

How iOS became an essential platform for making music - marcieoum
http://www.techradar.com/news/audio/portable-audio/how-ios-became-an-essential-platform-for-making-music-1088387

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jgroome
_Essential_? Really?

> _es·sen·tial [uh-sen-shuhl]_

> _1\. absolutely necessary; indispensable: Discipline is essential in an
> army._

> _2\. pertaining to or constituting the essence of a thing._

I think the phrase the author is looking for is "pretty cool", or "actually
quite easy to use".

Edit: On reflection I think I'm being overly snarky. But I seriously do get
wound up when a writer uses a hyperbolic word when a plain and more accurate
one would not just suffice but actually work better. iOS is NOT _essential_ to
making music. It is, however, representative of a commonly overlooked aspect
of tablet computing.

A lot of focus seems to be on gaming, but this has never really appealed to
me. Making music on a tablet is where it's at. I've never owned a tablet
(hence my snootiness when I read the _essential_ above), but when I played
with Garage Band on my friend's iPad my mind was blown. I can certainly see
how musicians are using it to work in new ways. Remember when Gorillaz wrote
recorded and released a whole album on the iPad? Incredible. However, this is
a gimmick and will soon pass (has already passed, even).

iOS has taken the lead in mobile music composition and production, simply by
virtue of being on the first successful tablet computer line-up. Obviously the
Android tablet platform has barely kicked off, so it'll be a while before
there's anything comparable available to us Droid plebs.

~~~
FigBug
It's going to require more OS and hardware upgrades for Android to properly
support music apps due to the latency of the audio stack. In previous versions
of Android it's over 100ms, 4.1 they were aiming for 10ms for Nexus devices.
Other devices will depend on hardware and drivers. iOS is 5.8ms.

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cageface
As the author of a few iOS music apps, I'd really like this to be true but
we're still a long way from _essential_.

The iPad music market has certainly matured a lot in the last year but none of
the apps do anything you haven't been able to do on a consumer grade PC for
the better part of a decade already.

An article that refers to iOS Garageband as a "21st century DAW" could only be
written by someone in total ignorance of how much more powerful the desktop
alternatives still are.

~~~
jsz0
_anything you haven't been able to do on a consumer grade PC for the better
part of a decade already._

Just at a much lower cost on the iPad. The PC software packages for soft
synths are often hundreds of dollars. Dedicated hardware can set you back
thousands. I've spend maybe $100 on iPad music software and have more to show
for it.

~~~
cageface
That's true but I don't know how long this can last. Developing a quality iPad
music app takes just as much time as it does to develop a good VST and from
what I can tell the sales volumes aren't high enough to compensate for prices
that are about 1/10th of the VST market.

I think you're going to see a lot more apps like Figure and a lot fewer
serious instruments unless people get used to payer higher prices for apps.

~~~
Synaesthesia
The sales volumes are high enough. They're much higher! The Appstore and low
prices, combined with the vast amount of people using iOS makes for a way
bigger potential market than audio pro's using PC's

~~~
cageface
Sales of my own apps suggest otherwise. From what I can tell the market for
non-toy music apps is no larger than it is on the desktop and may actually be
smaller.

I get far more searches for the VST port of my iPad synth than I do for the
iPad app itself, for example.

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j_s
Why Android isn't a platform for making music:
<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434> (Issue #3434: need
NDK support for real-time low latency audio; synchronous play and record, July
2009, 2000+ votes/"stars")

JellyBean promises some improvements: [http://www.rossbencina.com/code/dave-
sparks-on-android-audio...](http://www.rossbencina.com/code/dave-sparks-on-
android-audio-latency-at-google-io-2011)

~~~
valdiorn
I came here to say that. I do real-time audio plugins; guitar effects and
amplifier simulation as a hobby and Bug 3434 is THE reason I don't have a
smartphone.

Android could have swallowed this market whole, but because of that fucking
issue, it is completely and utterly useless for audio, IMO.

Edit: For those of you who don't play instruments or have never tried using a
digital device to process audio in real time, let me assure you that anything
above 20ms latency is unplayable. You are unable to hold a rhythm when the
delay from moving your fingers until your ears receive feedback is too great.

~~~
colomon
Unless I'm totally borking the math, most pipe organs where the pipes are on
the other side of the room from the organ will have a greater delay than that
just from the speed of sound. It just takes a little getting used to.

Mind you, I wouldn't put up with that delay if I didn't have to, and I'd
certainly encourage great latency improvements for Android!

~~~
dubya
It's worse than that, because the larger pipes take longer to sound, so you
have to deal with variable latency. If you get a chance, you should watch an
organist play from close up. It's really disorienting how little immediate
feedback there is.

~~~
colomon
I should have said, one of my summer jobs during college was "church organist"
-- at a small church with a lovely old pipe organ that had exactly these
issues.

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rwhitman
While many of these apps are fun and increasingly powerful, I (sadly) don't
think we've crossed the threshold where they are essential just yet.

I think there may well be a point in the future where replacing an entire
studio / live rig with iOS may come to reality (and I'd love to see it) but
this is still a long way off. The platform is imperfect and the apps out there
reflect this - they're fun but even the best are still not feature complete or
stable enough to be dependable in a professional context

~~~
batista
> _I think there may well be a point in the future where replacing an entire
> studio / live rig with iOS may come to reality (and I'd love to see it) but
> this is still a long way off._

Well, I was there in 1996 when they were saying the same about plugins -- and
in 7-8 years tons of records where produced inside a laptop and a DAW
(speaking for electronic music of course, but also anything indie that was
made with a 4 to sixteen track previously).

~~~
rwhitman
Agreed, and I think we may get the full studio workstation on a tablet faster
than the transition from hardware to software. We're probably only one new
chip & iOS release away from a platform that can compete with desktop in terms
of power & stability

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dsirijus
I've personally found non-tactile touch interfaces to be too delicate to
operate live. That might genre-biased, though.

~~~
th3james
This is definitely the big issue with iOS music apps. There is a lot of
potential there, but unfortunately, doing anything serious is no fun at the
moment, because you can't beat having proper hardware to control the real
world interfaces apps try to emulate.

I've got a fair few synths for the iPad which I use with a akai 25-key
controller, but even with that, knob-twiddling is really fiddly when trying to
get sounds.

Would be good to see more apps trying to play to the touch interface's
strengths. Figure from Propellerhead is a good example of something with a
more thoughtful UI. A good Kaoss-pad like sampler/effect manipulator could
also be really cool.

~~~
dsirijus
I'm having high hopes of getting Leap Motion [1] developer device and playing
with something a lot more hardware-ish (even though it's still waving in the
air), within iOS.

[1] <http://leapmotion.com>

------
nsns
An interesting article, perhaps it's time to buy a tablet (I've been waiting
for it to become more productive).

I'm out of touch now, but used to experiment a lot with various synthesizers
(soft and hard) in the 90's, I wonder how good the new soft ones are.

I hope the article's obvious mistakes do not reflect on its main points too
seriously. E.g. - "Propellerhead makes ReBirth for all iOS devices, a new
version of its ground-breaking analogue sequencing software that helped to
kick off the electronic music revolution."[1]

[1] Huh? Did he just confuse ReBirth with Roland's TB303 and Tr808/909?
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYZILDafL0>

