Thanks for the heads up on Addictive Microsynth. I had no idea it had been released (or was even in development). Just downloaded it and played with it for a bit. They did a great job getting the iPad version onto the iPhone. It took a while to figure out that I wanted Gliss turned off to make the virtual keyboard act a like a real keyboard rather than an X/Y pad ("on" was the default setting). It looks like the biggest sacrifice made in creating the iPhone version was cutting the max polyphony from 8 to 4, but I can live with that. I think I'll use it most to sample sounds or phrases and then bring them into NanoStudio. For $2.99 it seems well worth it.

Soundwise, it did take me a while to warm up to the presets, but there's some good stuff there and the "draw your own wave-form" as well as the randomize feature can yield some good results. I sort of see the synth as the "Yin" to Sunrizer's "Yang" as far as different types of synths are concerned (with Animoog being it's own beast, but that's also iPad only).

Cue limpid "Friends" O M G!!! I've wanted an iPad just for this shit (addictive synth that is). Thanks for letting us know dude! And yeah I agree lets keep the freakin' moaning to a minimum. This is possibly the only forum I've been a member off with such a low quantity of actual moaning, great :-)
Also I guess it's ok to post this in here. I made a tune with Xenon. I purchased the app last night when I read that it can be programed similar to iElectribe (another one I want an iPad for) before I knew Gorillaz made that track Phoner To Arizona with it (they used both Xenon and iElectribe). I like it anyway and made this.

http://soundcloud.com/joesoj/soj-monkeys

I bought addictive after reading this post...and for this price it's a good choice! Thank's!

Nice track joesoj. If you like xenon, I'll vouch for argon. It'll be a nice addition to your synth arsenal and it's on sale for a buck right now. Icegear has made two nice apps and they support the synthstation and core midi if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah man I have both. Very underrated. I love the sequencing style of Xenon especially since I can't get iElectribe for iPhone :-( Also the arpeggiator on Argon is extremely easy to use. Not meaning to whore myself but I've just made a better one and swapped the two if you or anyone else cares to listen :-)

http://soundcloud.com/joesoj/itch

Wish beatmaker 2 had demo version. During the hour I used it, I had to force my device to boot twice as it just hang there. I ran out of ram loading preset sounds twice, thought that was like polish farce - so sad it had to be hilarious too.

I think BM2 has a memory limit option somewhere which defaults to a low amount. If you can find it, try increasing it to 32 or 64MB.

Doesn't solve the fact it keeps hanging on me. I PAID TO PARTICIPATE IN BETA :P

I also have stability issues with bm2. It loves to crash on me in the middle of sequencing which is why it's getting used less and less. And there is No way to stem out tracks which makes getting stuff into a daw lots of work.

> I also have stability issues with bm2.

Which is sad. It's nice to have variety on these devices and BM2 seems quite nice for samplebased producers. It can't match workflow of NS, but both are light years away from desktop solutions and once BM2 has its bugs fixed, it just boils down to matter of choice really. I'd have both, NS and BM2 on my ipad even if I'm bit of a NS fanboy (:

Not new, but Argon is for sale 0,79€ for limited time (posted 27.10)

Garage Band is now universal. For you iPhone/pod guys I highly recommend it for the organs and pianos alone it is very nice. Oh, I just picked up SampleLab it's on sale for a buck. Why did I get it you ask...time stretching.

Oooooh I didn't know it was universal, rejoice! I bet it's gonna be a pain in the ass on the small screen but that's ok, plan on getting an iPad soon anyway. Primarily thanks to Matt lol.

@sirmcp: SampleLab looks cool for a buck. It appears that it requires iOS 5, though, which I'm not crazy about (I'm currently happy at 4.3.3). Are you running iOS 5, or are you getting SampleLab to run on an earlier iOS version?

Thanks!

iOS 5

Organ+ has some excellent organ sounds - loads of presets and draw bar emulation. Not new (but new to me). The keyboard is good - very responsive. It has a metronome and audio copy so you can import into NS. You can also bounce recordings within Organ+ to build up a piece in layers. It's very cheap too. There's another Organ app, but that doesn't do audiocopy - so make sure you get right one, if you are interested.

