The Catloaf Software Blog

The holidays are upon us again! This year, we are giving thanks to our budding musicians by reducing the price of instruments significantly over Thanksgiving weekend, specifically starting with Black Friday (November 24) till Cyber Monday (November 28).

During this time, the following prices will be reduced:

• The bundle with all instruments in Fretuoso will be down to $3.99 (from the usual $6.99 - 43% off!)
• The Complete Edition will also see a similar drop in price to $3.99.
• Other editions will go down to just $0.99 for the base app price (down from $2.99 - 66% off!). This includes editions for Guitar, Banjo, Bass, Mandolin and Ukulele.

In related news, the latest version of Fretuoso (6.1.3) now fully accomodates the screen of the brand new iPhone X.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

See more product announcements on our blog or contact us for business and press inquiries.

With the recent release of iOS 11, we are proud to announce the availability of the latest version of the Fretuoso® apps to support the latest version of the Apple operating system.

Version 6.1 is now available on the App Store for all devices running iOS version 9.0 and later.

We have recently added support for new screen sizes, most notably the latest 10.5” iPad Pro that came out a few months ago, and we have started making accomodations for the upcoming iPhone X, whose larger screen presents some additional challenges for apps like Fretuoso. We will be further refining support for this new device before its release in early November.

This new version of Fretuoso also uses the latest version of the AudioKit framework, the open-source audio library that we have been collaborating with to help developers provide first-class audio applications on Apple platforms. Version 4 was just released, feel free to check it out if you are interested in making your own audio apps for iOS!

If you are building an iOS app and need technical support, visit our services page or contact us.

Today we are proud to announce the availability of a major new version of our Fretuoso® apps.



Fretuoso 6.0 mostly features some significant internal changes compared to previous versions of the app. The most visible are the improved support for iOS 10, and the move to AudioKit as our new audio engine.

Now Powered By AudioKit

A few months ago, we announced that we were actively supporting development of this new open-source framework for Apple operating systems.

Today marks the first time that we actually ship an application using it. AudioKit provides Fretuoso with a more solid audio foundation which will pave the way for some exciting new features in the near future.

The main reason the switch wasn't made earlier was that using AudioKit forces us to drop support for devices running iOS 8. Today, the vast majority of active iOS devices run iOS 9 and above, and this will be the minimum supported configuration for Fretuoso releases from now on.

Other changes in this release include the following:

• Taptic feedback on the new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
• Various bug fixes and improvements.

Fretuoso 6.0 is available today on the App Store and is a free upgrade for all users.


As a side note, both the Catloaf Software and AudioKit teams will be roaming the floors of NAMM over the next few days. Please say hi if you run into any of us!

Need help shipping your own iOS product? Visit our services page or contact us.

We are proud to announce the release of the latest app in our Texts From series, Texts From Bernie.



Focusing on quotes from Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, it follows in the footsteps of the Texts From Trump app we released a month ago, allowing us to cover a wide spectrum of political discourse in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

Better known as the anti-establishment candidate of the American left, Bernie Sanders has been active in political life as an elected official for many decades and has managed to shake up the political world in this campaign cycle with his staunchly progressive rhetoric.

All quotes are gathered from various public online sources, and are drawn from many speeches and public appearances across his career, including of course his 2016 campaign for the US presidency.

It also joins previous apps in the series mostly focused on historical figures, such as Texts From Founding Fathers, Texts From Oscar Wilde and Texts From Jesus.

Like in other Texts From apps, a new quote gets delivered every day to your device as a notification, via a Today Widget or on a paired Apple Watch. Quotes can be quickly “loved”, “hated” or shared on Facebook and other social networks.

Additionally, all quotes are indexed by iOS 9 for quick and easy search.

In addition, we also released updated versions of all the other Texts From apps. These bring various bug fixes, and improvements to the Glance for Apple Watch.

The app is now out on the App Store, and it is free (though ad-supported). Get your copy now!

