This is an attempt to draw together a number of ideas I've been having about a number of subjects which may seem unrelated, but which I think actually have something in common.
(Its also the second stab at writing it as ironically, given that much of it relates to the Internet as an extended joint memory, I managed to write the whole thing and then lose it when I tried to post it having forgotten to save as I went along. On this 2nd writing, I'm not sure I've linked the concepts as well or articulated the issues for education as well either - but tough. Its close enough and I'm fed up with trying to articulate it now for a while at least ;)
The Internet is a wonderful tool for bringing people together. Social networking tools such as Facebook dominate many of the most visited sites on the web and almost every site includes a comments section. The number of ways we can interact with other people online grow and increase in complexity continually too.
The Internet also remembers everything. This is both a good thing and a problem with much debate and effort currently looking for how to give it a way to forget the bad things (bad in this context can mean a lot of different things).
Access to the Internet is also becoming both ubiquitous and universal.
Putting these together is oft referred to as a manifestation of a Hive Mind. A kind of collective consciousness in which ideas spread as memes, where you can get answers to things you don't know yourself just by asking as someone somewhere is bound to know what you need. But it goes beyond a collective consciousness, it is also a collective memory.
With a simple YouTube search, I can "remember" exactly what it was like (at least the visual/audio aspects) to witness the assassination of an american president who died before I was even born. I can "remember" what it is like to journey to the moon, including the entire dialogue of the Apollo 11 crew all the way there and back, including those parts not transmitted to earth.
With music, with services such Spotify, I can "remember" a tune with perfect clarity on demand, wherever I am and at whatever time I choose.
Let's take that last point first and imagine back what life would have been like before recorded music, before sheet music, before any technology had been invented to help share the essential transient nature of music. I focus here on music, but the principle applies to books, video, news etc just as well.
At the time before any mechanism to record music, the only way to experience music "on demand" would be to remember it. Our memory is not perfect but it is quite effective. In that way, as soon as a piece of music is performed and experience by someone else, it is "owned" in some way by the listener since they can recall it later. The music gains a virtual existence in the mind which can not be controlled, or regulated by the originator.
However, the wetware of our brain gives far from perfect recall; how many songs can you remember exactly, note perfect with all the words? A few maybe, but probably not many. So, as soon as technology came along which could augment that recollection process, it became highly valued. Sheet music (for those who can read it) could assist the accurate recollection of a piece of music - it can even be used to transmit that music to someone who has never heard the original performed. In that sense, it augments the individuals memory, but also their ability to sense things at a distance - both in time and space.
Because of the value such technology brings, it was quickly highly rewarded and so became protected by law (which tends to be concerned with ensuring financial reward goes/stays where it is perceived it should be by those with power). This allowed the originator to gain reward not only from the initial performance, but from the transmission of the idea/music/etc through a medium other than direct experience. It also enabled/(required) 3rd parties to add value to this transmission process and they also gained reward from that process. Publishers of sheet music, shops who sold it and resellers all were able to gain a share of financial reward by adding value as the technology needed their help for it to work.
This situation essentially continued as music became recorded and the fidelity of the transmission process improved. As each new technology came along which improved the fidelity of transmission, the value we attributed to the experience it granted us increased to, and as a result, it allowed greater accumulation of reward for those who could control the media, while those originating the memes could also (sometimes) gain greater reward too - but not necessarily.
The media industries are just that - industries concerned with providing ad controlling a medium through which ideas are conveyed, making money from providing that medium.
This is the old world, the world before the hive mind.
ISPs (amongst others) provide the medium for the Internet, but completely disassociated from the content/ideas/memes being conveyed. Web sites such as FaceBook provide repositories for the memories/knowledge/ideas/memes, but as the things they hold are virtual, the ideas/concepts/memes can ebb and flow from one shore to another, endlessly duplicated and mutated in the process such that no one site can really be seen to "own" the content.
Many services such as bittorrent even delegate responsibility for the storage down to the collective level. There are no barriers to bits and bytes moving wherever they are needed. Some "old media" are attempting to coral the content they seek to control behind pay walls, but that is a form of censorship, and as the saying goes, the Internet sees censorship as damage and just routes around it. In the case of paywalls, people who do have access act as vectors for the bits and bytes to leak out. They don't have to intentionally do so, but by sharing the thoughts and ideas they have around that "protected" content, it leaks.
