Good things come to those who wait, and, well, you all have been waiting a long time for this one. Version 3.0 of our Little MIDI Machine step sequencer app is now available in the App Store! Sorry it took so long!
Here’s an overview of some of the new features:
Virtual MIDI with audio background
This is a big one, it lets you sequence other synth apps on your iPad or iPhone with Little MIDI Machine! No longer do you need to hook up a hardware interface or a network MIDI connection to make some groovy synth music. Just load up AniMoog, Arctic Keys, iVoxel, NLogSynth Pro, Sunrizer or any other synth app that has virtual MIDI and audio backgrounding support. Since Little MIDI can sequence two channels at once, if you have an iPad 2 (or the upcoming iPad 3!) you can sequence two different synth apps with Little MIDI plus sync up a drum machine app, all at the same time. Sweet!
OMAC fast app switching
This feature works hand in hand with the Virtual MIDI support, it lets you assign a button on the main Little MIDI page to another app, so that you can quickly switch over to that app without having to double press the home key and go through the active apps in the menu bar. You can set which app to assign to which button (each sequence gets its own button) in the Settings menu. Currently there aren’t a ton of apps that support this, so if you don’t see your favorite synth app in the list, bug the developer to add this feature! Arctic Keys, Beatmaker 2, NLog Synth and ThumbJam currently support it, and it makes it much easier to move to those apps to tweak the synth parts being sequenced by Little MIDI.
Sequencer improvements
Sequencer improvements, oh yeah! The first big one was to add a second sequence to the iPhone/Touch version, to match it up feature-wise with the iPad version. Your iPhone can now sequence in both orange and green! Whoa, crazy colors, man…
Little MIDI v3 also now lets you sequence Note Length as well as Pitch and Velocity, so you can vary the length of each note in your sequences for more expression and feel. You can also now un-link the Pitch, Velocity, and Note Length parts of the sequence: this means you can set skip, random, and reverse separately for the three parts which can make the sequences much more interesting! For example, you could have a normal 16 note sequence of pitches, that uses random velocity values for each step, and a 13 step note length sequence so that the note length times are sequential but constantly varying with relation to the pitch. Cool!
Also added is a new super-sequence mode. This lets you gang together the 4 16 step sub-sequences (A B C D) into one big 64 step sequence, so you can have one nice long complicated sequence rather than 4 separate ones. You can also use this with the un-link feature described above in this mode!
New MIDI Input modes
Little MIDI now supports MIDI input to both record notes into your sequences, and transpose your sequences on the fly! Input record mode works when your sequence is stopped, it lets you enter in the note values of your sequence manually using an external MIDI keyboard or another CoreMIDI music app. Transpose mode works when your sequence is running, it takes the MIDI notes you input and transposes your sequence so that the note you enter is equivalent to the center slider value. This lets you, for instance, change the key of your sequence to match overall key changes in a song. Rad!
Improved MIDI configuration
Getting things set up and working is one of the biggest hassles of iOS MIDI, so we’ve overhauled the way you set up your MIDI configuration to make it (hopefully!) easier to use and more powerful. Easier on the eyes too! Check it out in the Settings Menu.
iCloud support
Little MIDI can now save your sequences in the cloud! If you have iCloud active on your iOS devices, any sequences you save to the iCloud area will be accessible to all of your other devices. This is especially useful in combination with the virtual MIDI feature: come up with a dope sequence on your iPhone at work using AniMoog (during, uh, lunch hour or something…), get home later that night and that sequence is right there on your studio iPad to sequence your Moog Little Phatty. Whoa, man! The future is here, like, now, man!
Other stuff
There’s more stuff too, like support for using a footswitch to start your sequences, the ability to clear your sequences with random data instead of zeroing it, a variable MIDI latency setting so you can reduce lag when you’re using virtual MIDI, and more.
And it’s still completely and totally free! Wow!! Why is it free? Well, basically because we’re idiots. Wait, no, I mean because we love you! Yes, that second one, free love, baby, yeah! And uh, okay, maybe a little bit of the first one too. Anyway, have fun with Little MIDI Machine v3, and please use it responsibly to make some groovy far out music! Whoa…
Little MIDI Machine is being used as part of Bjork’s Biophilia education program to teach kids about music and science. You can see it being used at 2:10 in the video to control one of Bjork’s custom musical instruments.
“Here you can explore spatial and structural similarities in crystals and music, hear how viruses behave like generative music, see how the full moon governs the tide which then rations water into a music sequencer, there is a simon says method in learning differences in scales, DNA multiplying shows us how time signature and speed changes songs, an algorithm of gravity pulls a pendulum into natural counterpoint and the tectonic plates rub against each other and behave like chords.” -Björk
We are big fans of Bjork and are very interested in getting kids excited about music and science, so we were really happy to see one of our apps playing a small part in this very cool program!
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out her Biophilia app for iOS. It contains a bunch of interesting interactive music instrument apps based on her music, and also supports CoreMIDI so you can use the instruments to control your own synths.
