There’s a new version of Strum Machine available for beta testing! Changes include:
- New playback interface, redesigned from scratch to give quick access to the most useful settings,
- Easier tempo changing on phones with the new “BPM dial”,
- Unified app settings page: everything in one place, with room to grow,
- Dark Mode: matches your system preference by default, or you can choose light or dark in Settings,
- …and much more (full release notes here).
As this is a substantial update with some bold changes to the interface, I’m going to have a nice long beta period where I hope to get tons of folks trying it out and sending in feedback. So please give it a try!
How to try out the beta:
- iPad/iPhone - install TestFlight (Apple’s beta app platform), then install the iOS SM Beta app
- Android phone/tablet - opt into the “testing program” through this Play Store opt-in link (new as of this month!)
- Computer - go to beta.strummachine.com
- Desktop app user? You’ll have to use the beta website.
Just log in with your existing account (should happen automatically in the website version) and you’ll be good to go!
The beta app is stable enough for everyday use, and I’ve already gotten great feedback from it, so don’t be afraid to try it out! You can always go back and use regular Strum Machine if you want.
Behind the update
It’s tempting to look back and craft a clean narrative about how this update came to be—the grand vision for the update, the milestones crossed as it took shape, the obstacles we overcame along the way… but the truth is both simpler and more messy than that:
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Strum Machine needed a cohesive, app-wide Settings UI, both to replace the “Advanced Settings” page which had outgrown its moniker and to pave the way for more settings to be added in the future. Tyler and I started design work on this back in 2024 as a “backburner” task between working on other projects like band presets and walking bass.
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The current song playback page design, basically unchanged since 2018, was holding me back from some improvements I wanted to make, so Tyler and I started taking a fresh look at that page in the spring of 2025, which eventually turned into a full ground-up redesign.
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I’ve wanted dark mode for years, but a laborious process of updating ~2,000 hard-coded colors across the codebase. Eventually, AI was able to help with a good chuck of the tedium of this work starting in late 2025… but I also needed to have the Settings UI built to allow the user to toggle dark mode (see above).
Each of these separate efforts snowballed into larger projects, as often happens, and eventually these snowballs (along with a pretty substantial refactoring snowball) merged together into one massive snow-boulder that… well, I try not to get updates get to such an unwieldy size, but here we are.
Ten years of learnings
As it so happens, Strum Machine turns ten years old this summer. I thought “Tenth Anniversary Update” had a nice ring to it, so that’s what I decided to call this thing. 
As I said above, there are some BIG changes to the interface so I’m going to keep it in beta for longer than usual in order to gather feedback from users, positive and negative, and make sure that everyone’s as happy as possible with the new direction.
Redesigning the main song playback interface is not something I take lightly. As I said, it’s been more or less unchanged for nearly eight years, and I know people appreciate that kind of stability.
But in 2018, Strum Machine was still only a couple years old, and it was hard to know how it would evolve. Whereas at this point, I think I’ve got a good grasp of what Strum Machine is; where it will go as well as where it won’t. Plus I’m working with an actual professional designer now instead of piecing together UIs myself, which has totally changed the game.
My goal, therefore, has been for this to be the last big redesign of the main playback interface. Not the last time it will change at all—I’ve got a few more features to slot in later on, and I’m sure we’ll find ways to refine and polish what we’ve done here—but as far as major changes to the player go, this should (hopefully) be it.
Please try the beta version and let me know what you think! Don’t hold back on your feedback: if you don’t like it or miss something about the old interface, I want to know! Thanks!
