Just thinking about what might come next into BeatMaker. One thought I had was that it would be really clever if you could render you track in BeatMaker then upload it to SoundCloud or AudioBoo or another similar service for that matter.
I think that would be a great way to share music direct.
Maybe other apps could go the same way too.
Posted from my iPhone
5 comments:
I agree. It would make it easier for all of us to share our music. I specifically like SoundCloud because of its integration with Twitter. I hope the guys in Intua are working on some sort of update because they have not updated for a while.
Reverb, 64 velocity sensitive sample pads over 4 pages, full recording of all automation events, live play sample looping and piano roll note entry.
Well ok, that's what I HOPE is next :-)
One flaw with using SoundCloud with an iPhone/iPod app is that the SoundCloud website and widget don't work on the iPhone/iPod (they are very heavily Flash-based). But they do have a programming interface that will work from iPhone and iPod touch.
Pricing for SoundCloud is also problematic.
SoundCloud is expensive, I agree, but it can be accessed via an iPhone app, as FIRe can upload audio to SoundCloud.
I think AudioBoo is a good alternative for now.
Rob, I agree with your requests, I'd like them too.
The other major issue preventing iPhone apps (not just Beatmaker) from being able to upload audio files to a site like SoundCloud is the lack of suitable file formats or codecs.
I don't know how FiRE pulls it off.
But let's look at the options:
Uncompressed WAV -
WAV files are just too huge. Just say 10 MB per minute, and you've just run your iPhone battery down and also exceeded Apple's allowance for app cellular data usage (no more than 4.5 MB/5 min over EDGE or 3G).
Compressed codecs all suffer from huge CPU processing requirements. So, again, you've just run your iPhone battery down. This isn't a dealbreaker, but remember when encoding MP3 files was a standard benchmark for new computers?
MP3 -
MP3 is encumbered by prohibitive patent royalties for such applications. (MP3 Encoder licensing and transmitting MP3 files over the Internet are both covered by Thomson's patents.)
AAC -
I don't believe Core Audio on the iPhone includes an AAC encoder. And there are no open source AAC codecs that have an OSS license that is compatible with iPhone development. AAC also has a prohibitive encoder patent license requirement since it wouldn't be grandfathered in by the device or the OS.
Ogg/Vorbis -
This is really the only viable option. And SoundCloud supports it. But SoundCloud doesn't seem to convert Ogg/Vorbis on upload. So someone trying to download your sound from the SoundCloud website can only download a huge WAV file or an essoteric Ogg/Vorbis file which won't play in iTunes (without a lot of fiddling).
CAF (Core Audio Format) is supported on the iPhone with perhaps some limited compression (eg ADPCM), but CAF isn't supported by any service like SoundCloud AFAIK.
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