Posted: December 28th, 2011 | Author:admin | Filed under:Recap | Comments Off
Here’s our latest video, showing our FunkBox and Little MIDI Machine apps using an iRig MIDI interface and a bunch of other hardware and software to record an electronic music track.
To make our last two app videos we used an iPhone 4S to shoot the raw video. So far we’ve been very happy with the results, and we currently plan to shoot all our future videos this way. In addition to giving us some experience working with video on iOS, there is a certain appeal to doing as much of our iOS work as possible using the actual devices and their apps.
iPhone 4S nestled snug in the tripod
Previously we used a Canon S95 digital camera in video mode, so the transition was pretty easy. The S95 is a pretty basic camera, so while the iPhone camera and its app don’t have a lot of fancy features, for our purposes they work pretty much the same: point, light, focus, shoot. All we needed to do was find a way to get the iPhone mounted on a tripod, and then just swap the S95 out for the iPhone.
Glif tripod clip for the 4S
We used the Glif tripod clip to mount the iPhone on the tripod, which works great. The only downside is the iPhone can’t be in a case, so if you do use a case with your phone you’ll need to find one that lets you slip it in and out quickly and easily. Other than that, the iPhone fits in snugly to the Glif and works perfectly on top of the tripod.
We haven’t yet gotten to the point where we edit and publish the final videos on the iPhone or an iPad. For now we attach the iPhone to a Mac, import the raw video, and edit and polish things up with Final Cut Pro X. In the future we hope to do even more of the work on the devices.
Posted: November 16th, 2011 | Author:admin | Filed under:Recap | Comments Off
My overly complicated hardware setup for my Boston Music Hack Day hack.
I recently spent the weekend of November 5-6 at Boston Music Hack Day. The idea behind these hack days is everybody who participates has 24 hours to come up with a “hack” project, build it and get it working, and then demo it to everyone else. 24 hours isn’t long enough to get anything super complicated done, and isn’t enough time to make things look pretty, but it is enough time to try out something new and cool. The beginning is always the fun part of any project, where you’re first brainstorming ideas, sketching the app out, and writing the “fun” code to handle the normal cases, so this seemed like a fun way to spend a weekend!
My hack involved getting songs on your iPhone/iPod’s music library to sync up with MIDI. I came up with this idea while listening to the Echo Nest talk about their database of music info, in particular the beat analysis data they’ve generated for millions of songs. I figured I could take their detailed information about the position of the beats in a song, hook that up to some of the MIDI clock sync code I’ve worked on before, and get something that would let you sync up a drum machine to any old song playing on your iPhone/iPod. Cool in theory, but would it work? By the end of the weekend I did indeed have it mostly working — some songs better than others, sometimes with some adjustments required — but my little app would play a song and send out a MIDI clock for it. Pretty cool! Here’s a quick video demo:
Posted: August 25th, 2011 | Author:admin | Filed under:Recap | Comments Off
FunkBox was included in the “Staff Favorites” sections of both the iPhone and iPad U.S. App Stores this week. This is the first time one of our apps has been picked for this feature, and we really appreciate it. Thanks Apple!
Looks like FunkBox was also included in an iPhone and iPad feature called “Retro Apps” this week! Really cool!
Posted: August 11th, 2011 | Author:admin | Filed under:Dev Info | Comments Off
This is part three in a series of five blog posts discussing the use of CoreMIDI in iOS music apps. These five posts are being written to help celebrate five years of the Palm Sounds blog. You might have noticed that part three has taken a long time to write, and I apologize for that. It turns out that writing these posts has required a lot more time and effort than I anticipated, and part three in particular is the point where things are going to start getting less fun and more serious. Let’s just hope I can actually finish writing parts four and five by the time Palm Sounds year six rolls around…
Welcome back to our series of blog posts about CoreMIDI. In part one we talked about setting up and playing around with CoreMIDI, and in part two we discussed the basics of how to add CoreMIDI to your app using Pete Goodliffe’s PGMidi sample project. This time we’re going to make some tweaks to PGMidi to improve MIDI timing, improve MIDI performance, and add MIDI clock features.
Before we start, be sure to check out the latest WWDC videos at Apple’s iOS development portal. There is one video in particular that discusses audio and music in Lion and iOS 5, including some bits about CoreMIDI, that you will find very useful.
Second, check out three CoreMIDI tips from Finger apps, makers of the first two apps to fully use CoreMIDI clock sync, MoDrum and BassLine. If these tips don’t completely make sense now, read them again after going through this blog post, since they are covering the same ground.
I also recommend buying and reading the draft version of Chris Adamson and Kevin Avila’s “Core Audio” book if you find you need help with figuring out how to query Core Audio/MIDI properties, and also just to get some good insight into Core Audio and MIDI in general. Good information on these topics is scarce, for whatever reason, but this book is really great and I wish it had existed (even in draft form!) when I was starting work on my music apps.
