What's new in Captrice - June 2025
Welcome to the June edition of the Captrice newsletter. Not many features were released this month. I shifted focus from development to marketing/promotion of the app for a bit.
It was a good month in terms of personal practice too. I started a "30-day challenge" i.e. to practice on all 30 days of June for at least 30 minutes daily. For motivation and accountability, I invited my musician friends to the Captrice Telegram group to participate in the challenge. Must admit that doing it in a group does help. I plan to continue the challenge in July as well. If you’d like to be invited to the Telegram group, just send me an email. It’s open for all instruments and using Captrice is optional.
While I managed only 23 days of practice, I crossed an important personal milestone: alternate picking 8th note triplets at 200 bpm. I've always struggled with alternate picking at higher speeds, so it was an "achievement unlocked" moment for me. I’ve uploaded a couple of videos on Mastodon (please excuse the poor audio quality). Should have recorded videos right from the beginning!
Links to library collections can now be shared
Earlier, the library collections did not have shareable URLs, which is now fixed. It’s not a user facing improvement, but it makes the library discoverable through google and other search engines.
It was a significant change that touched several parts of the system and I’m glad to have gotten it out of the way.
Collection filter on analytics page
On the analytics page, there’s a drop down to view charts for a particular collection only. In context of a single collection, the “Speed v/s Duration” chart makes much more sense.
Adjust tempo without capturing an entry
The “BPM ±” field label is turned into a link that can be used to manually adjust the tempo. I find this useful for some collections where it’s easier to practice all exercises at one tempo before moving to a higher tempo.
Library additions
Descending triad shapes by Warren Mendonsa a.k.a Blackstratblues
Tip of the month
While practicing legato exercises, I discovered that repeatedly playing one shape at increasing speeds quickly tires my fingers. The duration and accuracy suffer, not from lack of skill, but from fatigue. Instead, I can practice much longer by cycling through all shapes at the same tempo before speeding up.
The manual tempo adjustment feature (clicking the "BPM ±" label) is useful here.
What's next?
I am planning to release a couple of new features by the end of July:
Journal/note-taking functionality that I had briefly mentioned in the previous issue of the newsletter.
User preferences: It will let users store settings such as “whether or not capture mode should be enabled by default” etc.
I also hope to resume work on device sync functionality soon.
If you’ve reached this far, thank you for reading. Please do share your feedback at vineet@captrice.io or naikvin@gmail.com.
More updates next month!