My next music application – SoundGrid Live!

As I promised, now I’ll tell you about my next music application that’s under active development currently. It’s called SoundGrid Live!.

As the name suggests, it’s member of SoundGrid family and is based on the same ideas, audio engine and user interface layout. The main difference - SoundGrid Live! is focused on live performance and recording. This changes so much that I had to develop it as separate application. And in turn this allowed me to made more changes, visible and internal, without worrying about compatibility. Here is an outline of the most important changes:

No ‘Song Mode’ to automatically advance from one pattern to another. Instead…

More performance modes. Each layer can be assigned one of 3 program modes and one of 3 manual modes independently. Some of them are similar to Tenori-on performance modes.
More layers and blocks. Number of layers increased to 9 and number of blocks (block is a set of currently active patterns, one per layer, switchable instantaneously) increased to 16. This allows to program twice more melodies (or maybe just variations of some parameters) to be switched between during performance.
Full support for musical scales. Any supported musical scale/octave can be set for any voice in case of pitched instruments.
Super-easy addition of user samples and voices. To add new pitched or unpitched voice just upload archived folder with some samples via web interface or iTunes file sharing - and it’s done.
Streamlined user interface. Many UI elements were replaced and optimized for convenient and fast live operation.
Improved audio engine. Performance greately increased on modern iOS devices. Support for background audio.
More sound effects. Unified place to store all reusable and exchangeable assets (patterns, layers, blocks and whole projects). Better mixer. Better recording (later). MIDI out (later). And more.
SoundGrid Live! will be released for iPhone, iPad and OS X.

Rather than giving any more details about new modes and other features, I will post very short demonstration videos from time to time until the release. Follow me on twitter, check tagged posts here and SoundGrid Live! home page.