Essentially then, the Internet now provides a shared consciousness infrastructure such that what is in my mind can flow through it freely to your mind as you read this without the need for any moderation or "added value" beyond the infrastructure itself.
Old media industries which fail to recognise this are quickly seeing the revenue streams on which they relied evaporating, and will continue to do so unless they reinvent themselves as "content creation industries" rather than media industries. The media to transmit ideas is no longer scarce or valued, it is becoming ubiquitous and universal, and taken for granted.
Currently, the "music industry" (read: music media industry) continues to bemoan the "losses" they feel they are suffering due to piracy. In fact, what has happened is that everyone can now transmit music with incredible fidelity and the "added value" they used to rely on being valued and hence gratefully rewarded for is now essentially unnecessary.
The barriers between an artist creating music and being able to share it with the world is now essentially nil. As an example, I've been creating lots of tunes recently and I've been able to put them online (through Soundcloud) and share them with the world for free. Now, one might feel the music I've created is awful - that's fine, I'm not that keen on it myself ;) and I certainly wouldn't pay for it or expect anyone else to pay for it either - I might think music being created by recognised artists is also awful too. The point though is artists can now share their works easily without the need for a media industry to mediate the exchange.
Now, producing (quality) music can be expensive still. Studio time, engineers, equipment hire, travel expenses and 1,001 other things all cost money, and artists who produce expensive music will need a way to recoup those costs if their efforts are to be sustainable - but they can no longer rely on rewards accumulated through the transmission of their work to do this as that process is no longer valued.
The film industry (currently) can still rely on accumulating revenue from the transmission process as people still value attending the cinema as a "value added experience", but the revenue from content for consumption in the home is certainly under threat as the speed of the Internet connections and infrastructure make the delivery of "content on demand" by using old technology of physically shipping media around the world much less valued (or by fewer people at least so far).
Old media companies that fail to recognise this fundamental shift in the balance of where people attribute value will increasingly struggle. It is only by shifting their business models to be content creation industries seeking
renumeration through adding value in other ways that they can continue.
Now, how does all this relate to education?
Historically, (bad) education has been about cramming young minds full of facts with the hope that wisdom will spontaneously emerge. Good education has always been about empowering people with a set of tools through which to see the world.
In a world of the hive mind and "perfect recall", even of events which happened to other people in other places and at other times, the bad way of seeing education becomes even more obviously pointless. Clearly, there is still a need to provide some framework of basic "knowledge" with which to evaluate the collective knowledge of the hive mind, but the days of measuring someone's worth by their ability to recall facts has surely past.
As Martin Bean said in his speech at ALT-C 2009, education needs to be about fostering the knowledge-able, not the knowledgable.
Yet, much assessment in education is still based on the arbitrary recollection of facts/ideas from the limited local wetware available to us as individuals.
In most exams, we cut people off from the hive mind and collective consciousness and then expect to assess their performance, when that environment is entirely alien, and akin to cutting off half of their brain.
In a very real sense, our individuality has been partially subsumed within the hive mind, but we are also greatly augmented by it, which is why most of us willing engage with this technology.
Most in education would now be incredulous if a teacher/professor insisted that students didn't use the Internet at all. Even in class, it is now common for students to be able to "check" things online, or to seek further clarification of points they may have missed, and many workplaces also now encourage, even expect, people to utilise the Internet to augment their knowledge when necessary.
...and yet, we still often assess students by artificially isolating them from the collective, despite this being unrealistic of the real world.
Higher education in the UK is facing drastic changes to funding, in much the same way that the media industries are. Where HEIs have historically been the medium through which individuals can access materials (lectures/books etc) and then gain accreditation, much content is now available "for free" on the Internet (iTunesU etc) and the private sector is almost certainly going to provide flexible ways for students to gain accreditation of their skills/knowledge-ability.
The business model on which UK HEI is based will need drastic and rapid re-invention if they are going to survive as the private sector is certainly going to seize any niches it can, which may otherwise leave existing HEIs as untenable.