Shadowgun is a buck. Ok, I know it's not for making music but you gotta relax too...right? I recommend iPad and iPod/iPhone 4th gen owners and above ONLY. I know this app is processor intensive and might not run on older devices. It's on sale for limited time so get it quick.

Contre Jour was 0,79€ too, it's not shabby either. Appshopper is great for people who love their devices; it's far more extensive than the normal appstore gui. Shows you updates, new apps, discounts, the price history of an app and you can check free/paid categories in every app genre. It can also notify you for updates on apps, so you don't have suffer from your OCD every time you hear app is getting updated soon (:

Does appshopper still only work on the US store? I seem to remember deleting it because the app listings were too different.

I'm seeing prices in euros (:

Just saw that Tabletop has dropped to $1 for 3 days. I know from other forum threads that this app has drawn mixed reviews, but I figure for a $1 it's worth a try, and the next time they put the a la carte modules on sale for $1 each, I may pick some of those up then.

Side note: They just added a new synth module, and from the "what's new" description in iTunes it looks like it's included in the core purchase, but it's actually a $10 IAP. That's a bummer.

I'd save your money peanut_gallery. Tabletop is about the most disappointing music apps I've encountered. Just about everything is an in app purchase - barring the 'free' audio out module.... Better to save your dollar for when Nanostudio, which is already great, does a proper iPad version.

ThumbJam 2.0 was submitted to apple...waiting for this now...; )

Yeh, Retronyms Tabletop is a cool concept that lacks some features, audio editing, no way to remove samples within the app (itunes), no sequencer editing, the table can fill up rather quickly, and their IAP pricing is expensive IMHO. The app is a very cool concept and I really want to like it, but it's getting harder for me to do so with over priced gear. In it's current state it's more of a groove box than a daw, but hey try it out.

I have Tabletop, but don't use it. The concept is quite the same as Reason, but no sequencer editing, so it's useless...
It's when you compare Nanostudio with theses toys that you realise all the incredible power of Nanostudio.

How do you guys find the 'tabletop' part of Tabletop (by this I mean the graphical view of all the instruments)? Graphical fluff or genuinely useful? I only ask this because it was an approach I considered taking at one stage but wasn't sure if it'd work well at phone size, and wasn't sure if I had the artwork resources to do it justice.

I like the idea behind tabletop, the modularity. Coming from Reason it's awesome to string everything together and be able to do crazy routing. It's unfortunate that Tabletop doesn't live up to the standard set by Audiotool, which is just out of control awesome.

I would love to have an interface like that :) but powerful like NS

Buzz tracker had a great interface for connecting machines to each other. You could shift-click any machine on the screen and drag to another and they would connect. This would be equivalent to long-tapping on iOS.

Here's an image I found of what it looks like at its worst: http://batman.no/buze/images/buze-1.gif

It was basically up to you to stay organized and here's a bad example of that. With a little bit of consideration, it was pretty crystal clear from a glance, what machine did what to which machine.

Very simple and extremely powerful routing. I think it could be doable even on the iPhone.

Stiksi: There is one sofware which perfecly works with buzz's modular architecture - it is SunVox tracker .. check iPad verision - it's awesome

ok it's also on iPhone but i think on the small iphone screen must be pain to work with it :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH6LiIERfHY

Depends if you have sausage fingers or not :-P

Sunvox is awesome with routing but yes, on iPhone it's a bit of a nightmare and even worse it's a tracker :( I just can't do the tracker thing lol...

I remember playing around with Buzz back in the day. I could never be bothered to do anything 'serious' with it aside from hooking various stuff up to see what it does. I think you're either into trackers or you're not, there's not much middle ground!

yes exactly :-) i started back in 1994 in MODedit (4 chanel mono tracker) and then next 4-5 years i was totally into trackers .. in Buzz i made lot lot tracks and it was great inspiring tool before i switched to reason and later cubase..

sunvox is great on iPad.. but i'm sure when finally NS for iPad will be release then for loong time i will again work with nothing else than nano :-)))

I've watched a couple of videos of Sunvox and I have to say I don't really get it! It looks like computer programming with the end result being sound. Can someone explain in laymen terms for me please.

I never got Sunvox to work on windows, so never really checked the ipad version. First tracker I saw in person was Octamed, the one I used extensively was Fast Tracker 2 . .

