What's New — Mar 22

This is the biggest update we've shipped since EchoVQ launched. Over the past few weeks, 62 commits went in — a full rebuild of the practice plan player, a major overhaul of the Teacher Studio, a new audio engine under SongSplit, a redesigned progress panel, and more fixes and polish than I can comfortably list here.

I'll do my best to walk through what's changed and why.

Practice Plan Player — Rebuilt from the Ground Up

The practice plan player was one of the earliest parts of the platform and it showed. It worked well for standard pattern exercises but fell over for anything else — audio file exercises, PDF sheet music, exercises with multiple tracks. I've completely rebuilt it from scratch.

What's different:

• All exercise types now work properly in the plan player — not just standard patterns. If you've been avoiding assigning certain exercises because of playback problems, it's worth trying again.
• PDF sheet music displays directly in the player — no more separate viewer. If an exercise has a PDF attached, it shows up right there as you practice.
• Audio file selector — for exercises with multiple tracks, you can now select which one you're working with from inside the player.
• Layered track playback with drift correction — if you've experienced the backing track and guide track gradually going out of sync, that's been fixed with proper sync logic.
• Browser autoplay compliance — fixed the issues where audio wouldn't start automatically on certain browsers, particularly on first interaction.

This was overdue and I'm glad it's done.

Teacher Studio — Big Changes

This sprint added more teacher tools than any other. If you haven't logged into your studio in a while, it looks quite different.

Teacher Join Codes — the one I'm most excited about

Getting students into your studio has always been more friction than it should be. You had to add them manually, they had to find you somehow, and the whole process was awkward.

That's now solved. You have a permanent join link for your studio. Share it however you like — pop it in your email signature, put it on your website, send it to a new student. When they click it and create an account, they're automatically linked to your studio. No manual steps on your end.

Studio Analytics — My Students + Studio Overview

Two new dashboards show you what's actually happening across your studio:

• Studio Overview gives you the big picture — how many students are active, practice trends over time, overall engagement.
• My Students goes deeper on individual students — who's been practicing, what they're working on, where they're falling behind.

This is the foundation for proper data-driven teaching. There's more to build here, but this is a genuine start.

Exercise Library Redesign

The exercise library has been redesigned from a card grid to a compact table layout, with Upload as the primary action. A few things worth knowing:

• Teachers can now upload audio files and PDFs directly as exercises — this is new. If you have recordings or sheet music you want students to work with, you can add them to your library now.
• SongSplit tracks appear in your library and can be assigned to students.
• Exercise tags — you can tag exercises and filter by tag. The filter UI uses a pill-based design that's much cleaner than the previous system.

Bulk Student Invite

You can now invite multiple students at once instead of adding them one at a time.

Students and Licences — Merged

What were two separate pages are now a single tabbed page. Cleaner to navigate and easier to manage both in one place.

SongSplit — New Audio Engine

If you've had audio sync issues with SongSplit on Safari — backing track drifting, playback timing feeling off — this update is for you.

We've migrated SongSplit's audio engine to Tone.js, which gives us proper cross-browser audio scheduling. The main improvements:

• Pitch-preserved tempo control — you can slow down a song without it pitching down, and it works correctly on Safari now.
• No more sync drift between stems during playback.
• Better recording start — recording now triggers cleanly through the new audio engine, fixing issues where the first beat would sometimes be missed.

Practice session linking is also in — recordings are now properly tied to the practice session they came from.

Progress Panel — Redesigned

Students, your progress panel has a new look. It's been rebuilt with four clear sections:

• Skill Overview — your core metrics at a glance
• Milestones — achievements and progress markers
• Exercises — your history broken down by exercise
• Timeline — a chronological view of your practice sessions

The previous layout made it hard to see anything at a glance. This one is much easier to read.

Onboarding Updates

A few improvements to the new teacher onboarding flow:

• Setup Studio first, Experience EchoVQ last — reordered so the most important step happens when you're fresh.
• Auto-detection of completion — the platform now recognises when you've finished onboarding and shows a personalised success message rather than leaving you in a half-finished state.
• Accurate progress counting — fixed the progress indicator so it counts all tasks correctly.

School and Organisation Updates

For those in the school pilot program, a few relevant changes:

• The school dashboard has been redesigned, with a clearer layout for the no-licence state and better guidance on the three available access options.
• Practice plans are now ungated for school pilots.
• Storage retention has been extended.
• Student licence management has been improved — revoking, restoring, and reassigning seats is cleaner.

Smaller Fixes Worth Knowing About

• My Studio is now hidden from the sidebar for non-teacher accounts (was confusing students who saw it but couldn't use it).
• Fixed exercise switching — changing exercises now properly clears audio sources, layered tracks, and lyrics before loading the new one.
• Fixed PDF display and transpose for audio-only exercises.
• Various z-index, padding, and layout polish throughout.

As always, if something isn't working the way you'd expect, or if any of these changes raises questions, I'd really like to hear from you. The feedback link is in the sidebar, or just reply directly to any email from us.

There's more in the pipeline — but for now, I hope this update makes your studio feel meaningfully better to use.

— Dave