AgilePartners
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SteadyTune for Mac
Agile Partners released SteadyTune for Mac today. It's a simple app that gives you a tuner for stringed instruments in your menu bar, and it's an amazingly accurate alternative to the tuners built into apps like Logic Pro. It uses a completely new algorithm from Agile Partners that provides a stable and accurate meter. You can define your instrument type and listen for all notes, or define a tuning to detect just certain pitches. It has presets for an array of instruments ranging from six- and 12-string guitars all the way through banjo, ukulele, violin and double bass. The entire meter glows red and green as you near the perfect pitch, which makes it easy to use from a distance. SteadyTune can be configured to stay on top of other windows, and you can set the input device to listen on and define a hotkey to pop it up and hide it. SteadyTune is just US$4.99 on the Mac App Store, and check out the website for more information. If you play a stringed instrument, this app is great on its own or in combination with any recording software you happen to use.
Apogee Jam guitar adapter review
Musicians have long needed ways to catalog ideas and capture rough recordings of new material without the anchor that is a full-fledged recording setup. Apogee offers just that with its Jam guitar adapter for the iPad, iPhone and Mac, which allows you to strum your way to a record deal via an iOS device. Whether you're on the road or in your living room, the ability to connect a Les Paul to a mobile device and crank out the demo for your next hit is super helpful. But, is it worth the $100 investment to have recording-on-the-go at your fingertips? Read on to see what we discovered. %Gallery-137053%
Guitar World & Agile Partners introduce Lick of the Day app
If there's one thing we love here at TUAW -- besides Apple, of course -- it's music. And it especially rocks our world when these two great loves meet. So, when we got wind that Agile Partners (makers of GuitarToolKit and TabToolkit, which, by the way, are fantastic) and Guitar World Magazine were collaborating on an iOS app, well, you can only imagine, the TUAW offices were in a ruckus. Today sees the launch of Guitar World Lick of the Day: an iOS app that teaches you a new guitar move every day, by the pros. With tutorial videos featuring Guitar World instructors, and the likes of Joe Satriani and Zack Wylde (to name a few), now you can have that master class you've always wanted! So, how does it work? You download Lick of the Day free from the App Store. It comes preloaded with a few sample lessons, but the idea is that you subscribe to the lessons for either one-month (US$4.99), three-months (US$12.99) or six-months (for US$19.99). Each lesson is video instructed with a corresponding practice mode. In the practice mode there are settings that control the music notation, tempo of playback, a looping option and playback with a metronome. A "dynamic fretboard" will show your fingers where they need to go, synchronizing with the scrolling music notation. It's all very sharp and effective. And if you're left handed, don't fret! You can invert the fretboard to accommodate. Finally, each lesson has a "performance note" that's written by a Guitar world instructor, too. We've had a brief play around with the app and can safely say that we are already shredding it up like never before. The tutorials come in a variety of styles / genres of music for guitar: from rock and blues to jazz and country licks. With iPad and iPhone / iPod touch versions, If you're a guitar player and you're looking to improve your skills and technique, we'd definitely recommend you go and check out Lick of the Day, now! However, if you've never picked up a guitar or you can only just manage Kum-ba-yah-my-Lord, you might need a more experienced friend to help you get your head around it. Either way, Lick of the Day is an exciting and effective app that we can't wait to spend more time with. Hit the read button for some PR shots of the app and a video about the app.
Macworld 2010: A few more video tidbits
It's hard to believe that it's been a week since I left Macworld Expo 2010 to head home. Last night, I finally went through the last snippets of video from the Expo and put together this short compendium of three interviews. The first company I talked to was Telnic.org, a group which champions the use of the .tel top level domain as a type of global address book. There's a free iPhone app available for updating your .tel domain information from anywhere. Next, I visited shortly with John from Agile Partners, the developers behind GuitarToolkit. TUAW's resident musician, Mat Tinsley, reported on this app last September and it's quite impressive. Finally, I talked with the folks from myRete, who have created an interesting social networking app called WhosHere. There are over one million users of WhosHere, and with the free texting and VoIP capabilities of the app you can ask the locals in cities around the world for travel tips or a date. Want to perfect your language skills with a native speaker? WhosHere is an easy way to find someone to chat with. As with several earlier videos, this suffers from a bit of mic noise. Our apologies!
Get your mix on with Star6
Star6 [iTunes link], from Agile Partners, is a beat-mixing iPhone app with a lot of power behind its kitschy interface. While I see it being a fun toy for the casual user, there are some possibilities for great things, if you have the dedication to get good with it. I won't award it a heap of points for aesthetics, but the interface is highly usable and well thought-out. You get six pads to which you can assign sounds, either from the array of included kits or from your own wav or aiff samples. Once you've got your kit loaded up, you can trigger the sounds in Grain mode, which makes it more of a sound effects machine, or in Sync mode, which will beat-match the samples to keep the rhythm flowing. While you're playing each sample, you can modify attributes like pitch, gate, speed, jitter and "size" by holding down each respective button and raising or lowering the iPhone. There were times in my trial of Star6 that I just wanted sliders, but the accelerometer-based manipulation has a definite right-brain appeal. Additionally, you can turn effects like delay, filter and distortion on and off whilst grooving away. Star6 is running a contest right now, with two grand prizes of $500 each. You can see some of the entries by going to the YouTube Group, and join the group to submit your own. Details are available at the Agile Partners page for the contest. I'm a little late on the jump here, but the deadline has been extended to October 25th, 2009. It can't hurt to try, right? Star6 is available in the App Store for $6.99US. Check out the gallery below for a few shots of the interface. If it looks interesting, though, definitely head over to the introductory video and samples (play before you buy) at the Star6 website. %Gallery-74902%
