How iOS became an essential platform for making music | Hacker News Reader

How iOS became an essential platform for making music

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17 pointsmarcieoum23 comments

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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.

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.

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.

True. But what the iPad brings to the table is mobility.

And given that creativity can come at any time you are far more likely to be near to your iPad then your desktop.

As a music producer myself I would NEVER use a tablet for making music. It would be a nightmare to do postproduction and anyway you can't connect any pro soundcard. But an app that could export some midi partitions that I would write would be pretty cool. So I can write melodies on the go and then produce when I'm back in the studio. Even better, an app made by a music software company (Steinberg, Ableton, etc) that would directly sync with your projects on your desktop with a cloud service or something would be amazing but also very complicated to operate as your desktop may have lots of customisation such as VSTs and others.

That's exactly it - I've had the same thought. If there was a tablet version of my DAW that sync'd with my desktop machine (or cloud, whichever), I'd probably buy it pretty quickly.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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!

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.

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.

Thats a shame, I'm sure hardware manufacturers are drooling at the prospect of embedding Android into hardware workstations

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

>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).

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

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

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.

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

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

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