I've been toying around with the idea of a Looper app very much inspired by EverydayLooper and Loopy on iOS. I play guitar and ukulele and having an app you can jam along to is lots of fun. Of course the big challenge on Android is how to deal with the latency of recording something alongside a delayed track playing back. Well, turns out it just needs to be calibrated once, then everything is good.
The app is in a basically functional state now, but what I need is "fragmentation" testing (I'm sure the iOS people are loving this)
I've tried it on a few devices already, most work ok, but I'm looking to see if the microphone works correctly for collecting input using the standard 44k record mode that's meant to be "guaranteed to work" if your device has a mic.
From reading another dev's posts, it seems like a few device have quirks about opening the mic up for recording. I know already that some "Optimus" phones cut off the external mic if headphones are plugged in, making this app sort-of useless for them. I'll be sharing the results with fellow Android dev NikoTwenty and anyone else who cares so we can bring you better audio apps in the future. (Yes, I'll be bringing some of this back into Caustic eventually)
Here's how the beta works:
Start the app, it should say it needs calibration (if it hasn't crashed already
)Remove any headphones so that the click is coming out of the phone's speaker. play around with the volume so that the click gets picked up by the microphone at a decent level (~yellow according to the VU meter on the right), then press the record button and wait. If it succeeds in calibration, it'll reset the click track and show you all four tracks. If not, try the calibration again, with the volume a little louder on the speaker or by plugging headphones and placing one ear near the mic.
Recording works like EverydayLooper's "quantize" where it starts recording when it loops around so when you press record on a track, it'll "arm" and start recording when the loop rolls around. This gives you time to start playing your instrument so you're not recording from a stop. Make sure you've got headphones plugged in or you'll be polluting your tracks with what's playing, there's no audio cancellation.
You can control the volume of each track with the knob and if you pull left on the gripper bar next to it, it'll expose more controls. I've got a cheap reverb in there right now and a "loop mute" button where it cuts out the track when the loop rolls around. This is used to drop tracks when playing without having to hit mute at the exact right time.
You can "stack" tracks by dragging them on top of each other. The volume gets baked in so what you hear is what you get once combined, but this doesn't include the effects... haven't decided what I'll do about that yet.
To start a new stack or change tempo, press the menu key on your device. The eventual market version will save your tracks out to SD, but this one doesn't.
Share your results with me at loopstackapp@gmail.com. Please include device name and Android version. I just need to know if the microphone records correctly for now, but if there's a feature you absolutely need in this kind of app, you can include that too. Please remember this is not a final app, so no comments about ugly UI please.
If you've read this far, thanks for your interest. Here's the download link, your device will need to be enabled for "Unknown sources" for this to install. No ARMv7 requirement on this one so it should install on most devices. This is a time-limited app so it'll stop working in about two weeks.
< Link removed as beta has expired >
Have fun and let me know how it goes please.
so it's hard to test noise filtering when most of the range I want to cut is already cut for me.