Content creation will be done by the best in the world and available for free. Assessment will be based on demonstrating real world benefit - which will mean demonstrating being knowledge-able, and so unlikely to be accurately assessed using exams or other artificial means of isolating students from the hive mind/collective consciousness.
Revenue will be gained by demonstrating some other added value. That could be the study environment itself (libraries open 24/7), access to content behind pay walls (since the leaks are imperfect), access to experts directly (to provide a much greater augmentation of the individuals abilities by a more direct connection in the hive mind...perhaps with a commitment to provide this after graduation?)...who knows. Market forces will certainly influence where added services are valued, but sitting in a darkened room listening to an expert talk quite possibly won't be highly valued when the same content is available on demand provided by the worlds best presenters.
So, any industry based on the value of the media for transmission of ideas/content/knowledge has been undermined by the Internet fostering a collective consciousness and memory. Any industry which fails to recognise that and resists it is doomed to fail. That goes for education as well as the traditional media industries.
While that means difficult changing times for those industries, it is for the greater good of society as a whole.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/02/26
2011/02/20
IPad app review Korg iMS-20 Analog Synth
Firstly, 
despite the title of this app, this is of course not an analogue synth of course, but it is a very good simulation of one, in this case, the Korg MS-20 (from 1978-1983) monophonic synth. It feels very analogue and really, its close enough to it that it justifies the use of the word in the name. The original device has been used by artists such as Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, OMD and Aphex Twin....so this app has a lot to live up to.
What this app is, is a simulation of an (old) analogue synth (and a sequencer) by one of the most recognised names in professional music. Given that heritage, its not surprising that it isn't the cheapest of apps (I bought it for £9.49 but I see its since gone up to £19.99 - worth waiting for a price drop again perhaps). When you run the app, you see a loading screen showing what the genuine old synth looked like and it is quite intimidating, looking more like a home electronics kit for kids than a musical instrument, with only the piano like keyboard a clue that it is in fact a musical instrument (in fact, much much more than just an instrument - more on that later)
While I have no personal direct experience of the original synth, there are plenty of examples of how it sounds and what it can do out there, and based on what I could find to compare with and based on the statements of genuine professional musicians, this app makes an amazingly close simulation of that original kit.
That is both it's strength and weakness. The original was quite clearly a monster of a machine - capable of the most incredible creativity, but also a mind boggling array of options and technology that can be certainly quite daunting.
Take a
look at the initial screen you are presented with when running this app for the first time. Having seen a photo of the original in the loading screen, the similarity is clear, and OK, the keyboard at the bottom looks relatively familiar and inviting, but the array of tiny knobs, buttons and bazaar yellow patch cables is initially quite off putting. Certainly, the menu at the top of the screen with it's multiple sections, each with many many sub screens full of additional knobs and switches is hardly intuitive...and yet, given a little while, it really all works very very well.
That initial screen is actually a simplified view of the assortment of options around just the main synth part of the device.
For example, tapping the keyboard button at the top, hides the pop up recording keyboard to fill the screen with more of the options available. All of this is still available with the keyboard displayed too, but you have to scroll the panel to see it all then. On this screen, the top bank is what is "recorded" (programmed is probably a better term) for the current "pattern". each pattern can have a different synth sound, a different set of notes/parameters for the notes and a different drum pattern. A "song" is made up of up to 256 separate patterns.
Before getting to making songs though, its worth noting that you can also zoom in on the settings for the synth, which makes tweaking all those knobs a little less fiddly
but not by much. The synth is a collection of 2 "Voltage Controlled Oscillators" (VCOs), with a selection of waveforms and parameters for each. The 2 main oscillators can be combined, along with a frequency modulator, and shaped with various filters (Highpass and lowpass) and shaped by an envelope with attack, decay, sustain and release along with pitch and numerous other parameters. These settings alone are enough to produce a bewildering array of very different sounds, although even after much playing, I'm still struggling to really understand how the different sections interact and as a result, most sounds are arrived at with a lot more trial and error than intention - but that is part of the joy of playing with the thing - the feeling of exploration and discovery.
