A Tasty Pixel

Put on your sampling pants: The Samplebot has arrived!

On sale, and available for iPhone and iPad!

Samplebot is a collector of sounds. It’s a crafter of songs. It’s a finger-drummable looping sequencer of rainbow glory, and it wants to be your friend. Come. Play. Robo-boogie.

Record sounds. Make songs. Do a dance.

Record or import samples, then play them back on beautiful, sproingy rainbow pads!
Then record or input arrangements using the sequencer
Revel in the power of built-in drum patterns, loop record and playback, quantization and copy/paste
Trim samples, and adjust volume and balance for the perfect mix
Share your creations to Facebook, or export them to other music apps
Comprehensive MIDI control with velocity, for play using a grid controller like the Launchpad
Helpful and fun-loving intro tutorial

Announcing: Samplebot

Hello, friends!

I’ve finally emerged from the depths of coding – and, I might add, the joyous but rather engaging throes of new parenthood of a quite charming little boy! – to make an announcement.

No, it’s not what you think: Loopy Masterpiece Edition, now named Loopy Pro, is still a little ways off. But I have something to tide you over.

Samplebot: Beta test me!

It’s a new app! A taste of things to come, if you will. It shows off some of the features to come in Loopy Pro, but with a special focus of its very own.

p style=”font-weight: bold”>It’s called Samplebot, it’s a sampler/sequencer, and I hope you’ll love it.

Now’s the part where you come in: I need your help, right now, to test it, stretch it, break it, find its weaknesses and crush them. Because this bad boy is coming out this month.

So, interested? If yeah, head on over to samplebotapp.com, pop your email in and tick the box, and let the robo-boogie begin.

This is a discussion of four common mistakes that audio developers make, how to do better, and how to detect whether there’s a problem. It’s written primarily for developers, but should be accessible to non-developers too. I introduce Realtime Watchdog, a diagnostic tool for developers, and provide a brief survey of popular audio libraries.

Making audio apps is enormous fun — it’s rewarding, there’s huge scope for creativity, and then when you’re done, other people use it to be creative too! There aren’t many fields that are like that, and I consider myself very fortunate to be able to work in this area.

But there’s also a serious side to working with audio. As audio developers we have a responsibility to our users to, basically, not embarrass them in public. A DJ whose equipment emits an ear-piercing crunch mid set will not thank us (well, it depends on the club. Maybe they will?). Nor will a performer whose backing drum machine clicks and crunches distractingly, throwing the performance. Same goes for in private — if the user just nailed a take, only to discover that there’s a giant click in the middle of the recording, they’re going to be cursing our name.

Now we’re living in a post-Audiobus/IAA world, where our users’ setups often span multiple apps, one bad actor can mess everything up, and it’s often impossible to tell from where the problem originates.

Imagine if Loopy HD had glitched in the middle of that?

The audio engineer on The Tonight Show told me the main reason that they chose Loopy for the looping segments with guests was because he had been a Loopy user for years, and it has always been solid and reliable.

Even if there’s just a one-in-ten-thousand chance that an app will glitch during a typical session, well, that’s one glitch a day if your app sees ten thousand sessions per day, which is not uncommon. Two glitches a day if it has twenty thousand sessions a day. And I’ll bet most music apps have a higher glitch rate than that.

It can take just one glitch during a live performance for a musician to completely lose faith in their whole setup. The one thing they cannot troubleshoot in their setup is their apps, because it’s an opaque system. And so every app they’re using is indicted. They’ll stop using all of them. It’s an angry Facebook post to all of their musician friends waiting to happen; the exact opposite of what anyone reading this would want.

So, it’s this duty of care that we audio developers have that I want to focus on in this article, because our music apps have to be solid and reliable. All of the time.

If you’re interested in the technical details around how music apps get made, this is an excellent talk by music technologist Greg Cerveny on creating music apps. He’s interviewed a bunch of developers (including the developers of Patterning, Fugue Machine, Elastic Drums, and me) about their process and their background, and these are the results. Worth a watch!

