Support

Every question, bug report and feature request goes to the same place: GitHub Issues. It is public, it is searchable, and it is read.

Getting help

Open an issue on GitHub →

That is the support channel — for bug reports, questions about how something works, and requests for things Artscripture does not do yet. There is no separate email queue, no forum and no ticket system to sign up for; a public issue tracker means the answer to your question is also the answer to the next person’s.

Before opening one, it is worth a quick search of the existing issues — including closed ones, which often contain the answer already.

Reporting a bug

The more of this you can include, the faster it gets fixed. None of it is mandatory; a short report is much better than no report.

• What you did, what you expected, and what happened instead. In that order, and as concretely as you can — “pressing D with a loop set does nothing” is worth more than “looping is broken”.
• The Artscripture version. Artscripture ▸ About Artscripture, or the name of the release you downloaded.
• Your macOS or iPadOS version, and your Mac or iPad model.
• The audio file’s format and roughly its length — 24-bit FLAC, seventy minutes, that sort of thing. Several past bugs only appeared on album-length files or on one particular container.
• Whether it happens every time, or only sometimes, or only after some particular sequence of steps.
• Whether a .cue sheet or a .artscripture session file was sitting next to the audio. Both are read automatically, and both have been the culprit before.
• A screenshot, if the problem is something you can see.

Please do not attach copyrighted music. It is almost never needed — the format and duration usually are enough, and if a specific file really is required, that can be worked out in the issue.

Requesting a feature

Open an issue and describe the problem, not only the proposed solution — what you were trying to do when you wanted it, and what you do instead today. That is consistently the part that decides whether and how something gets built.

Some things are known gaps rather than oversights: spectrum analysis, MIDI input and stem separation are all deliberately not started. Saying you want one of them is still useful.

Frequently asked

What audio formats does Artscripture open?

MP3, AAC, M4A/MP4, ALAC, FLAC (including 24-bit), WAV, AIFF, CAF, Ogg Vorbis and Opus. Everything is decoded by the operating system’s own frameworks — there is no bundled ffmpeg and there are no bundled codecs.

Ogg Vorbis is macOS only. iPadOS cannot decode it, so it is not offered in the iPad file picker rather than being offered and then failing to open. Opus is a different codec and works on both.

What do I need to run it?

macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. Homebrew ships arm64-only libraries and Artscripture has never been an Intel product, so the released bundle is arm64 rather than universal. The iPadOS target requires iPadOS 26 and is built from source rather than distributed as a download.

macOS says the app “cannot be opened”

That means the build you have was not notarised. Releases published from the project’s own release workflow are signed and notarised and should open normally. If you hit it — with a build you compiled yourself, for instance — right-click the app and choose Open, then confirm; or run:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine Artscripture.app

Where are my sessions saved?

Next to the audio file, with .artscripture appended to the whole filename: Blackbird.flac saves to Blackbird.flac.artscripture. The extension is appended rather than replaced on purpose, so a lossless master and an MP3 of the same song in one folder do not silently overwrite each other’s loop points.

If the folder cannot be written to, the session goes to ~/Library/Application Support/Artscripture/Sessions/ instead, and the app says so rather than failing quietly.

I have older .artscribe files — are they lost?

No. The app was called Artscribe until August 2026 and wrote .artscribe sidecars; it still reads them. Open the track as usual and your loop points, speed and playhead come back.

The next save writes the new .artscripture name and leaves the old file alone — nothing is deleted on your behalf. If you would rather not keep both, the .artscribe one is safe to remove once the new one exists.

Press ⌘S to save, ⇧⌘S to save elsewhere.

How do I see all the keyboard shortcuts?

Press ⌘/, or View ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts. It opens a window showing the whole keymap drawn on a keyboard, with a searchable list beside it. Hold a modifier and the picture changes to that layer. The documentation has the same information as tables.

Can I change the keyboard shortcuts?

Not yet. The bindings all live in one catalog and the app is built so that a rebindable table can replace it, but the user-facing editor has not been built.

Does Artscripture send any of my data anywhere?

No. It has no network code at all. See the privacy policy for the full detail.

Is it free?

Yes, and it is open source. Artscripture’s own code is Apache-2.0; the distributed macOS binary links Rubber Band and is therefore conveyed under the GPLv3. See NOTICE.

Can I build it myself?

Yes — the README has the full instructions. The short version is make bootstrap followed by make app.

Contributing

The source is at github.com/adamhadani/artscripture. Pull requests are welcome; opening an issue first to agree the shape of a change tends to save everyone time.