I hope you guys take users suggestions.. :)
Hey guys and grrls
Wow bm2 is the first app (I've tried many) that I can do some real work on. Fantastic job :D
I hope you'll consider some of my ideas, sorry if I repeat other people's requests or go on for a bit. I love the program and I see a lot of potential to make it even better.
The number one most important suggestion is auto play to audition samples. I had to stop working because my arm was burning from selecting samples and hitting then the audition button. Tedious and creativity killing. Finding the right sample quickly and easily is critical.
I really like how you can move through samples and presets quickly but hitting the virtual button doesn't always register.. I'd like to be able to Swipe left and right to move through samples/presets and up and down to select different folders.
Some samples don't really have good loop points. The old trick is to copy the sample, paste it tom the end and reverse the pasted section. Extending the sound and making the loop less repetitive. That's really a waste of ram though. It would be better if the sampler had an option to play the looped section forward, then reversed. It's what we used to save ram in the old tracker days.
Higher quality offline dsp fx in the sample editor. The realtime fx are great but I hear a lot of unpleasent artifacts when I'm trying to mangle the sample to much and 3 fx doesn't always get me to where I need to be. Perhaps you could leverage the higher quality code and turn it in to realtime fx when more powerful iPads come along.
I see that you guys are including bouncing of individual tracks, that is great news! Any chance we can get a bounce selection/loop to sampler option? I'd suggest freeze but I doubt the iPad could stream that many channels from flash.
Your control learning is good but not all that quick to use. I'd much rather have a small midi learn button on the interface and a overlay, as you would see in Ableton, VSTs etc. Rapidly mapping a knob is super useful for workflow.
More LFO modulation routings.. Env modulating lfo speed, key modulating cutoff freq.. Again swipe would be helpful in changing destination and wave form. What would be absolutely fantastic would be control of fx parameters. Env to overdrive, lfo modulating chorus speed. Hell yah!
More LFO waveforms. Stepped waveforms would be fantastic. Not sure if that means any thing to you.. But let's say you had a 3 step waveform, then the first rise would go up sharply to 33.3% and hold there for a duration then on the 2nd step it would rise to 66.3% and hold there, then on the 3rd it would rise sharply again to 99.9% and hold. Very useful for doing things like changing LFO rates to specific devisions, arp like note pitch changes with out the bending effect and or for doing things like changing filter types.
Collaboration via drop box or similar service. I'd love to shoot files and presets back and forth between me and a couple of people I work with. Open and save right to drop box would be perfect. Being able to leave notes for each other (stored in a txt file perhaps), sharing comments and keep track of changes would be very useful.
In the sampler, auto detection of root note and snap to zero would be very useful. Sometimes samples I get don't have any info and my ear is far from perfect.
I see youre adding apple loop support, how about Acid file support? For better or worse it's still a very popular format.
A separate LFO in the filter fx.. My wobbles are being killed by the bit crusher and other fx but I need them to create that aggressive sound. Running the LFO modulated filter after FX would solve that right quick.
Some touchOSC like controls, to take advantage of the iPads strengths and make it more instrument like.
Well I've written more then enough.. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with next.
Dusty
Wow bm2 is the first app (I've tried many) that I can do some real work on. Fantastic job :D
I hope you'll consider some of my ideas, sorry if I repeat other people's requests or go on for a bit. I love the program and I see a lot of potential to make it even better.
The number one most important suggestion is auto play to audition samples. I had to stop working because my arm was burning from selecting samples and hitting then the audition button. Tedious and creativity killing. Finding the right sample quickly and easily is critical.
I really like how you can move through samples and presets quickly but hitting the virtual button doesn't always register.. I'd like to be able to Swipe left and right to move through samples/presets and up and down to select different folders.
Some samples don't really have good loop points. The old trick is to copy the sample, paste it tom the end and reverse the pasted section. Extending the sound and making the loop less repetitive. That's really a waste of ram though. It would be better if the sampler had an option to play the looped section forward, then reversed. It's what we used to save ram in the old tracker days.
Higher quality offline dsp fx in the sample editor. The realtime fx are great but I hear a lot of unpleasent artifacts when I'm trying to mangle the sample to much and 3 fx doesn't always get me to where I need to be. Perhaps you could leverage the higher quality code and turn it in to realtime fx when more powerful iPads come along.
