The shape of the song, before the notes.
BY SONGDEED
Every other songwriting tool starts with a chord or a groove. Ritornello starts with the form — how long the verse is, where the chorus lands, whether the bridge actually goes anywhere — then fills it with the parts you have written and plays them back as one song.
Coming soon to the App StoreChords from one app, a bassline from another, a groove from a third — stacked in the same bars, transposed into the section’s key, sounding at once along the form you drew. That is the premise, and it is the one thing a loop pack cannot do.
Where the first chorus lands. Whether the bridge departs. Whether three choruses are identical. Whether the energy arc goes anywhere. Stated as observations you can dismiss — never as rules, and never as a score.
With nothing attached, Play still keeps time: a click on every bar, accented at each section start. Sixteen bars of verse at 96 BPM is forty seconds, and sitting through forty seconds tells you something the number does not. Ritornello reads MusicXML and MIDI, which is what every Songdeed app already exports.
Every trim, loop, pad and transposition is written down. A 4-bar progression in a 16-bar verse says it repeated four times. A 16-bar groove in an 8-bar chorus says how many notes were cut, and at which bar.
A one-page PDF: the form map, the form on one line, and every section's bar number. Plus the form map on its own, a plain-text version for a message, and the whole arrangement as MusicXML or MIDI.
No account, no sign-in, no ads, no in-app purchases, no subscription. One purchase under $5. Nothing leaves your device, because there is no networking code in the app.
What it will not do. Ritornello is not a DAW and will never grow into one. There is no audio recording, no mixing, no piano roll and no note-by-note editing. It arranges symbolic material — the notes other tools wrote — according to a form you designed, and then hands the result to whatever you actually record in.
It also will not name your chords back to you. A MusicXML file carries notes, not meaning: a progression arrives as pitches, so the app can transpose it and lay it out but cannot tell you it was a ii–V–I. Anything it cannot know, it says it cannot know.
Chord progressions. Export the changes, attach them to a section.
Basslines that walk through your changes.
Drum parts that land the fill where the music turns.
Counterpoint against a line you already have.
Ornaments and variations on a phrase.
Words that fit the melody, syllable by syllable.
Ritornello is where they meet: it is the app that assembles what the others generate into one song, one chart and one file. See the whole line at songdeed.com.