MusicDevelopments has announced a major update of RapidComposer and RapidComposer LE, their music prototyping application. The update focuses on improved chord selection and chord progression editing but it also contains several bug fixes.

Enhancements and bug fixes in the update (since v1.5):

• New chord selector and chord palette with many options.
• Progression editor was rewritten to provide more functionality e.g. chord suggestions, various coloring and preview options.
• New soundfonts (pad and bass) included for chord preview.
• New variation: Velocity Generator to set velocity values of a phrase/track by a function and its automatable parameters.
• New variation: MIDI Echo with swing option.
• Smart displaying of overlapped notes in two styles.
• Harmonization improvements: manual selection of chords to complement automatic harmonization decisions.
• Chord database cleaned up; dozens of new chords added; naming convention became 7b5#9 instead of 7-5+9.
• Selected phrase notes are displayed in shades of grey depending on velocity.
• New keyboard shortcuts: TAB (toggle phrase/note editing), '1', '2' (hide/show the left and middle panels.
• Beats counted from 1 instead of 0.
• Transposition is taken into account when glueing phrases.
• Bug fix: in some cases exported MIDI file had inaccurate timing.
• Bug fix: interval detection did not work properly.
• Bug fix: beat alignment was rewritten.
• Bug fix: several issues with Undo fixed.
• Bug fix: structure tab rendering fixed when velocity envelope was displayed in note editing mode.
• Bug fix: file selectors did not become the foreground window.