I see that you guys are including bouncing of individual tracks, that is great news! Any chance we can get a bounce selection/loop to sampler option? I'd suggest freeze but I doubt the iPad could stream that many channels from flash.
Your control learning is good but not all that quick to use. I'd much rather have a small midi learn button on the interface and a overlay, as you would see in Ableton, VSTs etc. Rapidly mapping a knob is super useful for workflow.
More LFO modulation routings.. Env modulating lfo speed, key modulating cutoff freq.. Again swipe would be helpful in changing destination and wave form. What would be absolutely fantastic would be control of fx parameters. Env to overdrive, lfo modulating chorus speed. Hell yah!
More LFO waveforms. Stepped waveforms would be fantastic. Not sure if that means any thing to you.. But let's say you had a 3 step waveform, then the first rise would go up sharply to 33.3% and hold there for a duration then on the 2nd step it would rise to 66.3% and hold there, then on the 3rd it would rise sharply again to 99.9% and hold. Very useful for doing things like changing LFO rates to specific devisions, arp like note pitch changes with out the bending effect and or for doing things like changing filter types.
Collaboration via drop box or similar service. I'd love to shoot files and presets back and forth between me and a couple of people I work with. Open and save right to drop box would be perfect. Being able to leave notes for each other (stored in a txt file perhaps), sharing comments and keep track of changes would be very useful.
In the sampler, auto detection of root note and snap to zero would be very useful. Sometimes samples I get don't have any info and my ear is far from perfect.
I see youre adding apple loop support, how about Acid file support? For better or worse it's still a very popular format.
A separate LFO in the filter fx.. My wobbles are being killed by the bit crusher and other fx but I need them to create that aggressive sound. Running the LFO modulated filter after FX would solve that right quick.
Some touchOSC like controls, to take advantage of the iPads strengths and make it more instrument like.
Well I've written more then enough.. Can't wait to see what you guys come up with next.
Dusty
Comments
I gotta be honest very few of these ideas are really new, some of the are 15-20 years old. When PCs had 100mhz, and 4-8mb if ram, we had tons of work arounds that we used to over come limited hardware resources. The iPad is at least hundreds of times more powerful as those old PCs but some of the techniques are still relevant in reducing resource usage.
Offline dsp processing is the oldest form of digital fx and it's fairly straightforward, duration + complexity + quality = time. This has been in sound editors since the Atari ST days.
The early samplers (hardware & software) had limited ram so some of the better ones included forward & reverse looping. Some of the better ones had even more exotic looping features, like multiple loop points. 1kb sample could be turned in to a evolving soundscape. creative looping could dramatically reduce sample size and free up ram, for other samples
Root note detection has also been around for forever. On single hit samples (such as a lead). Frequency is analyzed and since musical notes have a specific frequency, if you know the frequency you know the note.
Since we had limited equipment, we would often sample loops and phrases, allowing us to free up the original synth and fx. Plus it allowed for further signal processing. basically you make a trade off between CPU and ram. Take a sound that eats up 80% of your resources and sample it, you kill off the original synth and fx and you're left with a free CPU and 5mb sample loop. Bouncing a loop to a sampler is just automating bouncing to storage (in this case flash) and then auto importing it to a sampler zone.
Even the stepped ladder lfo shape are old. I believe it was in Z3ta which I ran on a 500mhz CPU (still much slower then the iPad) . It's not a mathematically complex shape and shouldn't need much aliasing (if any) so it should be doable. But I'm not sure, I think all the wave forms in Z3ta are wavetable based.
The other stuff is just UI changes, routing, and adding existing code to other parts of the sw (the added lfo on the filter)
The other stuff is just, UI changes, routings, reused code (lfo on the filter) and integration with 3rd parties via their API. Stuff like TouchOSC and dsp FX exist in open source and could possibly be used (depending on the license).
Really it all depends on their architecture choices and if they see a value in implementing them. The technology is certainly there but who knows if any of this fits with their long term strategy.
As for them making a full fledged DAW, this is exactly how Cubase & Logic (and many others) developed. Started with core functionality and then expanded in to more complex tasks as the hw evolved. I wouldn't mind seeing BM Studio come out of BM2.
I'm not saying any of this is easy to implement or could be done quickly. But I think it's in the realm of reason.. Hopefully they'll agree.
Ideas plucked from, Fast Tracker 2, soundforge, the early soft synths Like rubber duck, Seer sys Reality, emu samplers,.. everything old is new again... And 100% more touchable. <!-- s