What's new

Harrington has moved from the retired desktop/founding-cohort app into the hosted SaaS workbench. This release is the foundation for launch: accounts, cloud storage, managed AI, durable editing, authorship history, richer reports, adaptive song-form inspiration, and a more polished workspace.

What’s new

Hosted SaaS app

Harrington now runs as a browser-based SaaS app instead of a local desktop app. The hosted app includes account sign-up, login, reset-password flow, onboarding, settings, billing foundations, account deletion, and integrated AI tools.

Durable songwriting workspace

The editor has been rebuilt around fast local interaction with background sync and retry. Typing, pressing Enter, holding Backspace, and moving quickly through a song should feel immediate while saves continue in the background.

This matters philosophically as much as technically: a moment of inspiration should be captured even when the network is slow, flaky, or temporarily unavailable.

Authorship history

Harrington now keeps separate histories for user edits and AI tool results. Writers can revisit previous line text, section activity, and tool suggestions without re-prompting or losing the distinction between what they wrote and what AI suggested.

Line, section, and song context menus now expose the relevant notes, edit history, and tool history in the place where the writer is already working.

Song Development Report

The new Song Development Report is a deterministic, AI-free report of the song’s development. It summarizes edit history and tool usage as data, not interpretation.

This report is meant to help the songwriter review their own process and show authorship context in a culture that may too quickly assume AI wrote the song.

Report for Coach

The coach report uses the song’s history and tool context to generate qualitative feedback and insights. It provides useful coaching sections, including recommended search terms, focused toward patterns that may help a collaborator understand how the writer is working.

The report is designed to support collaborative conversations: coaching sessions, co-writing, mentoring, or work with a producer.

AI stays out of the song

AI tools now follow a clearer contract: they can observe, suggest, explain, and save context, but they never mutate the song. AI does not edit, add, remove, restructure, or update lyrics, chords, song form, or flow.

Harrington still provides practical song-development tools for changes like transposition, section movement, line edits, and flow management, but those are writer-directed tools, not AI collaboration. The songwriter remains the author; the song remains their intellectual and artistic property.

Adaptive song forms

Song Form Templates are now contextual. Instead of only offering a fixed list of forms, Harrington can suggest forms that fit the song’s genre, vision, and current content, with a wildcard option for creative stretch.

Examples are generated on demand and retained in the dialog history. Suggest More Forms adds new ideas without discarding previous ones, and regenerated examples remain explicit inspiration rather than automatic song edits.

Chords, Nashville, and imports

ChordPro import, Nashville display, key handling, and transposition have been tightened up. Imported songs now preserve chord intent more reliably, and Nashville numbers are treated as the authoritative progression.

Key and mode changes now distinguish between transposing, reinterpreting the key/mode metadata, and modal reharmonization. That gives songwriters and arrangers more honest control over what they are changing.

Workspace polish

The sidebar now supports sorting, filtering across projects, song titles, and lyrics, and moving songs between projects by dragging. Project controls were simplified so add/import actions live with the project they affect, and project edit/delete moved into the context menu.

The song editor layout now behaves better in narrower browser windows, dialogs can be resized, and the sidebar width can be adjusted. The goal is still a focused desktop-class writing space, but it now handles real-world screen sizes with more grace.

Deeper AI context across every capability, a new discovery tool, and smarter suggestion memory.

What’s new

Spark (⚡)

A new AI tool available on every line — including empty ones. Spark is a discovery tool, not a refinement tool. On an empty line it reveals three different directions the line could go. On an existing line it challenges the assumption behind what you wrote. The results are deliberately unexpected; the value is in what they show you.

Empty lines were the gap: when you don’t know what goes in a blank, Suggest isn’t the right tool. Spark is.

Suggestion memory

Previously seen suggestions on a line are now excluded from future requests on that line — across panel close and reopen within an app session. You won’t see the same options twice.

The scope is configurable in Settings → AI & Premium → Suggestion memory: AI session (original behavior), per line (default), per section, or per song. All memory resets on app restart.

Richer AI context

All AI capabilities now see more of what you know about a song:

• Full songwriter profile (voice/personality, goals, personal notes) included in every prompt
• Song Vision intent (“what is this song trying to do?”) included when present
• Section rhyme scheme passed to line-level rewrites and suggestions
• Song Coach conversation summaries (when compacted) are now visible to all AI tools, not just the Coach itself — so decisions made in conversation inform suggestions and rewrites

Rhyme categories expanded

Rhyme results are now grouped into four categories — perfect, assonance, consonance, and family — each searched independently so no single type crowds out the others. “Near rhyme” and “slant” replaced with more precise terminology.

Song Vision

After creating a new song, a skippable Song Vision dialog asks for genre, mood, themes, and what the song is trying to do. These fields were already accessible via Edit Song Info but were easy to miss. Good AI context starts at song creation.

Right-click any song in the sidebar → ◈ Edit song vision to update it at any time.

The “What is this song trying to do?” field is stored separately from the song notes scratchpad, so Theme Check output no longer overwrites your creative intent.

Suggest restricted to existing lines

Suggest on an empty line was always the wrong tool — it tried to fill a blank rather than open possibilities. Suggest now requires an existing line. Use Spark for empty lines.

Export upgrades

Exports are much more performance-ready:

• New export preview dialog with layout controls for PDF and Word documents
• New native OnSong export alongside ChordPro, PDF, DOCX, and plain text
• ChordPro now writes real sections once and stores the full arrangement in documented {meta: flow ...} metadata
• Text, PDF, and DOCX can export either the full expanded flow or a compact sections-only chart
• Sections-only PDF and DOCX exports can draft concise performer flow cues like 2x, To Chorus, and To Outro 2nd time
• PDF lead and lyric sheets now support two columns, page numbering in any corner combination, repeated title headers, section keep-together behavior, tighter line spacing, visible page separation in preview, and optional first-page branding images
• DOCX exports now use Word-style first-page headers, optional repeated title headers, page numbers, two-column content, and clearer spacing between sections

Internal

• Prompt layer refactored for consistent context across all capabilities
• Song Coach summary wired into all capability prompts (not just conversation)
• Per-line suggestion cache in the main process (in-memory, resets on app quit)

Initial release shipped to the first founding cohort. This is the workbench in its earliest form — functional, opinionated, and ready for real songs.

Historical note: this entry refers to the retired Electron/founding-cohort product. The current launch path is the hosted SaaS product, with waitlist access before public launch and free trial conversion after launch.

What’s in 0.1.0

Song editor

• Lyrics organized by section: Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Pre-Chorus, Outro, and custom labels
• Chord symbols per section with Nashville numbers support
• Song flow arrangement — set the section order for live use (V1 → C → V2 → C → B → C)

Craft tools

• On-device AI suggestions: line rewrites, alternate phrasing, cliché detection, meter analysis
• Song Coach — conversational AI for deeper work on any section
• Theme check — semantic coherence across the whole song
• Rhyme scheme analysis

Export

• ChordPro (zero-edit import into OnSong and compatible apps)
• PDF lyric sheet
• DOCX for rehearsal handouts and documents

Platform

Apple Silicon · macOS Tahoe 26+

Notes

This is a founding cohort release. Features are being shaped directly by feedback from the first users. Bugs are expected; direct access to the founder is part of the deal.