Mobile Studio: Palm RhythmPro

I've posted before on my old OS4 clie which is now my Palm Music Museum. Over time I'm trying to write something about all of these old apps and dig out pictures where possible.

So, today's OS4 treat is:

RhythmPro

I have to start by saying that this is a little bit of a cheat. RhythmPro is a also an OS5 application, but like a few that have persisted it started off quite a while ago.

RhythmPro lets you create and play your own custom drum patterns with real digitized drum sounds on a Palm handheld. Or it can also be used as a versatile and extremely accurate metronome. You can create rhythm patterns in almost any imaginable time signature, save and organize your patterns into categories, and play them using your choice of four different display modes for optimal visual and audio feedback. Set the tempo for each pattern using the onscreen controls or just tap the screen twice in time and RhythmPro calculates the tempo of your taps and begins playing. Other included features:

- Ability to build rhythm patterns using digitized drum sounds (hi-hat, snare, bass, and cowbell) or using musical tones at any pitch from 50 to 4000 Hz.
- Customizable relative volume for each type of beat sound.
- Extremely accurate playback with timing accuracy of 0.00017 BPM (the highest accuracy possible on Palm devices).
- Ability to create patterns in any time signature up with up to 40 beats per measure.
- Playback at any rate from 1 to 400 BPM (beats per minute).
- A self-check features monitors the playback to tell you if your playback tempo surpasses the ability of your Palm's hardware to play the rhythm with accurate timing.
- Whenever possible the CPU is put to sleep between each beat to limit battery power consumption.
- Four different visual display modes during playback, including an animated metronome and other modes showing you the entire beat pattern or the current beat.
- Measure counter with option to automatically stop playing after a set number of measures.
- Six sample rhythm patterns included.

RhythmPro has an appealing interface that makes the application a pleasure to work with.



Whilst it has a fairly standard interface for rhythm programming it has good methods of feedback to the user and that's important when working in a small form factor.



Also, the metronome function is implemented very well indeed.

tags technorati : Palm, Clie, Sony, PDA, Music, Handheld, MIDI, Mobile Studio