Yonac’s miniSynth was one of the first synth apps I had on my 1st generation iPod Touch. It was a massive step forward, and when they brought out megaSynth it was even better. I still love Yonac’s apps, they’re up there with the best in my opinion.
Category: Music
Music is a huge part of my life so it’s almost certain that this category will have a lot of stuff in it.
Tabletop 1.4
Just a quick mention of the latest version of Tabletop. It’s awesome. That’s all.
The Retronyms are amazing, their work just gets better and better.
App revisit: Sir Sampleton
Sir Sampleton is a great little sampling app that’s got a nice interface and just does the job really well.
App revisit: Euno Synth
This was a great idea for a synth app, and had a very clean interface, but it was really hard to get to grips with it. By the time you’d set the synth controls and moved to the keys page you couldn’t tell what the sound would be like. It didn’t make sense from there really.
It was a shame really. It hasn’t seen an update for a long time now either.
App revisit: Beat it!
I remember this game when it first arrived, it was a great idea, and it still is, but I always found it just a bit too hard, which made it a bit off putting really. Which was a shame as visually it was amazing to play.
So, is Spotify the OS of music?
This was something that their head of platform claimed that they were aiming for at the Music Ally App Side conference last month. An interesting claim. I have a slightly different take on it though. For me the OS of music isn’t just about listening, in fact it might not be about listening at all, or at least listening might only be a small part of the puzzle.
For me the idea of an OS for music has always been very enticing. Something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen done properly, but I’ve always wished for. The closest thing to it was the elusive Capers OS which was meant to be a replacement for the Palm OS and act as an OS for music making.
Back when that was being talked about it wasn’t really something that could be used for pure synthesis, so Capers OS was more about controlling other devices. That made sense then, but not now. I think now we have the capability in mobile devices for an actual mobile OS which is built for music making.
Will something like this ever come about? Who knows, I’d love to see it, but I can see it being difficult to get off the ground and fund properly. One day perhaps.
So, is Spotify going to be the OS of music? Not for me I don’t think, but I do think that they are doing a great deal for changing listening and discovery, and that’s a step in the right direction, albeit not my direction.
App revisit: Noise Machine
I remember when this app first arrived. I was really blown away by it. I still think it’s a lot of fun to mess around with and a nice example of an experimental app for the iOS. I hope that people keep on doing things like this instead of more complex apps that are commercial but less experimental.
Time will tell.
App revisit: Star Melody
Amidio used to make all of their app splash screens like this, and in some ways I preferred them to what they do now. The app was meant to be like Eno’s Bloom app only much better. I’m not sure it was. It was different, that’s for sure, but better? Maybe in some ways. I still liked this, and found it useful back when I first got it.
This version only gets as far as the splash screen on my 3G so it won’t be used any more sadly. I haven’t tried the latest version of the app that Amidio have released. Perhaps I should. But it won’t be the same experience.
App revisit: O-Generator Accoustic
Another circular sequencer concept. This one was quite tricky to use although the concept was good. I seem to remember that there were in fact a number of version of the app with different sample bases to them. Something that a number of people have tried out, but that hasn’t always been too successful.
Still, it was ok to use although I can’t see myself making any amazing tracks with it.
Sunvox 1.7 arrives
I’ve been a fan of Sunvox since the very first version I ran on my Treo under Palm OS. That was over 4 years ago now. It has come a long way since then, and the latest version is really amazing, with lots of new features and especially live recording.
I am Ashley Elsdon 