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To paraphrase myself from last time: I'm working on a sort of DAW-ish thing for iPad. Except it's not really a DAW — more of a musical sketchpad. When I was sitting down and thinking of what I would like in a music creation app, I thought of two things. First, the typical DAW grid structure (and sheet music before it) is far too rigid for modern music. It's really hard to annotate music with syncopation, pitch bends, and fluid rhythms unless you already have the song in your head — and even then, it takes forever. Second, the feedback loop in most DAWs is really large. By the time you've pecked away at your piano roll and fiddled with the dozens of switches, your song is no longer fresh in your head.
In other words, I wanted something akin to musical clay: a very simple, very malleable representation of music in space that focuses entirely on ease of interaction. With my app, I try to solve both of these problems. In regards to the former, you have the option of drawing every note arbitrarily in pitch or time, as simply as in an ordinary drawing app. (Snapping is an option, too.) And as for the latter, the whole thing is a scroll view, so panning and zooming are incredibly simple. Furthermore, you have immediate access to undo/redo and can also rewind to the last place you played from, meaning that iterating on your ideas takes only a few seconds as opposed to the arduous process of controlling a DAW. The UI tries to get out of your way as much as humanly possible.
I should emphasize that this won't be production software; the music you create will sound like MIDI. Rather, my goal here is to make an app that you can freely sketch and create musical ideas in, which can then be used as a rough draft for working with a more featureful DAW.
Performance is a top priority, and I'm targeting 60fps on my iPad 3. Here's a very early video with (mostly) mock UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra8OvnoxKQw Hope to release within the next few months! |