We are extremely pleased to announce the launch of Slice, our beat-juggling app. You’ve watched the demos, salivated over the possibilities, and now you can grab the app and juggle our beats as well as your own to your pounding heart’s content.
The Slice debut features graphic design by Sally K Russell and sound design by Claus Muzak. Mountains of thanks for their efforts!
Hello San Francisco! Lucas Kuzma will present current and future apps at the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group meeting Wed. Oct 7, 2009 alongside other presentations for computer music enthusiasts.
Presentations will include:
- Ge Wang (Stanford CCRMA Assistant Professor and Smule CTO) will give a tour of TAPESTREA.
- Jorge Herrera (Stanford CCRMA graduate student) will demonstrate Flash Audio synthesis approaches.
- Lucas Kuzma of The Strange Agency will present his series of music applications for the iPhone. In addition to showcasing current and forthcoming apps, the talk will address making music on a mobile platform.
- SHARE San Jose is a group of technology-oriented musicians and visualists that meets monthly to jam, experiment, and talk. Tim Thompson will describe the group’s activities since its inception almost two years ago.
While hordes of strange agents wrangle little gleeks of funk from Audio Units to bring you Slice, it has come to light that SLICE NEEDS LOOPS!
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 11th. 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.
Curtis 1.4 just popped onto the scene, so those of you with long IP addresses can now also enjoy file transfer between Curtis and your computer. We fixed the address truncation bug and added saving, so now your favorite recordings can be accessed again and again.
For those of you who have been reluctant to give Spoke a spin, a limited free version is now out on the App Store. Give it a whirl, give us some feedback!
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?
It’s a strange process indeed, so we’ve posted a new guide to Curtis Heavy that hopefully clears things up.
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.