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SpinPad Description |
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SpinPad is a graphic pattern sequencer for any Palm Platform handheld computer. It is designed as a much more intuitive and flexible interface than our BeatPad pattern sequencer; where BeatPad offers precision, SpinPad offers more flexibility and ease-of-use.
Instead of every pattern being 16 steps long (like many hardware sequencers insist), SpinPad lets you freely scatter notes anywhere you like--up to two hundred of them!
Right on the beat, way off the beat, or anywhere in-between. Instead of a bouncing ball indicating which note is playing, you can clearly see what note is playing as it is hit by a spinning arm.
Notes (or bells as we think of them) can be moved by simply grabbing them with the pen and dragging them, and an edit window lets you design each bell just the way you like; you can even choose what the distance from the center of the circle means for each bell (distance can determine pitch, volume, duration or MIDI channel).
Beyond the new interface, we used the development of SpinPad to experiment on the inner workings as well (you know, the gears and springs).
A new Indirect File Format and new Sound Engine allow for much more complex songs without giving up responsiveness to the graphic interface. An enhanced version of this engine will power the next incarnation of BeatPad allowing for many simultaneous patterns layered together.
Also SpinPad is our first application that automatically senses the availability of enhanced sound capabilities (either with the Beat Plus Springboard module or one of the recent Sony T-series or NR-series handhelds) and you can mix sounds from the speaker, enhanced sound, and attached MIDI instruments all in a single song... making it the first Palm application ever to allow 32 channel MIDI output! (16 to sound card, 16 to serial port) |
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