Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ngcazz 1339 days ago
Love it, but the latency with a Bluetooth headset is a sore point. Probably an inevitability of iOS...
3 comments

Latency is inherent in Bluetooth, for music production you're pretty much tied to wired headphones (or expensive live setups). AFAIK, AIAIAI makes wireless headphones for music production, which has its own dongle and doesn't make use of BT.
I can’t believe it doesn’t support manual midi entry (as far as I can tell), seems like a huge miss. This is a well understood limitation for apps in this space (see Auxy), and people increasingly have only wireless headphones.
well, those people will have to put up with Bluetooth latency, or use wired headphones on the Lighting jack. That's not up to the app (or even iOS itself). It's not meant for the general public that just wants to have bluetooth headphones. Musicians working with DAWs and music apps, mobile or not, will have wired headphones too.
I am such a musician, and have been looking for years for an app I can use on the go to capture a spontaneous idea on the go and then pick it up later at my home DAW. The ability to manually enter musical notation is a essential here, because it allows me to use an app even if I don’t have my wired headphones (and when I’m out and about living my life, I don’t carry wired headphones). The closest I’ve found is Auxy, but it can’t do a truly native import to Ableton.

This app misses so badly because, by design, it makes such manual entry impossible. It actually hides the musical grid, and tries to focus on snippets of musical performance that are automatically (and invisibly) tempo analyzed and locked. This means that with wireless headphones the app is actually complete useless, instead of merely impaired.

Unless I’m missing something?

you're not.

they'll probably add this over time - as well as audio recording, for adding vocals etc.

but for now it's aimed as quick sketches and getting down some ideas as "finger-playing" jams, not at being a lite MIDI sequencer.

It's not about iOS, it's about Bluetooth.

In iOS you can still use regular headphones with the adapters.

To be fair, it is kinda about iOS. There are lower-latency codecs than AAC available, but you cannot install them since Apple doesn't allow it.
AAC is an audio encoding codec. It's not about Bluetooth latency - just audio quality.