Thankfully, unlike the original, when you do find just the settings you like for that swooping laser sound or crashing base, you can save all the knob position and patching routes to load again whenever you like. There are also a number of pre-defined settings you can load to get you started. I can only imagine that musicians first getting such kit back in the 70s with no such luxury would have had to spend a lot longer getting familiar with the thing before they could get anything like the sounds they wanted :)
This is only the beginning
of how the sounds of the synth can be tweaked though. Zoomed in, the patch panel is a little more obvious as the tiny white "print" can be read, but its still a magic black box without understanding how the different elements work together and what each does. Again, after a lot of playing, I'm still only scratching the surface of really understanding any of this part, but it's clearly very powerful in how the wave forms going through the synth can be taken out and redirected into additional/different (virtual) circuitry. Thats the key I think to getting any understanding of what is going on - remembering that its all about voltages and waveforms, some of which become triggers for events and clocks for other bits of the system in a complex feedback loop. One thing I think the app can do that I'm not sure how the original would have managed is that it only lets you plug the output signals into places in the circuits for inputs. Heaven knowns what happened on the original of you tried feeding a voltage back in where another voltage was being produced!
The top section of the synth has 16 separate "notes", each with 12 parameters arranged in 4 sets selected by the white buttons on the left. The first bank are the "note", the "octave" and the "length" of each note. Length isn't what it sounds like however as the way the synth plays a pattern is at a fixed rate for each "note" (fixed meaning a rate set by another dial on a different screen), but length is the nearest term I can think of. The other banks of settings include volume, pan, and 3 parameters than can be selected to tweak (almost?) any of the settings in the dials below individually for each note. This works simplest for things like the high and low pass filters to give a characteristic "sweeping" type sound.
The next screen to look at is the drum pattern settings.
Anyone familiar with an old drum machine will probably recognise the way of setting a drum to sound or not on each of 16 beats in a pattern. This synth has up to 6 different "drum" sounds (7 channels in total with the synth track), with each drum being effectively a synth in it's own right with all the same settings and options. So for each drum sound, you can select to edit the sound and you are presented with a very similar screen to the synth screen.
Here, I've selected to edit the drum pattern in more detail rather than the sound (as the sound editing screen is really so similar to the synth screen). This shows the dual X-Y touch pads that can be used to interactively play or "record" edits to the various parameters instead of the piano keyboard.
Next
up is the master mixing screen. Each of the 7 channels can have a different overall pan applied (on top of the individual note pan settings), and an overall volume. You can select to mute any channel individually, or choose "solo" to mute all other channels except that one. There is also a master effect which can be selected from things like reverb, delay, chorus and flanger. This is again on top of the same choice of effect which can have been applied to each channel individually earlier in the sound chain!
Songs are made
of a sequence of patterns, and this is the screen for doing that. Here, the slider chooses which set of 16 places for patterns in the song is selected for the buttons below. Each button can be assigned to one of the 16 patterns on the pads below that (by clicking a button and then tapping the pad to assign to that slot). There are 2 special options too to either loop the song when the sequencer reaches that slot or end. The pads can also be "played" in real time, either changing the pattern being played as soon as a new one is pressed or sync'd to the track seamlessly. There is also a mixer on this screen for each channel and a BPM setting (which is what changes how quickly each note plays back on the synth and drum screens). You can choose to play the whole song or repeatedly play the selected pattern (until a new one is selected) using the menu at the top.
Last few things to note (excuse the pun), are the ability to save songs (with all the patterns/synth settings etc)
This bit is the nearest to looking like a standard iPad app. It integrates with Soundcloud for sharing your creations with others (my efforts with this app and others are here http://soundcloud.com/sputuk to get an indication of what it can sound like). There is also a community section on Soundcloud where everything everyone shares with the app is collected. One great thing is that depending on how people choose to share their creations, you can download their original rather than just the resulting song so you can dissect it and tweak it yourself to learn from how they produced certain sounds and effects - very useful for learning how to get what you want from the app :)
Finally,
this is the global menu for tweaking a few settings of how the app behaves (such as where the text pops up showing you the value of a dial when you're adjusting it) and also "bouncing" your song or individual patterns - which is the musician term for creating a final mix down of the sounds into a single file (in this case, wav files).
So, enough of how the app looks and works - I have only included so much on that because I think it's the only way to convey how complex, flexible but also bewildering this app is. The important things are, does it work, what can it do, and is it worth the money.
