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Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Bleep!BOX Released

contact@bleepboxapp.com
www.bleepboxapp.com

White Noise Audio Software Releases iPhone App bleepBOX!, an Analogue Synthesizer / Drum Machine Combo that Fits in Your Pocket

KENNETT SQUARE, PA – August 17, 2009 – The beat box just got pocket sized. bleep!BOX, an analog syth/drum machine debuted in Apple’s iPhone App Store on Saturday, August 15, 2009. bleep!BOX allows users to arrange synthesizer melodies, program drum beats and edit dozens of parameters in real time. Unlike other music apps, bleep!BOX does not limit users with fixed sample sets or pre-made loops. It does not use any samples, only tweakable, analog-style sounds.

Developer Dave Wallin, owner of White Noise Audio Software created bleep!BOX after becoming frustrated with music apps available for the iPhone. “Only two types of music apps were available: simple music toys and music makers. The simple music toys become boring fast and had limited usefulness and the music makers didn’t offer enough options to make a song interesting. bleepBOX! strikes that balance between simplicity and creative potential.”

Similar to the controls on a vintage analog synthesizer, bleep!BOX gives users creative license over waveforms, filters, effects and modulation. It features 50+ parameters and can play up to 10 instruments simultaneously.

“There are a lot of musicians who don’t like using already-made loops,” said Wallin. With bleep!BOX you can program all of your own sounds and make the melodies you want instead of using canned loops or samples. Now users can produce real music on their iPhones.”

bleepBOX!, sold solely in Apple’s app store, costs $9.99 USD and requires iTunes. Click here for the iTunes store link for bleep!BOX.

White Noise Audio Software produces innovative computer based instrument plugins. Founded in 2003, the company is best known for 3 products: Additive, an additive synthesizer, Doppelmangler, a spectral resynthesizer and Zero Vector, a virtual analog synthesizer. bleep!BOX is the company’s first iPhone app. Dave Wallin is the founder and sole proprietor of White Noise Audio Software. www.whitenoiseaudio.com

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Thursday, August 06, 2009

Next Project..

Now that bleep!BOX has been submitted to the app store, I've been relaxing a bit and thinking about my next project. Some of my old plugin users have asked when Doppelmangler or Zero Vector will see an update. Honestly, I haven't touched those plugins for years and some of the code is pretty bad or difficult to maintain (esp. in Doppelmangler's case). Those plugins were compiled for vst 2.3 and we're up to 64-bit and vst 3.0 at this point, so some updates definately are in order. With Doppelmangler, I've always wanted to do a full re-write since I've never been totally satisfied with the quality of the resynthesis and the amount of CPU it consumes. I've actually been brainstorming about how to revamp it for quite a while now.

Zero Vector also presents some challenges. I would love to port all my plugins to the Mac, now that I've gotten comfortable with XCode. However, Zero Vector contains massive amounts of SSE assembly code and I'm not sure how well that will port (maybe it will be fine.).

In general, I've developed my own audio framework for writing portable modules. This is used in Genome Studio and also in bleep!BOX. I'd like to port both those plugins into the new framework.

Finally, I do want to get back to working on Genome Studio. I've put way too much work into it to not finish it (plus I'm getting fairly close to being able to beta test it). Genome will need some more instruments built into it, and I always intended to include some variant of Zero Vector and Doppelmangler. So, maybe now is the time to update those plugins, rebuild them in my new audio framework so they are ready to include in Genome. At the same time I can produce up-to-date plugins for them.

Doppelmangler is the most interesting problem to solve, so I think I'm gonna tackle it first. ZV will be a more straightforward port (though not trivial..). The direction I want to take Doppelmangler is to focus on high quality sample manipulation rather than all the crazy spectral stuff. Warping and modulating sounds is still the focus too (just that DM2 won't use spectral resynthesis per se). It may be something that is more like specialized granular resynthesis synthesis (not wacky artsy fartsy granular ;). As always, the motto is to be able get greater control over your samples and to use them in new and creative ways. More soon - need to do some experiments. ;)

Oh, and I nearly forgot. I have a few updates planned for bleep!BOX. Those will happen first and they will mainly be centered around performance features, patch sharing, and synchronization (read: DSMI - wifi midi).