While we have been hard at work adding new features, we have also been thinking how to best make use of all this great new screen real-estate on the iPad, while still keeping our iPhone and iPod touch users happy. To that end, we have gone through and adjusted every page in bleep!BOX to use the full screen space available. No more ‘empty’ looking pages. Plus, we’ve added the one feature that will make bleep!BOX respected in the pantheon of ‘Professional’ music applications. You guessed it – BRUSHED ALUMINUM. Awwww yeah!!!

And yes, for you haters of white space, there is still some white space on the sequencer page. Why you might ask? Well maybe, JUST MAYBE some amazing new things will get added there someday. YOU JUST NEVER KNOW!!

Click below for the bigger versions.

bleep!Synth is on sale for today and tomorrow as a thanks to our friends at PalmSounds. Pick it up super cheap!

The following features are confirmed for the next release:

• - BeatMaker audio copy
• - Easier recording of trimmed .wav loops
• - Ability to keep/delete multiple audio files
• - Email a file (audio or patch)
• - Tweet your beat

Still working on:

• - SoundCloud track submission
• - Sonoma Audio Copy
• - more

bleep!BOX has been getting some nice reviews in the app store. Here’s one I wanted to share:

This is the first review I’ve ever felt compelled to write…

First of all, WOW! The developer did such a fantastic job on this app! There are so many great and intuitive features packed into bleep!BOX that make it an entirely new experience for this electronic musician of 15 years who has seen and heard it all, and the sound quality is simply superb!

I downloaded this after getting both the Korg app and Mini-Synth Pro, and bleep!BOX is the winner hands down, for all around design, programmability, playability, and sound quality. The sounds are all synthesized as you go, no samples, and all ten voices have been thoughtfully designed and are true to their analog counterparts. In just a couple days, this has become my new favorite app of all the music software loaded on both my iPhone and new iPad.

Don’t make the mistake I did of thinking that because it has a whimsical name that it’s not a deadly serious production tool with tons of potential. Exporting recordings via wi-fi .wav files is awesome, and I am floored by the punchy full frequency sound that this app delivers, which is by the far the important criteria for me personally.

So keep an eye out for my existing hardware synthesizers for sale on eBay in the coming weeks, as it turns out a $9.99 app on my $600 iPad has just replaced a couple thousand dollars in bulky gear, letting me freely create music in a fraction of the time and always take my production tool with me. Also, my hardware synths don’t email or surf the web!

I have a feeling that as updates come down the pipe, bleep!BOX is only gonna get better and better, but one thing is certain, the future is truly NOW!

Thanks for the kind words!

A quick overview of some of the new features in 1.2.x and a look at how the interface works on the iPad:

More videos coming soon.

Bugfix update 1.2.1 has been approved! All users are encouraged to upgrade.

An update that fixes a couple crash issues has been submitted for approval. One issue is iPad specific – when launching in landscape mode the app crashes (this was a bug that didn’t happen in the iPad simulator). The second issue was a crash that happened if you click thru the ‘news’ screen before the news finished downloading. Both these issues should be resolved now. The update was submitted yesterday, so it should be available soon.

I’ve had a few questions about .WAV recording, which is going to be the focus of the next update. Right now you are limited to recording one file at a time and there is no way to delete that file (except to record over it). This will be changing in the next version. I plan to add an extra dialog box that will let you set the length of the recording in Bars (so you can get perfectly trimmed loops without having to do any extra work) and it will allow you to enter a file name so you can save more than one audio file on the device. A button labeled ‘Audio’ will be added to the Delete page which will allow you to pick which audio file you want to delete.

The next big change is that the ‘Transfer’ button will become ‘Share’. I may be killing the HTTP server stuff at some point. I will be adding the option to email yourself files (patches and audio) which is probably easier. On the iPad you will be able to transfer files directly over USB (and hopefully this feature will make it onto the iPhone too). I feel the HTTP server is a bit of overkill and also it only works if you have WIFI setup in your house (something not everyone has). Everyone has access to email. The share page will include other options aside from email. This is where you will be able to access Audio Copy (details still being worked out) and I also hope to add social sharing options such as ‘Post to SoundCloud’ and ‘Tweet it’.

First step on the agenda is getting a quick fix out for the iPad crash issue. Then I’ll be focusing on these updates.

Bleep!BOX is available on the iPad (which is where I’m writing this ). Overall I’m very pleased with how it looks on the device. Unfortunately it looks like one bug did make it through the review process – launching in landscape mode crashes the app. The app is fine to rotate after launching in portrait. We will get a fix out ASAP – should only be a couple days.

After a couple of marathon coding days, bleep!BOX 1.2.0 has been submitted to the app store. We missed Apple’s deadline for inclusion in the ‘grand opening’ by a couple hours (hopefully that won’t matter and it will still be approved), but the extra time I spent developing should be worth it. 1.2.0 is a universal binary, meaning it runs on both the iPad and iPhone / Touch devices using the same executable. You won’t have to buy bleep!BOX again to get it on the iPad – if you already own it on the iPhone, you can use it on the iPad and take advantage of the bigger interface. 1.2.0 has a few feature additions – a delay effect has been added to each of the Synth parts (meaning you can get individual delays for those, in addition to the existing global delay). We also made it so you can tap and drag any of the top edit buttons on the SEQ page to edit their values. This makes it possible to do quick adjustments in one gesture. I also have included a number of bug fixes and the interface overall should run faster thanks to some rendering optimizations.

I decided to make bleep!BOX work in both portrait and landscape on the iPad. This ended up taking about 12+ hours to do yesterday, but I was worried that it might not be approved if I left the current behavior of forcing the landscape orientation. Overall, I think it’s a cool feature and I’m looking forward to seeing it in action on a real device.

Keep in mind that the approval process could take a week or two – since we don’t have an iPad to test on, we don’t know if there are any issues we may be missing, and there is a big rush to get apps approved at the moment. I’ll keep everyone posted about the app’s approval status.