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| That was then... |
Octamed on the Amiga 500. Seems like another lifetime since the days when I managed to wrangle a tune out 4 tracks of audio and 1mb of RAM. Hours of mispent youth while the other kids ran around and spanked footballs into each others faces. Satisfaction crafting noise from my imagination sowed seeds in my mind, seeds that blossomed into a general disinterest in the distinctly passive past time of goggleboxing. Now I prefer to dedicate my time to something interactive where I actually get some sort of result for my hours of input.
So it is sad that so many hours of life are wasted on the inbetweens; travelling to work, commuting up and down the country on the delay wagons, enduring large swarms of humans while savouring a bankrupting coffee in the Costa Universe. Hours that could be poured into something constructive instead. Why, God, WHY, have I not got an A500 I can just stick in my pocket and whip out to maximise what little there is left of my lifespan?
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| ...but this is now |
Someone up there has been listening, as BlipInteractive have been sent down to Earth for all your portable studio desires. Nanostudio (currently £8.99 from the App Store) is all you could want and more. 4 channels of synth audio (inspired by the classic dance synth of old, the Korg M1), backed up by 2 banks of 16 sample pads. This is all tied together with a full song arranger, mixer and the ability to export your noise noodlings to .wav or upload directly to Soundcloud. I-freaking-love-it.
Obviously Nanostudio is light years ahead of where Octamed was, that was purely sample based and struggled to do anything more than 4 noises at once. This is like having 4 polyphonic synths and 2 drum racks in your pocket. Using the touch screen you can flick between different screens on the synth. Standard functions like touchpad filter and LFO controls, pitch bend, a whole host of effects, everything you'd want really. The software design is clever enough to know that you might just want more than 4 banks of synths, so you can render your synths to a sample to trigger as loops in the 2 sample banks. I believe you can also load in your own samples to the synth modules if you fancy a sound less ordinary.
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| Noise Tetris |
No doubt that this piece of software will be bloody awesome on the iPad with its increased real estate, and checking out the forums on BlipInteractive's website, a dedicated iPad version is in the works. That is a system seller for someone like me, whose willpower resembles a decomposing banana. Just one piece of software could move me to shift some serious £age onto the AppleSlab. Time to cut down on the Costa.
£8.99 might seem like a fortune to you paupers who are reduced to "free apps only pls" after yielding to a £65 a month vanity contract. Worth every penny just isn't a strong enough recommendation, just trust me on this one. The functionality is excellent and several grades higher than anything on the app store (including the much more publicised Garageband), and the support is personal and cheery. None of this "thank you for buying our product GOODBYE" you get elsewhere. Check the forum or hit up Twitter if you don't believe me. Want more cherries on your cake? Mmm? Chocolate sauce and diamonds too? Hit up the Samples page for some *actually pretty good* samples from the likes of Atjazz, Jamie Anderson and Faze Action... for freeeeeee. Better still, just go buy the bloody thing.
Have a little demo that I knocked up in about 5 seconds when I was testing it out for the first time. Ease of use incarnate:
