We’ve been working on a fun, powerful, music-making iPad app called Shapemix and are thrilled to see it go live in the App Store! We’ve been working with Colin Owens and his team to build the app and get it launched, and are thrilled to see some of the positive press it’s already gotten (check out the Mashable article).
The app is designed to help you create music in a fun, intuitive way that anyone – even those without a musical background – can pick up quickly. The idea is to grab some tracks (at launch, there were over 100 free tracks in the Shapemix store), then mix them together to create completely new songs.
There’s two ways to mix tracks, each giving you different levels of control over your song:
Mix View
Each track is represented as a circle: as the song plays, you’ll see visual cues representing which track is playing and what effects are applied to it. Tracking these circles around the screen changes the volume and pan of the track.
It’s a great way to get real-time feedback of changes you make for your song. It also takes great advantage of the multi-touch capabilities of the iPad.
Time View
As you create your songs, you’ll get to a point where you want finer-grained control over what tracks are being played. That’s where the time-view comes in. It looks a bit like a traditional music-editing program, but still retains the app’s simplicity.
You can drag clips around, solo and mute, and decide exactly where each clip will start and stop in your song.
We were thrilled to be part of the development team. Shapemix is made up of a number of great musicians, designers, and programmers. Be sure to check out Shapemix in the iTunes store.