Does it work? Absolutely. I've not had it crash once and despite the non-standard look and feel of the UI, it all works really well once you get used to it.
What can it do? Well, just about anything you're likely to have heard in the form of electronica music. Dance, trance, pop, dub - you name it and you can create a suitable set of sounds and beats. There are lots and lots of examples on Soundcloud besides my few (search for iMS-20) which show the huge range of styles and sounds it's capable of. What I haven't even touched on here is how it can work with external midi equipment, making your iPad the hub of multiple controllers and keyboards acting as the synth and sequencer while using real full sized velocity sensitive keyboards and drum pads. Korg have a whole set of such items as well as those from other manufacturers, and these can be used through the camera kit thanks to the latest iOS4 update which includes CoreMidi support. This is something I certainly intend to investigate further. NB if you are thinking of this option, there is a web site that details which midi kit works through the camera kit and which doesn't. Most it seems does, but some which need to draw power through the USB will need connecting through a powered hub. I think there is also scope for someone to create a camera kit adaptor that allows charging the ipad at the same time. There is also a new device, the iConnectMIDI due to be released Q2 2011 that acts as a "midi hub" for the older 5 pin din devices as well as multiple USB midi devices and up to 2 iPad/iPod/iPhones at the same time. The videos of this kit working with apps such as iMS-20 as well as external hardware synths and multple simultaneous keyboards/pad (with up to 5 people jamming together on just an ipod and an ipad) shows just how advanced this stuff can get.
Is it worth the money? Well, at less than £10 (when I bought it) for a synth that sounds like something costing well over £1000 for vintage versions of the original (manuals for the original seem to cost as much as this app!), and with the ability to use it professionally for recording or live performances especially with the addition of midi controllers, I'd have to say yes. It's amazing fun to play with and despite making music so far that I would usually really hate to listen to, I'm having great fun making the music. Yet another example of how the myth of the iPad only being suitable for consuming content has been blown out of the water :)
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
despite the title of this app, this is of course not an analogue synth of course, but it is a very good simulation of one, in this case, the Korg MS-20 (from 1978-1983) monophonic synth. It feels very analogue and really, its close enough to it that it justifies the use of the word in the name. The original device has been used by artists such as Gorillaz, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, OMD and Aphex Twin....so this app has a lot to live up to.What this app is, is a simulation of an (old) analogue synth (and a sequencer) by one of the most recognised names in professional music. Given that heritage, its not surprising that it isn't the cheapest of apps (I bought it for £9.49 but I see its since gone up to £19.99 - worth waiting for a price drop again perhaps). When you run the app, you see a loading screen showing what the genuine old synth looked like and it is quite intimidating, looking more like a home electronics kit for kids than a musical instrument, with only the piano like keyboard a clue that it is in fact a musical instrument (in fact, much much more than just an instrument - more on that later)
While I have no personal direct experience of the original synth, there are plenty of examples of how it sounds and what it can do out there, and based on what I could find to compare with and based on the statements of genuine professional musicians, this app makes an amazingly close simulation of that original kit.
That is both it's strength and weakness. The original was quite clearly a monster of a machine - capable of the most incredible creativity, but also a mind boggling array of options and technology that can be certainly quite daunting.
Take a
look at the initial screen you are presented with when running this app for the first time. Having seen a photo of the original in the loading screen, the similarity is clear, and OK, the keyboard at the bottom looks relatively familiar and inviting, but the array of tiny knobs, buttons and bazaar yellow patch cables is initially quite off putting. Certainly, the menu at the top of the screen with it's multiple sections, each with many many sub screens full of additional knobs and switches is hardly intuitive...and yet, given a little while, it really all works very very well.That initial screen is actually a simplified view of the assortment of options around just the main synth part of the device.
