Vocoder SV-5

I'm am extremely excited about this. Over at the App Store you can now pick up Vocoder SV-5 for the iPhone and iPod. I did, and it's great. Really, really, great. Even better, it works just fine with my external microphone on a 1st gen iPod Touch. Yipee!!!

I am a robot.

It's also a fabulous-sounding virtual analog synth with some genuinely innovative interface ideas. Examples are the virtual knobs, which normally cause usability problems for touch-screen apps as you can't see what you are doing. Also if a knob is near the edge of the screen you can't rotate it accurately. In SV-5, however, you can "toggle" a knob to make it "hold" and then any movement on the interface just affects that knob's values. Very clever and very useful. Not perfect (you can only move 1 knob at a time), but then what is? Also the pitch bend wheel is fairly unique, along with a keyboard that can be scrolled sideways if you hold down a button - this latter option allows for sliding your finger across the keys when playing, but still quickly getting up or down a few octaves. Lastly, a quick stab of a (rather hidden) logo takes you into a full screen double keyboard. All very well thought out. Definitely a "keeper".

I'm so happy with all the music apps coming out for my iPod. We really are spoilt for choice, or flat broke if we can't resist buying everything that looks good! Wonder who will be first with a modular synth, complete with virtual patch cables? A Yamaha FM synth emulator (TX81z please!). Virtual VL1? A Minimoog? A fully featured stompbox unit (think iShred with external input)?

What is needed, however, is a central storage location for these apps to write to and read from, so patches, samples, recordings etc. can by synced with other devices and shared between apps.

Anyway, I'm off to play!