We are proud to announce the release of the latest app in our Texts From series, Texts From Trump.


This new app follows in the footsteps of other popular apps in the series, which includes Texts From Jesus, Texts From Founding Fathers and Texts From Oscar Wilde.

The app is timely as it comes in the midst of a very heated and unusual U.S. presidential election year. Donald Trump is best known for his frequent past and present incendiary statements that have set the media ablaze.

We hope to help contribute to the public discourse on this crucial race by making some of these statements more accessible to users of Apple devices, and the public at large. The app will be updated regularly as new quotes become available.

All quotes are from public statements from Donald Trump, gathered from his famous Twitter account, his public speeches, to newspaper articles and media interviews. A few excerpts from some of his published books are also included.

Like in other Texts From apps, a new quote gets delivered every day to your device as a notification, via a Today Widget or on a paired Apple Watch. Quotes can be quickly “loved”, “hated” or shared on Facebook and other social networks.

Additionally, all quotes are indexed by iOS 9 for quick and easy search.

A few days ago, we released the latest version of Fretuoso for iOS.

Among the usual set of bug fixes and minor improvements, we also included a brand new feature giving you yet another option to focus your fretboard training: a time limit for guessing each note.

This new option can be enabled by going to the training options, within the settings menu or from the wheel icon that appears in training modes.

The new training option

This option basically allows you to set a time limit within which you need to guess the note prompted to you. Being a training option, this only applies to the fretboard training and staff training modes, not the game mode which is independent of these settings.

The maximum value is 10 seconds; the option is turned off by default.

In effect, this allows you to make your training more challenging, and adds a time element which was previously mostly relegated to the game mode.

Any guess not made in the allotted time will effectively count as a miss, though you will get a nice TOO LATE sign to tell you you were too slow to answer! We suggest you start with a higher value and progressively lower it as you get more comfortable.

You should have answered faster!

We would like to publicly acknowledge our user Andrew Owen who suggested this new feature a few weeks ago. We are proud to be listening to our users, so feel free to shoot us an email with your feedback and suggestions. We just might turn your idea into a new feature...

Have fun with this and keep practicing daily!

Before there was the new Fretuoso app for iOS, came its venerable grand-daddy just a few years back.

Guitar Trainer was a Java app for feature phones and BlackBerry; the first version came out in 2007 before the iPhone even made its mark on the mobile industry. It was regularly updated up till version 1.2 released back in 2011, when further development pretty much stopped in favor of Trainer HD (now known as Fretuoso).

Up till now, the original Guitar Trainer app was still available for sale on a number of legacy app stores, including directly from our mobiletutor.org website. The cost was about $5 per copy on average, which for such an old app was rather high. Looking at recent usage for the app, it appears that it is still in use mostly by people in developing countries stuck with legacy feature phones.

To celebrate the new year and the recent release of Fretuoso, we have decided in turn to make the original Java Guitar Trainer completely free! The app will no longer see any new updates, but you will be able to enjoy it as it is for as long as it works on your old phone without having to spend any money. We hope it will still be a useful tool for users of legacy phones around the world.

To get your copy, you can now head to our product page and request a free download code. Further instructions will then be provided to help you complete the download and installation. For BlackBerry users, the app can also be downloaded on the BlackBerry App World store directly.

We still have a demo version of the app available, but at this point it should be considered deprecated. Feel free to upgrade to the full version right now if you were still using it.

If you have been using our Trainer HD educational games, the app has been rebranded!

Trainer HD is now Fretuoso. We also have a new logo!

• Adds full support for new devices, including the new iPhone 6S and the large iPad Pro.
• Also supports the latest iOS 9 system. We had to drop support for iOS 6, and you'll now need at least iOS 7.1 to use Fretuoso on your device.
• 3D Touch shortcuts on the new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. Force-press the app icon and you'll be able to quickly start or resume training, game, or free play.

• See more of the instruments on the large screen of the iPad Pro.
• We also fixed a bunch of nasty bugs!