For example, tapping the keyboard button at the top, hides the pop up recording keyboard to fill the screen with more of the options available. All of this is still available with the keyboard displayed too, but you have to scroll the panel to see it all then. On this screen, the top bank is what is "recorded" (programmed is probably a better term) for the current "pattern". each pattern can have a different synth sound, a different set of notes/parameters for the notes and a different drum pattern. A "song" is made up of up to 256 separate patterns.Before getting to making songs though, its worth noting that you can also zoom in on the settings for the synth, which makes tweaking all those knobs a little less fiddly
but not by much. The synth is a collection of 2 "Voltage Controlled Oscillators" (VCOs), with a selection of waveforms and parameters for each. The 2 main oscillators can be combined, along with a frequency modulator, and shaped with various filters (Highpass and lowpass) and shaped by an envelope with attack, decay, sustain and release along with pitch and numerous other parameters. These settings alone are enough to produce a bewildering array of very different sounds, although even after much playing, I'm still struggling to really understand how the different sections interact and as a result, most sounds are arrived at with a lot more trial and error than intention - but that is part of the joy of playing with the thing - the feeling of exploration and discovery.Thankfully, unlike the original, when you do find just the settings you like for that swooping laser sound or crashing base, you can save all the knob position and patching routes to load again whenever you like. There are also a number of pre-defined settings you can load to get you started. I can only imagine that musicians first getting such kit back in the 70s with no such luxury would have had to spend a lot longer getting familiar with the thing before they could get anything like the sounds they wanted :)
This is only the beginning
of how the sounds of the synth can be tweaked though. Zoomed in, the patch panel is a little more obvious as the tiny white "print" can be read, but its still a magic black box without understanding how the different elements work together and what each does. Again, after a lot of playing, I'm still only scratching the surface of really understanding any of this part, but it's clearly very powerful in how the wave forms going through the synth can be taken out and redirected into additional/different (virtual) circuitry. Thats the key I think to getting any understanding of what is going on - remembering that its all about voltages and waveforms, some of which become triggers for events and clocks for other bits of the system in a complex feedback loop. One thing I think the app can do that I'm not sure how the original would have managed is that it only lets you plug the output signals into places in the circuits for inputs. Heaven knowns what happened on the original of you tried feeding a voltage back in where another voltage was being produced!The top section of the synth has 16 separate "notes", each with 12 parameters arranged in 4 sets selected by the white buttons on the left. The first bank are the "note", the "octave" and the "length" of each note. Length isn't what it sounds like however as the way the synth plays a pattern is at a fixed rate for each "note" (fixed meaning a rate set by another dial on a different screen), but length is the nearest term I can think of. The other banks of settings include volume, pan, and 3 parameters than can be selected to tweak (almost?) any of the settings in the dials below individually for each note. This works simplest for things like the high and low pass filters to give a characteristic "sweeping" type sound.
The next screen to look at is the drum pattern settings.
Anyone familiar with an old drum machine will probably recognise the way of setting a drum to sound or not on each of 16 beats in a pattern. This synth has up to 6 different "drum" sounds (7 channels in total with the synth track), with each drum being effectively a synth in it's own right with all the same settings and options. So for each drum sound, you can select to edit the sound and you are presented with a very similar screen to the synth screen.
Here, I've selected to edit the drum pattern in more detail rather than the sound (as the sound editing screen is really so similar to the synth screen). This shows the dual X-Y touch pads that can be used to interactively play or "record" edits to the various parameters instead of the piano keyboard.Next
up is the master mixing screen. Each of the 7 channels can have a different overall pan applied (on top of the individual note pan settings), and an overall volume. You can select to mute any channel individually, or choose "solo" to mute all other channels except that one. There is also a master effect which can be selected from things like reverb, delay, chorus and flanger. This is again on top of the same choice of effect which can have been applied to each channel individually earlier in the sound chain!Songs are made
of a sequence of patterns, and this is the screen for doing that. Here, the slider chooses which set of 16 places for patterns in the song is selected for the buttons below. Each button can be assigned to one of the 16 patterns on the pads below that (by clicking a button and then tapping the pad to assign to that slot). There are 2 special options too to either loop the song when the sequencer reaches that slot or end. The pads can also be "played" in real time, either changing the pattern being played as soon as a new one is pressed or sync'd to the track seamlessly. There is also a mixer on this screen for each channel and a BPM setting (which is what changes how quickly each note plays back on the synth and drum screens). You can choose to play the whole song or repeatedly play the selected pattern (until a new one is selected) using the menu at the top.Last few things to note (excuse the pun), are the ability to save songs (with all the patterns/synth settings etc)
This bit is the nearest to looking like a standard iPad app. It integrates with Soundcloud for sharing your creations with others (my efforts with this app and others are here http://soundcloud.com/sputuk to get an indication of what it can sound like). There is also a community section on Soundcloud where everything everyone shares with the app is collected. One great thing is that depending on how people choose to share their creations, you can download their original rather than just the resulting song so you can dissect it and tweak it yourself to learn from how they produced certain sounds and effects - very useful for learning how to get what you want from the app :)Finally,
this is the global menu for tweaking a few settings of how the app behaves (such as where the text pops up showing you the value of a dial when you're adjusting it) and also "bouncing" your song or individual patterns - which is the musician term for creating a final mix down of the sounds into a single file (in this case, wav files).So, enough of how the app looks and works - I have only included so much on that because I think it's the only way to convey how complex, flexible but also bewildering this app is. The important things are, does it work, what can it do, and is it worth the money.
