Band Companion — record your band’s rehearsals and study them song by song

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. The web client is already open at bandcompanion.net and the Android app is close behind; the account is the same on both sides. What follows is the tour of the screens, with captures of the app as it stands today.

Band, songs, takes

The repertoire is a list, not a folder: search it by title or artist, sort it by title, artist or date, and drag it into whatever order the band wants. Every song carries its key and its target tempo, and everyone in the band sees exactly the same thing.

The band’s repertoire list: every song with its key and its tempo

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 hangs off the right song and shows up in the list straight away; the tempo analysis runs separately and, once it finishes, the BPM sits next to the length. Every take is rated from 0 to 5 and one is flagged as the definitive one, so when you come back three months later you know which to play. If you already have audio from old rehearsals on your phone, twenty files import at once into a song.

A song’s takes with the date, the length, the detected BPM, the star rating and the “Final” button

A player for studying, not for listening

A waveform accurate to the millisecond — computed at record time, so the player never has to decode the audio to draw it — 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”, “arrangement notes” — and filter by both; during a rehearsal you drop them with a Bluetooth pedal, without touching the phone.

The study player with the waveform, the A/B loop, the pitch and tempo controls and the markers by category

Every song, a folder of its own

A song’s page holds, in tabs, its sheet music, its lyrics, its takes, its free-form notes and its reference links (Spotify, YouTube): no digging through three different apps when it is time to rehearse. PDFs take annotations on top with pencil, text and eraser, in four colours, and the original is never touched — annotations live separately and export merged when something needs printing.

A sheet-music PDF annotated by hand with coloured pencils inside the app

Gigs and setlists

A gig calendar with each one’s setlist: which songs, in what order, and the running order as a PDF to print and leave on stage. Setlists without a date work too, which is what you want for a rehearsal focused on half a dozen songs.

The gig calendar, with undated rehearsals listed underneath

There is no signal in the rehearsal room

It is a basement: the connection is bad or simply missing. The app records and saves to the device anyway, and sends the pending changes and files when the network comes back. The sync screen always says how many changes and how many files are left, which is the only way nobody goes home thinking they uploaded something that is still on their phone.

The sync screen: changes waiting to be sent and files waiting to be uploaded

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. Who sees which bands is not up to the app; the database decides it.

Free while you try it

In free mode everything stays on the device and costs nothing. When the band wants to share material — which is when the storage and the syncing come into play — it moves to a per-band plan. You can start at bandcompanion.net.