What's New — Aug 4

Most of this update is about the first ten minutes.

I spent a day walking through EchoVQ as if I'd just signed up — new account, no students, nothing in my library — and it wasn't good. The first thing a new teacher saw was five statistics that all said zero, a checklist whose opening step pointed at a page we're retiring, and no explanation of what any of it was for. So I've rebuilt that first run, and fixed a fair few things I found while I was in there.

See a song come apart

There's now a short guided tour on the sample song. It walks you through what EchoVQ actually pulls out of a track — the four separate parts, the backing track once the vocal drops out, the melody laid out note by note, the lyrics in time, the chords, the lead sheet — and it does it on the real player, not a video.

Nothing runs on a timer. Each step waits for you, and where there's something to actually do, doing it is what moves you on. When it tells you the vocal can come out, you mute it yourself and hear the backing track appear. You finish having used the thing rather than watched it.

It's about two minutes, and you can skip it or replay it any time from your getting-started list.

While I was in there I found the drop-and-split animation on that page had quietly stopped working back in July, when we moved everyone to the new player. It's back.

A sample student

If you're not ready to invite a real student yet — and most people aren't on day one — you can now add a sample one.

They come with six weeks of made-up practice history, so you can see what a student's progress actually looks like coming back to you: where they improve quickly, where they plateau, and the bad week that every real student has. You can switch into their account and see exactly what they see. Remove them whenever you like, in one click.

They can't sign in, they can't record, and they don't count towards anything on your account. The numbers on their progress chart are invented, and the page says so — it's there to show you how to read a real one.

Your library leads with splitting a song

Almost everyone adds material by splitting a song rather than uploading an exercise, but the two buttons sat side by side looking equally important. Split Song now leads.

I've also taken the public exercise library out of the teacher sidebar. Having two doors to "find something to teach with" wasn't helping anyone, and your own Library is the one that matters.

Clearer about where your account stands

A few things here were plainly wrong and I want to be straight about them.

The badge in the corner told every teacher their access was "included with your students" — including teachers who had no students at all. Now it tells you the truth: you're free while you have an active student, and it says which of those is keeping you going.

If you're getting close to needing a student, you'll get told before anything changes, not after. That warning existed in the code but had never actually been shown to anyone, which is a fairly embarrassing thing to find. It works now.

And your setup window now starts when you first genuinely use EchoVQ — your first split, your first student, your first assignment — rather than the moment you sign up. If you created an account and got busy for a fortnight, that fortnight no longer counts against you.

Switching to a student, explained

If you've ever used Switch to Student in a lesson, you'll now get a short explanation the first time. It's the least obvious useful feature we have: the work saves to their account and their progress, while running on your computer, so your microphone and your speakers just work. No setting up a student's laptop mid-lesson.

The banner was also covering the top of the page while switched. Fixed.

Smaller things

• Getting-started steps now actually do what they say. A couple of them navigated you to a page and left you to find the button yourself.
• The stem waveforms on the sample song weren't drawing at all. They are now.
• Sign-up and sign-in both point at the same demo, instead of two different ones.
• Tightened up permissions and rate limits on the student invite endpoints.
• The student getting-started list is down to two steps, and neither of them is compulsory any more.

One change I want to be upfront about

Teachers are free on EchoVQ as long as you have an active student — that hasn't changed and isn't going to.

What's new is that if you don't have a student yet, song splitting is now capped at 40 a month. Each split costs us real money to run, and unlimited splits on accounts with nobody attached was becoming a problem. Forty is far more than anyone has ever used while setting up, so I'd be surprised if you notice it — and the moment you have an active student it goes away entirely.

As always, if something here doesn't work the way you'd expect, tell me. Most of this update exists because I sat down and used the product like a stranger for a day, and a lot of what I found was only obvious once I stopped assuming I knew how it worked.