On computers and most hardware, waveforms have been a “look, but don’t touch” affair. Now, that view is coupled with multi-touch capabilities. Samplr is, as the name implies, an app that focuses on working with sound. With rhythmic slicing modes and multi-touch manipulation of samples, it’s a lovely-looking way to surf sounds from your fingertips. Some of the sonic modes, and certainly the visual appearance, take more than a passing inspiration from Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 hardware. That said, the actual modes are a bit different, though they draw on some of the “tape” concepts, and the actual workflow with touch goes a completely different direction from the OP-1. (In fact, it’s different enough that I would rather do without the OP-1-style skin, which for me doesn’t seem to quite fit the iPad in the same way it does hardware. The actual functionality of the app looks great.)
Sample modes:
Slicer
Looper
E-bow
Tape
Scratch
Keyboard
Loop Player
As Borderlands demonstrated what could happen with granular samples, so this packs in – well, basically everything else. It may come closest to transforming your iPad into a touchable sonic slate. I hope to do a full review of this tool soon.
Another video looks at play modes:
Reader Alex Theakston writes in with some hands-on impressions and video (which, while blurry, demonstrates that the included sounds can sound really good, indeed):
It’s what I wanted borderlands to be, but wasn’t quite. Really great work by the guy, and best of all it’s software that could only exist because of multitouch, it’s not just software that happens to be on the iPad but really could have been done equally well on any other hardware device.
See here for rubbish shaky example I did after experimenting for a bit, but at least you can see I’m using multitouch:
US$4.99, for iPad “and iPad mini” (though, technically, anything that supports iPad 2 is effectively going to be the same on the mini – interesting to see this annotation, though).
Thanks to everyone who sent this in – looking like a big hit.