v0.23.0 — the backing singers get their own lane

Songs split on the computer now arrive with the lead singer and the backing vocals on separate lanes: mute the harmonies and sing over just the lead, or the other way round. The melody line follows the lead instead of slipping an octave down onto a harmony under it. Vocal training now hears the octave you actually sing. And a track of your own added on a Windows computer now plays on the phone instead of quietly going missing.

Песни, разделённые на компьютере, теперь приходят с солистом и бэк-вокалом на разных дорожках: выключите подпевки и пойте поверх одного солиста — или наоборот. Линия мелодии идёт за солистом и больше не проваливается на октаву вниз, на гармонию под ним. Вокальная тренировка теперь слышит ту октаву, которую вы действительно поёте. А своя дорожка, добавленная на компьютере с Windows, теперь играет и на телефоне, а не пропадает молча.

The choir has been singing into your microphone for years. This release hands
them their own. It changes every song you split from now on, fetches a new
splitter the first time it opens, and re-traces the melody line of every song
you already have, once, the first time you open it.

Mac and Windows:

• Every split separates the lead from the backing vocals. A split used to
  end with one Vocals lane with everybody in it. It now runs a second stage
  that takes that lane apart: Vocals is the lead singer, and Backing
  vocals sits right under it with the harmonies, the doubles and the "ooh"s.
  Mute the backing and sing over the lead, or mute the lead and sing it
  yourself with the harmonies still behind you. The two add back up to the
  original to within a rounding error, so nothing is lost and nothing is
  invented. One progress bar covers both stages. The second stage adds time to
  every split, and on Windows and Intel Macs, where it runs on the processor,
  it can take longer than the song itself.

• The melody line follows the lead singer. The pitch strip's melody line
  used to be traced from the whole vocal lane, and a harmony a third or a
  fifth under the lead would drag it an octave below the tune. Traced from the
  separated lead, those octave slips roughly halve across the 44 recordings we
  test with — on "Time", from 618 to 85. Every song you already have
  re-traces its line once, the first time you open it in 0.23.0: a few
  seconds, and it saves itself.

  One honest caveat. The separation hears musical roles, not people: where
  the lead is doubled, or sung in unison with the choir, some of it can land
  in Backing vocals, and the melody line then has gaps there. If a stretch
  looks thin, solo Vocals and listen.

• Songs you split before keep their six lanes until you ask. Their Split
  button turns amber — "Click to split for backing vocals" — and Separate
  backing vocals in its menu runs only the new second stage, on the vocals
  the song already has. The other lanes are left alone. Save keeps the result.

• The splitter needs one new download: about 350 MB on a Mac with Apple
  silicon, 290 MB on an Intel Mac, 360 MB on Windows. SingZ starts fetching it
  by itself the first time it opens after the update — on a metered
  connection, that is the moment to know about. Skip for now lets it finish
  in the background.

• Updating the splitter no longer deletes the old one first. Until now a
  splitter download removed the one you had before checking the new one, so a
  download that failed to unpack, or turned out to be one this version could
  not use, left nothing installed at all. The new one is now
  unpacked and checked beside the old, and swapped in only once it passes; if
  SingZ is closed halfway through the swap, the next launch puts back what was
  there.

• Separated songs are bigger. The lead and backing lanes are saved at full
  precision, uncompressed: the lead is the original minus the backing, and
  squeezing either through the 16-bit compressor would clip the few peaks that
  subtraction pushes past full scale. That is about 40 MB per minute of song
  for the pair — a four-minute song grows by roughly 150 MB, on your disk, on
  Google Drive, and on the phone when it downloads the song.

• Your own tracks added on Windows reach the phone and the Mac. A track
  added to a song on Windows was saved with a Windows-style path, which the
  phone refused and a Mac went looking for under a file name with a backslash
  in it, so the lane quietly vanished everywhere but Windows. Both read that
  spelling now, and the next Save writes it the portable way.

• Note names in the pitch strip stay readable. With Note bars on, a song
  with a wide range squeezed the rows until every note name disappeared, and
  a long note that started off the left edge lost its name too. They stay now,
  and a held note carries its name on the part you can see.

• Settings says which microphone capture is in use. When SingZ cannot use
  its own microphone capture and falls back to the browser's, the microphone
  section now says so and why — worth knowing on a multi-channel interface,
  since the browser's can offer fewer inputs.

Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android:

• Vocal training hears the octave you sing. The pitch detector sometimes
  heard an overtone of your voice instead of the note, and training quietly
  folded any reading an octave or a harmonic away back onto the target. That
  hid the detector's mistakes, and it also counted the right note in the
  wrong octave as a hit. The detector now tells a note from its overtones by
  itself and the fold is gone, so an octave off reads as an octave off. A note
  also has to be on target at the moment it locks, not merely have spent long
  enough there before wandering off.

iPhone and Android:

• A separated song plays the way it does on the computer, with Backing
  vocals directly under Vocals, and your own tracks added on Windows now load
  instead of going missing.