know which to play. Any of them exports to MP3 and goes out through the system share sheet to the band’s WhatsApp group.
Every song, a folder of its own
A song’s page holds its reference links (Spotify, YouTube), its sheet music and lyrics — as PDF or Markdown — and free-form notes in the style of Google Keep. PDFs take annotations by finger or stylus, and the annotated copy prints and shares exactly as it appears on screen.
Where the files live
Recordings are compressed to AAC before they go up — some fifteen times smaller than the WAV coming off the microphone — and land in a private store, organised by band and song. The app carries no credentials inside it: every upload and download goes through a short-lived link, issued only after checking that whoever asked for it belongs to the band that owns the files.