RoGame Software (www.rogame.com) has released BandMaster for Mac OS X, a tool for improvising musicians. It requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or higher and costs US$29.99. It’s available worldwide exclusively through the Mac App Store in the Music category.
BandMaster creates a virtual backing band from songs created in the application’s editor. It features looping options, a timeline editor, chorus-based time scale and transposition settings, chord analysis, a metronome mode and more. With BandMaster musicians have the ability to create a realistic practice session that for once takes the entire piece into account, according to the folks at RoGame.
BandMaster consists of three main parts: a control strip with an array of playback controls, a timeline editor and a songform view. The timeline editor can be hidden to just display the song form and control strip. Song creation is template-based. Included are six base groups with 26 templates containing various blues forms, variations of the 32 measure AABA form and more. An additional 1,100 song form templates based on common standards are available for download free of charge.