So far for 1.1.0 I can confirm the following

• Fixes for playhead visual positioning issues
• ‘Create’ option for Grooves (create a groove template from a pattern, such as recorded MIDI notes).
• Remix Pads
• File management – Delete, email, Open in… (for opening files in other apps including Dropbox)

More is also being worked on – I’ll be tweeting and posting here as new stuff gets added. Be sure to Follow @whitenoiseaudio
for the latest updates.

BS-16i's mixing / setup page

An app I have been using a lot lately is BS-16i – it’s a soundfont player (a sampler for those unfamilar with soundfonts) and it’s capable of playing 16 instruments at once. This means that you can make a decent song just using Genome and BS16. It’s also convenient because you can control mixing and instrument setup all from the same screen. BS16 comes with a fairly typical General MIDI sound bank, but there are free soundfonts online and making your own is also an option. Thankfully the default sound bank also has some drum kits, so you have everything you need to for a mobile music sketch pad.

My only gripes with the app are that you can only set up 8 of the instruments from the UI (the other 8 are only changeable through Program Change messages as far as I can tell). Another gripe is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to save your setups. This is pretty important if you want to be able to save your songs. It would be pretty awesome if these features could be added. Another thing to consider is that BS-16 eats up all 16 MIDI channels, but I suppose you could mute a couple instruments to free up those channels for other apps. Being able to record audio would be great too, but now I’m just getting demanding.

If you are looking for soundfonts to use with BS-16, there’s a massive collection at: Hammersound

Finally, I put together a little video tutorial of me using BS-16i with Genome.

Genome MIDI Sequencer v 1.0.9 is now live in the app store. We’ve also lowered the price to $6.99  for a limited time (sale ends 4/30). This new version fixes some bugs and also adds ‘groove templates’ for adding Swing to your patterns. Retina graphics for the new iPad were also added. I’ll be posting some videos about the new features, and also some stuff that is coming in the next update! The online docs also need to be updated with info on groove templates – this will be done soon.

Hey all,

we are still working resolve a bug with the pattern length in the current version of Genome. Instead of getting a bunch of bad reviews about this bug, we are temporarily removing GMS from the app store. Obviously, we’re going to try to get it back up ASAP. When it returns we’ll run a sale for a few days. We’ll post here when it returns.

In order to help better educate people about which apps work with Genome and how to get them up and running, I’ve updated my Compatibility List and wrote a Tutorial piece. If there’s anything you’d like to see added, please contact me.

I’ve come across some of my original sketches for GMS on my hard drive and I wanted to write a post to describe the process of designing Genome MIDI sequencer. I think it’s always interesting to see an idea go from a sketch on a piece of paper to a full application months or years later. I first got the idea for Genome after hearing about the Line6 MIDI Mobilizer hardware (pre- CoreMIDI and camera connection kit). Having developed bleep!BOX, I knew that mobile devices are always going to lag behind their PC counterparts in terms of CPU power. This limits the quality and quantity of musical instruments that can be generated. I’m sure we’ll see some really impressive DAW’s on tablets at some point, but at the time it made sense to have something that can take advantage of all the cool gear that musicans own and the awesome capabilities of the iPad.

Personally, I’ve never taken full advantage of the gear I owned because I found hardware sequencers too clumsy to use and if I was going to use a computer, I might as well use plugins for convenience. Having a portable MIDI sequencer with a large touch screen and a nice interface would be a really cool thing and would defintely help me get more use out of my gear. I wanted to make something that people could play live or jam with, so being able to change loops on the fly was a must. Here’s my initial sketch:

The original design had no song mode and I ended up re-working some of the user interactions. For the pattern editor, I wanted to make sure that the core actions such as drawing notes and deleting notes only took one tap. Selecting and modifying notes takes a couple taps.

This is a shot of the sequencer from an early prototype. Some of the art was ‘borrowed’ from bleep!BOX. The core layout hasn’t changed much, but a lot has been added.

Same with the pattern editor. I’m a big proponent of building a prototype before getting too far with a design. It does bias some of your design decisions, but it ensures that what you are building is something worth using and helps you figure out exactly what controls are needed, how things will work, etc. It also helps you figure out early if any of your assumptions are wrong or if things need to be changed. Designers also love having the interface thought out in advance and a good designer should know when to argue for a different layout or different UI controls. The prototype proved that real-time looping of MIDI patterns was at least possible on the early Line6 MIDI interfaces.

Here’s where the final design ended up. I experimented with a couple different look and feels and took a couple weeks to get it just right. The main goal was to make an app that looks professional and matches the level of polish and class of the iPad itself.  The amount of controls keeps growing, but there’s room for future additions (and of course things could be re-organized into sub menus where appropriate). I want to keep the core functionality as simple as possible, while still accommodating as much of the more advanced features as I can. I won’t sacrifice ease of use for for advanced features. Mobile  apps need to be as simple as possible. But it has been, and will continue to be, an interesting challenge trying to bring the features of a desktop sequencing environment to the more limited touch screen.

We’ve snuck one more feature into 1.0.7 called Auto Scale. What does this do? Basically it creates a scale based on the notes in your pattern. This means you can hide any notes you aren’t using. For example, here’s a drum beat – we can hide the notes that don’t trigger any drums with just a couple taps:

bleep!BOX has been updated to 1.3.8 which brings compatibility with the new iPad. The Player version should also see approval on Monday if all goes well. We have also updated the Genome docs to include the latest features. It also includes some info on features that will be coming soon. bleep!BOX docs will be updated soon to include MIDI info.

bleep!BOX 1.3.7 has been released and is live in the app store. Notable features include:

• Added MIDI sync, triggering
• Improved navigation on iPhone (hello popover menus, goodbye sliders)
• Removed news screen
• Fixed crash issues
• Misc optimizations

On the down side, a new crash issue has been reported when clicking the Audio Share (copy) button. If anyone has any other issues with this version, please contact us ASAP. I plan on submitting a fix for the Audio share crash within the next day.

bleep!BOX will be on sale for 50% off through Monday, so now is a great time to pick it up.

Nice jam made with several iOS apps, including Genome.