Clarion 2.1 is available now from the Clarion home page. I also intend to submit this version to the Mac App Store, for what will be Clarion’s debut on the store.

Clarion is Red Sweater’s utility for practicing the recognition of musical intervals (the distances between two pitches). It’s the oldest of my shipping apps, and over the past several years I had lost sight of how far into disrepair it had fallen. Very cool features such as its ability to customize from a variety of built-in synthesizer sounds were no longer functioning. I’ve brought that back in Clarion 2.1:

Additionally, Clarion had not seen any updates since the advent of Apple’s high-resolution “Retina” displays. I’ve updated the graphics in Clarion’s main quiz window to look sharp on these screens:

The playful VU-meter-styled gauge in the middle of the screen reflects your overall accuracy for a given quiz session. Up until now, the “needle” just jumped to its new location whenever you made a guess, but starting with 2.1, the needle animates smoothly to the new location, making a further approximation of its real-world equivalent.

Complete list of changes in 2.1:

• Screen graphics optimized for Macs with “Retina” displays
• Slight update to UI incorporates always-on piano keyboard in main window
• Fix a bug that caused many instrument names to be listed as “Unknown Category”
• Now recovers gracefully from bad synth settings that could be set in previous versions
• Fix a bug that prevented changing Apple Synthesizer settings on recent OS X versions
• Now supports automatic checking for future software updates

If you want to develop your ear for musical intervals, give Clarion a try!

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