We’ve been hard at work making various enhancements and are happy today to unveil a major code release that brings a much-improved first user experience to help the less-technical folks get started making music.

If you’ve already been using Scratch Audio you may need to kill your cookies to see the improvements but basically the first time you go to record we’ll hand-hold you through the process of each step involved in making your first song with helpful in-line guides like this one:

Additionally we’ve overlaid a quick intro video that plays on first use while the tutorial tracks are downloading in the background. This gives first-time users a clearer picture of what they’re about to do. We’ve also pulled out some of the more advanced features from the main interface and moved them into an options screen with the goal of minimizing anything that could be daunting for the new user.

So how does this affect the advanced people like yourself who already know how to use the tool? It means you’ll soon have more neighbors to collaborate with. We believe making the first user experience a useful & rewarding one (or at least not a frustrating one) is key to building a thriving songwriting community. And lowering the difficulty bar for getting started in music-making is one of our core values.

The other big change you may notice is that you can now zoom in the DAW. This was a heavily-requested feature on our suggestions page and we’re stoked to finally deliver this functionality. This should make it significantly easier to get around your composition while sequencing

There’s a laundry list of other geekish improvements in this release. In no particular order those are:

• Improved UI for the login/create account dialog in the DAW
• More sensible slider controls for volume, pan, zoom, effects, etc. (ie. jumps right to where you click instead of incrementing)
• Fixed a nagging font issue (where sometimes the wrong font would load and make everything look funny)
• Lots of tweaks to html/css/javascript to help improve page load speeds
• New db access layer to drastically reduce # of sql calls per page (basically rocket fuel to make searches and results pages load much faster)
• Improved handling of user avatar images to improve performance
• Some misc code cleanup/refactoring (the code equivalent of cleaning the bathroom)

Lastly we’re excited to now be offering a service for bands who wish to do fully-outsourced remix competitions as a way to promote their music. If you’re a band you can read more and signup for us to run your next remix contest here. Everyone have a safe July 4th and this holiday declare your own independence of desktop recording software