. . since FT2 nothing felt good or right. Until Nanostudio :)

Joe it pretty much is lol, you run the track from the top down and can have different patterns, everything has a hex value (letter and numbers) to represent different things like volume, note, CC change etc. It's a bit too much, it's not like writing music it's like writing a computer program that makes sound.

The people who know what they are doing though, my god, can pump out some awesome stuff. Famitracker and Sunvox come to mind among others

Right, cheers. Sounds like learning a whole new instrument or production method and a little counter intuitive for me :-) Thanks for the explanation though mate :-)

@Blip wrote
"How do you guys find the 'tabletop' part of Tabletop (by this I mean the graphical view of all the instruments)? Graphical fluff or genuinely useful? I only ask this because it was an approach I considered taking at one stage but wasn't sure if it'd work well at phone size, and wasn't sure if I had the artwork resources to do it justice."

Just bought it as well thinking... 1$? Thats could worth the graphics only, to say the least.
Personally while i found it (the UI) quite versatille i think its hardly intuitive.
I really appreciate the way NS works but i could feel a little better maybe benefiting by a few tweakings for the iPads mucho screen, that will help you instantly go to every panel NS has without branching through menus... wich means... DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!!! lol (IMHO) ;)

Alchemy Synth Mobile v1.1.8 has just been released.

Bags of new features added including the ability to load Alchemy Desktop presets.

Have to admit that alone could well persuade me to purchase the pro upgrade.

Still no SS25 support though :(

I just brought the Dubstep pack :-)

Me two but it won't play the patches. Just keeps loading :(

I was gonna message you on SoundCloud about it. New you would want it lol. Shame they wont load properly, sync it to your computer then delete it from you phone and sync again?

Lol I'm on it mate just reloaded it and works fine sone great sounds there :)

Yeah man I like "Wobbled Digi" and "Resonant Evil Wobble" :-)

I'm really liking the freqs transition and the fx soundscapes. Really good update would like more

@ Blip: Yeah, I wasn't really suggesting a tracker interface, but just the machine/effect routing part of Buzz, which was what made it great (along with the community producing high quality free devices). I know it can't be directly applied to NS because Buzz was fully modular but it was just to suggest ideas about the graphic representation.

@ Dendy: Thanks, I did try out Sunvox but I can't work a tracker on a touch screen. The whole thing with tracking is that it works like a step sequencer – you punch in a note, go down a few steps, punch another, and repeat. I need a decent keyboard for that.

But with Buzz there were multiple ways to create the tracker data: you could use midi keyboards, controllers, or sliders on the screen to control effects in real time. Just hit rec and play. Or you could write it down on the keyboard. It was just a different kind of UI. You could use it like any other DAW it you chose.

Blip,

I like the rack approach that you've taken. It's universal and Tabletop isn't. Ever tried Rebirth on an iPhone? I imagine Tabletop would be a very similar experience, which is cool of you're an elf. I think Retronyms tried to give people a Propellerheads type of interface but I find that the workspace isn't big enough for more than 6-8 devices and the wire routing is messy. I think the NS interface is just fine. I keep saying this, NS is the king for a good reason. The problem with ios apps is that they're inexpensive, so it's easy to get caught up in buying the next, new thing...which has happened to me. No matter what I get, nothing is as complete as NS or BM2.

Yeah I think the rack approach is fine when you get to a particular instrument, and I wouldn't want to change that. I mainly wonder if the main drop down menu for instrument selection might be better as a 'tabletop' view, but it'd really only work on the iPad and it could get complex quickly if you have loads of instruments - you don't want to be dragging/zooming when a button tap works just as well.

Screen real estate determines ergonomics of the interface. One more consideration, I love Reason to death, I do. However, the rack view in Reason can get cluttered especially when flipped and now that audio tracks are handled in the rack it can get pretty insane. With no track folders in Reason, the interface is daunting. I know the iPad can't handle as much right now, but think about the future. Reasons interface can be information overload and it's something I think the Propellerheads will have to address in the near future. Being able to concentrate on 'tight views' IMHO is more productive and less distracting. Blip, I suggest you answer your own question and take an hour or so with Tabletop. It will be enlightening, after working with NS or BM2. You'll see right through the interface and possibly come up with improvements Retronyms hasn't thought of.