An iTunes Connect screenshot management workflow

Ugh – iTunes Connect is really annoying to use when it comes to screenshots. There’re some third party tools out there, but it was still too hands-on for my workflow.

So I wrote a little script that does the stuff I want. I have a Sketch document that exports all the screenshots, and the script updates the iTunes Connect metadata XML appropriately.

In case it’s useful to anyone else:

Sketch Template

Mate php
Script

Usage:

Work on screenshots
Setup:

alias iTMSTransporter="/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/Application Loader.app/Contents/MacOS/itms/bin/iTMSTransporter"
Grab latest ITMS data:

iTMSTransporter -m lookupMetadata -u [email protected] -p password -vendor_id APPVENDORID -destination YourApp.itmsp
Open up the metadata.xml and remove the fields you don’t want to change – this is probably going to be the currently-live
version, and maybe the product info at the bottom.
Export all the screenshots into the itmsp package folder
Run this tool (update_itmsp_screenshots.php YourApp.itmsp)
Check that everything looks okay
Verify

iTMSTransporter -m verify -u [email protected] -p password -f YourApp.itmsp
Upload

iTMSTransporter -m upload -u [email protected] -p password -f YourApp.itmsp

Thirteen Months of Audiobus: Part 2

This is the long awaited sequel to the tale of Audiobus’ development. I’m completing this article now, on the day we say an emotional farewell to our motorhome Nettle, who has today been sold to a new family in the UK. It seems like a fitting time to tie off some loose ends as we start the next chapter of our lives in our new home in Australia.

In Part 1 of this article, I wrote about the early stages of the technology which was to become Audiobus, our inter-app audio platform, now supported by over 500 great music apps. Part 1 ended just as Sebastian had one of his genius moments, which I obnoxiously left as a cliffhanger. So, onwards:

It was winter in the south of France, and I was buried in the best kind of work: A new project, and one that brought together a bunch of different interests into a challenging, exciting heap.

But first, it was time to move on and find a more satisfying place to spend the rest of the winter.

Want to be able to downgrade your apps? Save ’em before updating.

Regrettably, the App Store doesn’t really make it easy to downgrade apps if an update goes awry. This can be pretty problematic if you use your apps for critical stuff like live music and it all goes horribly wrong the day before a gig.

That problem’s pretty easy to solve though. Just back up your apps before upgrading. That way you can try out new updates without the risk. Here’s how:

Open iTunes, then select the “Apps” section from the drop-down box on the top right:

Next, find the app you want to back up, right-click on it, and select “Show in Finder” (or whatever the Windows equivalent is!).

Finally, grab the “ipa” file, and copy it somewhere safe.

If you want to be really safe, grab a piece of software like Macroplant iExplorer which lets you access the files on your device. Then hook up your iDevice via USB, and back up the Documents and Library folders from within the app. That’ll save all your files and config just in case the update applies some non-backwards-compatible changes.

Now, you may update your app with impunity.

If you change your mind and want to go back to how it was before, drag that backup you made back into iTunes, and tell iTunes to replace the current version. Sync your device, and if you backed up your Documents/Library folder, drag your backup back into the original app folder within iExplorer.

By the way: If it’s too late to make a manual backup, but you use Time Machine or another backup utility, then you’ll find the older version of the app in your backup, within your iTunes music folder. For me, it’s in ~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications.

Thirteen Months of Audiobus

Tomorrow, Monday December 10, my friend and partner-in-crime Sebastian Dittmann and I are launching a project over twelve months in the making: Audiobus. We’re very proud of what we’ve managed to do, and we both firmly believe that Audiobus is going to fundamentally alter the way people create music on the iPad and iPhone.

You can find out more about Audiobus itself at audiob.us, but I wanted to take a moment to breathe, look back, and explain why the hell I’ve been so quiet over the last year.

Apps