Does it work? Absolutely. I've not had it crash once and despite the non-standard look and feel of the UI, it all works really well once you get used to it.
What can it do? Well, just about anything you're likely to have heard in the form of electronica music. Dance, trance, pop, dub - you name it and you can create a suitable set of sounds and beats. There are lots and lots of examples on Soundcloud besides my few (search for iMS-20) which show the huge range of styles and sounds it's capable of. What I haven't even touched on here is how it can work with external midi equipment, making your iPad the hub of multiple controllers and keyboards acting as the synth and sequencer while using real full sized velocity sensitive keyboards and drum pads. Korg have a whole set of such items as well as those from other manufacturers, and these can be used through the camera kit thanks to the latest iOS4 update which includes CoreMidi support. This is something I certainly intend to investigate further. NB if you are thinking of this option, there is a web site that details which midi kit works through the camera kit and which doesn't. Most it seems does, but some which need to draw power through the USB will need connecting through a powered hub. I think there is also scope for someone to create a camera kit adaptor that allows charging the ipad at the same time. There is also a new device, the iConnectMIDI due to be released Q2 2011 that acts as a "midi hub" for the older 5 pin din devices as well as multiple USB midi devices and up to 2 iPad/iPod/iPhones at the same time. The videos of this kit working with apps such as iMS-20 as well as external hardware synths and multple simultaneous keyboards/pad (with up to 5 people jamming together on just an ipod and an ipad) shows just how advanced this stuff can get.
Is it worth the money? Well, at less than £10 (when I bought it) for a synth that sounds like something costing well over £1000 for vintage versions of the original (manuals for the original seem to cost as much as this app!), and with the ability to use it professionally for recording or live performances especially with the addition of midi controllers, I'd have to say yes. It's amazing fun to play with and despite making music so far that I would usually really hate to listen to, I'm having great fun making the music. Yet another example of how the myth of the iPad only being suitable for consuming content has been blown out of the water :)
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
2011/02/01
IPad App review CartoMap - basic CAD editor
I'm not a great user of CAD but there are some occasions where it is the right tool for the job - room planning for example where the actual dimensions can be modelled for all the items.
As a result, I've been keeping an eye out for a "proper" CAD application for the iPad for a while and recently I spotted CartoMap and decided to give it a whirl.
I'd previously tried the AutoDesk AutoCad WS app and had been disappointed to discover it is only really a viewer, but CartoMap appeared from the review to give full editing features, and thankfully that's what it does.
The interface for this app has clearly inherited it's design from desktop based applications rather than sticking to the usual iPad ways of interacting. Some of these differences are for the better and much more suited to "big" applications like CAD. For example, If you choose to open a file when you already have a file open, rather than just prompting you to Save or Cancel, this app allows a Save changes, Close losing changes or cancel. That ability to close a file you've edited without saving the changes is often lacking from other apps, but it makes sense and with CAD being so easy to mess things up and need to revert to a saved version, it's welcome in this app.
The interface is quite minimal, leaving as much of the screen available to view your work as possible, and when you start adding or editing items, the interface gets even more out of the way leaving only a small window at the top prompting you what it is expecting next (eg to enter the radius of a circle) and a couple of little icons in the corners, one of which pops up a quick "snap to guide" selection tool.
The usual basic CAD drawing tools are present. Lines, arcs, polylines, circles, rectangles, points and text are obvious in the pop up tools. Other tools include dimension lines, creating and using symbols (collections of other drawing objects into a single new meta-object), delete and settings.
