Some background to Amidio

The Amidio blog has interesting information on where Amidio came from and also the fact that Apple won't publish their 'Hot Dancer' game, I wonder why? Anyway, here's what they say:

26-Mar-2009 | Thought about Amidio, Noise.io, Star Guitar
I think first I should tell about who we are and why we engaged into developing of iPhone apps.

Amidio was founded as collaboration of gadget and music enthusiasts in 2005. Our first projects included custom robots, limited-quantity gadgets and VST synths.

It's quite interesting that for some time, we've been developing a VST synth very similar to Sonic Charge's SynPlant :) We never finished it, as we decided to switch to the iPhone development in March 2008.

It took us about 7 months to create Noise.io Pro. Some of us at that time had another full-time day job so we had to work at nights.

We released Noise.io Pro at the end of October 2008 and we were the first company to introduce an app of such quality and complexity. Noise.io Pro is still unrivaled in terms of sound quality, features and sales volumes.

After Noise.io Pro, we decided to try creating a game, "Hot Dancer". The game is finished, but Apple refuses to publish it :) I'll cover that in one of the next blog posts.

When Hot Dancer was finished, we started to think about creating a guitar app.

Personally I never understood why people tried to insert and emulate guitar strings (!) in the interface. The iPhone doesn't detect the power or the pressure amount of the screen taps so that's evidently useless, if we want to achieve good sound.

Strumming on-screen strings can be fun for like 10 seconds, but then even inexperienced user inevitably comes to the opinion that the sounds suck :)

Real guitard sound so nice because every string sounds different every time it is strummed/picked.

So we carried out R&D and came up with completely new "SampleMagic" engine which allowed quite realistic sounding, while keeping sample sizes to a reasonable 10mb per guitar.

We also introduced "SmartStrumming" technology. It's simply a virtual "hand". When you tap the chord manually, the app tries to detect, where your hand is now - above or below the strings - thus deciding the direction of the strum and modifying the sound.