The Slice debut features graphic design by Sally K Russell and sound design by Claus Muzak. Mountains of thanks for their efforts!

So where can we get the phattest breaks on the planet? From you!

The Strange Agency is holding a contest for the best loops to package with Slice upon its release! Loops must be hecka, hella quantized and ready for slicing, dicing, cutting, and milking. This app is all about tight timing and recombinant beat synchrony, so slop cannot be tolerated.

You must forfeit all rights to any submission. Slice users will want string-less, royalty-free loops to play with, otherwise where is the fun? We will credit you in the app, and we’ll say prayers for you nightly, but that’s about all we can offer beyond the endless paeans of your peers who will break out your beats at shows, on albums, in BMW ads.

We need your sounds by September 11^th. We will submit each loop to a rigorous ass-test. If the ass don’t wiggle, no dice. Oh, and YOUR OWN SHIT ONLY please. Let’s not all get sued? God bless.

Send us your loop

We have some new features in the works as well as some optimizations coming up. Apparently Spoke actually runs slower on OS3 than on OS2.2.1, and this is something we are working hard to diagnose and address.

UPDATE: We tracked down the issue with OS3, and Spoke will soon be running much faster on an iDevice near you.

For the developers out there: using NSTimer to frequently trigger a UI update on the main thread is a bad idea. For some reason detaching a new thread that sleeps often yet still performs the UI update on the main thread leads to huge performance gains. Anyone know what’s going on under the hood that makes this so?

Meanwhile, the ability to save your recordings is on the way. They will be accessible through the same browser interface, so you can move them to your computer as well.

Prison was hard, but we’ve moved on and dragged along with us just the darnedest little beat sketchpad we could have ever imagined. No grids, no top, bottomless, faithful: Spoke groove machine delivers.

Our thesis:

The drum machine began with analog sounds, but its brain was always digital; the step-sequencer places voltage potentials on a grid.

Analog synthesis was, in truth, merely a convenience; it did the job adequately. Analog is great for warmth and richness, but analog is shit for timing. So-called analog sequencers are, at their best, digital with regard to the time axis. True analog was never feasible for timing.

Contemporary sequencers have extremely high resolution; Logic has a resolution of 960 ppqn. Theoretically, Spoke places beats at sampling resolution. At 120 bpm that is 22050 ppqn. A frequency of 22050 Hz is sufficient to reproduce audio at the threshold of our hearing range. What is the threshold of our timing range?

At 22050 ppqn we are surely beyond the limit of human timing sensitivity. At 22050 ppqn position becomes effectively analog.

This is what Spoke seeks: analog positioning on a digital platform.

Of course we are limited by resolution. Of course this limit is arbitrary. Of course this limit is transitory. Of course this limit need not go very high before we supercede human timing accuracy.

Nonetheless this is the spirit: do away with the position grid, do away with the quantize. Place the beats where they need to be. Place the beats where they sound most true.

Sixteen bits still sound too smooth? Missing your SID chip? Two LO-FI bit reduction modes are coming as well!