The interface works well and allows all the usual options of entering coordinates directly or using snap to guides for the usual list of points including, end points, intersections, mid-points, centre points of curves etc.
The app also includes an automatic snap to detection method where you just tap somewhere close to the snap point you want to use and the app presents you with a list of the points nearby to choose from. It does this by presenting a new screen with the snap to point shown with a pin and the element it relates to highlighted, which works very quickly simply and intuitively.
I'm far from an expert in CAD, but the little I have tried with it so far has all worked fine, but it is only basic editing. You wouldn't want to be creating the next London Gerkin floor plans with it - but you can load the plans in the field and could probably make slight corrections or additions and then sync those edits back in the office. As you can see, there a various file transfer options using wifi, iTunes or sending the file as an email. I also tested opening a file from Safari using the "open in..." option. This worked, although when it first displayed the more complicated file I used as a test, it just displayed a blank screen, but when I closed it and re-opened it, it worked fine.
It is not without it's bugs, even with the little testing and playing I've done it has crashed a few times on very simple files, but with regular saves just in case, it's possible to work with it.
I've probably missed mentioning 90% of the things this app can do, but if I say it includes layers, DWG/DXF/CTM files support, multiple undo/redo, Unicode support, cut/extend objects then I've at least mentioned some of them :)
It's not cheap in App terms at £11.99, but if it does what you need then it's probably cheap at twice the price.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
As a result, I've been keeping an eye out for a "proper" CAD application for the iPad for a while and recently I spotted CartoMap and decided to give it a whirl.
I'd previously tried the AutoDesk AutoCad WS app and had been disappointed to discover it is only really a viewer, but CartoMap appeared from the review to give full editing features, and thankfully that's what it does.
The interface for this app has clearly inherited it's design from desktop based applications rather than sticking to the usual iPad ways of interacting. Some of these differences are for the better and much more suited to "big" applications like CAD. For example, If you choose to open a file when you already have a file open, rather than just prompting you to Save or Cancel, this app allows a Save changes, Close losing changes or cancel. That ability to close a file you've edited without saving the changes is often lacking from other apps, but it makes sense and with CAD being so easy to mess things up and need to revert to a saved version, it's welcome in this app.
The interface is quite minimal, leaving as much of the screen available to view your work as possible, and when you start adding or editing items, the interface gets even more out of the way leaving only a small window at the top prompting you what it is expecting next (eg to enter the radius of a circle) and a couple of little icons in the corners, one of which pops up a quick "snap to guide" selection tool.
The usual basic CAD drawing tools are present. Lines, arcs, polylines, circles, rectangles, points and text are obvious in the pop up tools. Other tools include dimension lines, creating and using symbols (collections of other drawing objects into a single new meta-object), delete and settings.
The interface works well and allows all the usual options of entering coordinates directly or using snap to guides for the usual list of points including, end points, intersections, mid-points, centre points of curves etc.
The app also includes an automatic snap to detection method where you just tap somewhere close to the snap point you want to use and the app presents you with a list of the points nearby to choose from. It does this by presenting a new screen with the snap to point shown with a pin and the element it relates to highlighted, which works very quickly simply and intuitively.
I'm far from an expert in CAD, but the little I have tried with it so far has all worked fine, but it is only basic editing. You wouldn't want to be creating the next London Gerkin floor plans with it - but you can load the plans in the field and could probably make slight corrections or additions and then sync those edits back in the office. As you can see, there a various file transfer options using wifi, iTunes or sending the file as an email. I also tested opening a file from Safari using the "open in..." option. This worked, although when it first displayed the more complicated file I used as a test, it just displayed a blank screen, but when I closed it and re-opened it, it worked fine.
It is not without it's bugs, even with the little testing and playing I've done it has crashed a few times on very simple files, but with regular saves just in case, it's possible to work with it.
I've probably missed mentioning 90% of the things this app can do, but if I say it includes layers, DWG/DXF/CTM files support, multiple undo/redo, Unicode support, cut/extend objects then I've at least mentioned some of them :)
It's not cheap in App terms at £11.99, but if it does what you need then it's probably cheap at twice the price.
- Posted using BlogPress from mobile device
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