New website, come on over

Apologies for the radio silence over here. I've been actively working on a better home for my apps, with the help of a Caustic user who generously did most of the work getting the new place up and running. Mike's helped me set up a great place to discuss features, share tracks as well as a great new "preset sharing" feature he just got working recently.

I invite you to come have a look, join up and participate in discussions and sharing.

As a housewarming gift, I'm happy to announce a free Windows version of Caustic, so come on over to the new

SingleCellSoftware.com

and learn more about the Windows version of Caustic 2

N.B. There will be no further updates to this blog from now on, so please change your RSS subscriptions to the new one if you wish to be informed of future developments.

Go!

Spread the word please... and don't be mad, I'm still working on Caustic.

First of all: apologies, this post isn't about Caustic. I'm working to move things over to a "company" website that will allow people to follow general news about my apps.

Work on Caustic 2.0 is still progressing nicely in between holiday festivities and nasty illnesses but it's not ready yet.

I hinted I was working on another app in between coding sessions for Caustic, and that app is out now so I just want to give it a shout here in case you're interested. Please help spread the word or your blogs, twitter, facebook, Google+, whatever the kids are into this week.

The app is called LoopStack and it's a loop recorder for Android very similar to Everyday Looper on iOS, with a hint of Caustic's new UI and effects. My plan is to bring some of this tech back into Caustic to allow sample recoding and maybe even a looper "machine".

Here's the market link:

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.singlecellsoftware.loopstack

And here's a short video that shows what it does:

Happy new year!

Caustic 2.0 is coming...

Exciting news for Caustic owners and Android music makers. I've got a few week's work left polishing up version 2.0 of Caustic and it's HUGE. It would probably be shorter to list what's NOT new rather than the new features so for now I'll give you the major items with some screenshots. A more complete feature list, as well as a user's manual, will accompany the official release.

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New visuals

Mixer 1.0 vs 2.0

I've spent a bit of time "tightening up the graphics" on Caustic using the excellent SkinMan and KnobMan programs. The result is an app that takes itself a little more seriously compared to the programmer art I had in version 1.0. This should also allow for new skins to be created in the future.

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Dynamic rack

You can now put whatever 6 machines you like in your rack. You want a crazy acid rig with 5 BassLines and a BeatBox, go for it. Nothing but SubSynths? Sure! Some machines are harder on the processor than others, but I've optimized everything to handle the average song on most devices. This also opens up the possibility of adding new machines to Caustic, which has me excited. I've already got a few prototype machines showing a lot of promise.

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Pattern Editors for everyone

The SubSynth and PCMSynth now have pattern editors too. You can create entire orchestrations in pattern mode now, then drop them into the sequencer's single-page "pattern view". The sequencer still has full-song piano roll for things that don't suit patterns.

I know the sequencer is a major sore spot for the app right now and I think the new pattern editors will help take away some of the pain while I continue improving the workflow.

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PCMSynth is all grown up

The PCMSynth extends to a full screen's worth of features. It's literally half sampler, half synth. Load up a simple WAV file or load a complex multi-sample instrument with loop points and send that all through the Filter, LFO and envelopes. The PCMSynth can now also load straight from SoundFont files (.sf2). Don't get carried away and load your 600Mb pro grand piano set, there's lots of older sf2 files on the net that make good mobile app instruments. I'll include some nice small ones with this release.

The PCMSynth will load up to 64 samples, or until you run out of RAM and it crashes ;-)

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BeatBox gets more control

The BeatBox got some love too. It gets a entire new top half, exposing lots of controls you'd find in a typical drum machine. You'll get: Tone, Punch(attack), Decay, Volume as well as Pan adjustments per-instrument. The BeatBox is the only machine with stereo output for now, but it might be going into others later on.

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Insert Effects

The insert effects now break off to their own screen, with support for 2 effects per mixer channel and allowing for real-time editing as well as control automation.

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The bad news

There's always something, but this is minor. With each machine having its own pattern editor and a new effects section, there's a lot more scrolling to be done. The "machine jump" screen, which now also serves as the dynamic rack management screen, is going to be used a lot. Because some devices don't have a search button, this popup is now also mapped to a quick button in the bottom bar. I know some will get annoyed at all this scrolling, but I think the added features make it worthwhile.

The other news is the price of the full version is going up to ~8$. I've spent the better half of the last three months working like crazy to add major features and improve the app. Without revealing exact sales figures, let's just say I'm doing this for passion more than profit right now and that has to change a bit if I'm to keep going with updates. What does this mean to you? For those who've already bought the app, thank you very much for your support so far, you'll be getting this upgrade like any other for free when it comes out. If you haven't bought yet and were waiting for the app to mature, take a chance and buy it soon for cheap or wait and pay a bit more. I have no doubt the new version will be well worth the asking price.

I'm really hoping to have this out for the holidays but there's still a bit of work to do and I really don't want to publish until it's solid so please be patient, it'll be worth it.

Thanks for reading, take care.

-Rej

Basic MIDI export for version 1.2

It's been a while since I updated Caustic... I apologize. It's not that I haven't been working on it, it's just that most of the work isn't ready for release yet, little bits and pieces for the next BIG release.

Today, I put together a version of Caustic that includes a few tweaks but mostly two new export formats: Ogg Vorbis and MIDI.

Ogg vorbis is an MP3-equivalent compressed format compatible with most portable MP3 players and small enough to share from a mobile phone. Why not MP3? Because the licensing fees to offer MP3 encoding in Caustic would cost more than the app itself! Ogg is free and sounds just as good.

MIDI has been around forever and needs no introduction. It's still very useful for transferring musical data across apps. One of the original intended uses I had for Caustic was for people to create grooves on their phones or tablets while on the go, and then bring them into their favorite pro software later for completion. That's not to say cool tracks can't come out of the app itself, but I never intended to compete with studio rigs on powerful machines in terms of quality.

For now, only notes are exported, no controls. The beatbox is mapped to CH.10 with the two intensity levels mapped as velocity. The rest of the instruments are just sequential from Ch.1, no GM mappings (they play as pianos in Winamp). I tested importing a big track into Reason and it works well. Mapping the knobs to useful defaults (volume maps to volume pan to pan, etc.) is proving harder than I thought given my generic control ordering and setup. This feature might still come in later if I can clean things up.

You can choose these new export formats by clicking the textbox that currently says
"WAV" next to the filename in the "Export Song" dialog. It will cycle through the options and offer format-specific options like "quality" for Ogg.

For the next version, I'll be beefing up of the PCMSynth and Beatbox, as well as adding pattern editors to all machines to make it easier to design grooves in pattern mode. More on that later...

There's a work-in-progress user manual I need to finish, that will be released in the next version as well as on this blog as soon as it's ready.

I've also got a few other Android projects on the go, including a Caustic "Mini" for small screens and a couple of other really fun music apps I'll be showing off soon...

"Welcome to CAUSTIC"

User Marc Shaftenberg made this video of him jamming along with CAUSTIC on his Galaxy Tab.

I really like this video because it's a good example of how to mix sequenced and live performance, and the song is great!

Thanks Marc

Two new videos

Here's two new videos I made to go with CAUSTIC 1.1

The first is a long-overdue SubSynth run-through, with more bad voice over, but it explains the new "drawable" waveform feature so it's worth a listen even if you're familiar with synths.

Next is a short video explaining how to use the new control automation feature, this one opens up a LOT of possibilities for song creation, I'm pretty excited, I've been working on this for months.

That's what's new for 1.1, MIDI export is next, I haven't forgotten...