A powerful music workstation in a handheld? Regular readers know that subway/airplane-friendly portable music creation is a reality, and here’s another tool for you. miniMusic helped launch the handheld music creation craze, and their Palm/Treo software just got a big update.
BeatPad 1.1 is an update to miniMusic’s pattern sequencer. The “point-one” is actually a pretty major upgrade:
Built-in sounds: The Krikit soft synth is now built-in, so you can incorporate multi-timbral, polyphonic sound on supported Palm devices (including the Treos).
Pattern features: Pattern chaining and a library for organizing your patterns
MIDI export: Here’s the real killer feature — you can export beats as MIDI files, so you can use your Palm as a scratchpad, then load into Reason / Live / Logic / whatever when you get home. (That’s missing in most other handheld software I’ve seen.)
US$29.95 on its own, but miniMusic has also introduced its Pro Music Suite, with BeatPad, the NotePad notation app, and the SoundPad synth editor (for creating Krikit sounds for the other two apps). Plenty of other ssoftware from these guys, too, including a Kaoss Pad-like X/Y touchpad synth called AxisPad, coming soon. We’ll be watching. (Of course, I’m still PocketPC loyal; anyone know if there’s a Windows Mobile app that supports MIDI export?)