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Bastl’s Outsidify app lets you capture and transform sounds via a smartphone
Audio gadget manufacturer Bastl just released an iOS app that uses the phone’s microphone and speakers to capture audio from the outside. You can then transform this audio via feedback, resonance manipulation, filters and custom impulse responses.
Elektron's Analog Heat gets a refresh with more effects and a customizable signal path
Elektron’s Analog Heat audio processor was already a fantastic tool for adding saturation and warmth to digital instruments, but now the company is upping the ante with a hardware refresh. The Analog Heat +FX picks up where the MK2 left off, with the addition of new digital effects to complement the pre-existing saturation options.
Reverb's latest feature lets you track the value of your music gear
Reverb, the Etsy-owned online used musical instrument site, has added a feature called Collections that lets you track the value of your musical gear.
Poly Effects fully merges Digit and Beebo into one super pedal
The Poly Effects Digit and Beebo are two of the more interesting guitar pedals to come out in the last few years. They were built on the exact same platform and their firmware are completely interchangeable. Now the company is taking the next logical step, and combining them into a single firmware and single pedal under the Beebo name.
Hologram Electronics Microcosm: A cheat code for making ambient music
The Microcosm can be a rhythmic glitch machine, a top-notch loop pedal or a straightforward delay. It’s more than just a one-trick pony, which is important given the $449 price.
Beebo is basically a modular synth in guitar pedal form
It’s, in theory, a “multi modulation pedal” for your guitar. But, Beebo also has a secret. It’s the same exact hardware as Poly Effects’ last pedal, Digit. It’s just running different firmware.
ZOIA review: A complex and rewarding modular effects pedal
Empress Effects ZOIA is unquestionably a one-of-a-kind effects pedal. Its interface can be daunting at times, but it puts an almost limitless number of sounds at your feet.
HP teases 'next gen' VR headset made with Microsoft and Valve's help
If you didn't rush out to buy a VR headset to play Half-Life: Alyx, your patience might be rewarded. HP is teasing a Reverb G2 headset developed in tandem with Microsoft and Valve that should be "more immersive, comfortable and compatible" than previous-generation hardware. The company is unsurprisingly shy on details, although the brief glimpse hints at a few design changes.
Gamechanger Audio introduces an optical spring reverb pedal
Gamechanger may have only released two guitar pedals so far, but the company has shown that it can live up to its lofty name. Its Plasma Pedal, for one, stands out in an ocean of distortion effects, thanks to both a staticky, lo-fi timbre and its astounding visual presentation -- xenon plasma shoots around a vacuum tube as you play. The Light Pedal, the company's latest creation, rethinks the traditional engineering behind spring reverb effects, replacing the electromechanical components with optical sensors. The result is a vintage-sounding echo that sits somewhere between the snappy guitar sounds of the '60s and the atmospheric squeals heard in classic rock tracks from the '70s.
Etsy buys music gear marketplace Reverb to expand its reach
Etsy is expanding its online shopping empire, albeit not in the way some would have expected. The company plans to acquire Reverb, one of the largest marketplaces for musical instruments, for $275 million. This is a chance to expand into a "new vertical" with a business that follows a similar strategy, Etsy said. It intends to run Reverb as a stand-alone business and help it grow through improved search, a stronger community and easier buying and selling.
HP's 'Reverb' is the sharpest Windows VR headset yet
HP is ready to outdo the HTC Vive Pro and Samsung Odyssey with its latest VR headset, the Reverb. Confirming a February leak, it features an astoundingly sharp resolution of 2,160 by 2,160 pixels per eye, while those other headsets have around half as much. It's sometimes tough to see the benefits of more pixels on monitors and TVs, but VR headsets are another story, since your eyes are practically right up against the displays. That's something commercial customers will likely appreciate, since it makes things like workplace simulators even more realistic.
Microsoft Research helped 'Gears of War 4' sound so good
Popping in and out of cover has been a hallmark of the Gears of War franchise since the first game came out in 2006. It hasn't changed much because it didn't need to. What's always been an issue though is how thin the game sounds -- a shortcoming of the underlying tech, Unreal Engine, powering it. But Microsoft owns the series now and has far more money to throw at it than former owners/Unreal Engine creators Epic Games did. With help from Microsoft Research, Redmond's Gears of War factory The Coalition found a high tech way to fix that problem. It's called Triton. Two years ago Microsoft Research's Nikunj Raghuvanshi and John Snyder presented a paper (PDF) titled "Parametric Wave Field Coding for Precomputed Sound Propagation." The long and short of the research is that it detailed how to create realistic reverb effects based on objects in a video game's map, to hear it in action pop on a pair of headphones and watch the video below.
Reverb: A unique personalized news tool for iOS
Personalization is the Holy Grail for news apps. Give the app an idea of what you want to hear about, and let it learn over time so that your news reading is always relevant. Reverb (free) bills itself as a personalized news discovery app. You can get an overview of the latest news, and the app "tunes" itself using algorithms to learn what you like. Reverb displays an attractive graphical representation called a "word wall" showing what topics are hot, and you touch the topics to read more. The app then lets you dig deeper and add topics of interest, all of which are saved under a button called "My News". Stories come from a variety of sources, including newspapers and TV and cable networks. Using the app is easy enough, but some of the choices of topics are downright bizarre. Things like "pottery" and "wedding photography" show up in general news, and I can't imagine why they are there. Reverb does learn from your choices, but it seems to cast a pretty wide net. Worse, you can't tell Reverb that you don't want any more news on a particular topic or from a specific source. Zite does both very well. For my personal interests -- the "My News" feature -- the app did quite well, leading me to articles I would never have discovered from casual browsing. That wide net of Reverb easily delivers things of interest to me, like photography stories, even though photography articles generally aren't news. The app allows you to add your Twitter and Facebook feeds for a summary of what your friends are sharing, and you can share directly from Reverb to your favorite social network. Reverb also allows you to send articles to people using messaging or email. The latest version of Reverb supports Pocket for offline reading. Stories are nicely formatted, and you move from page to page by swiping. A back button takes you back a screen if necessary. Reverb knows my location, but it failed for me in southern Arizona only showing a map of my location and no news. When I moved the map location to a larger city I did see some things pop up on the map, but the app should fetch the local material automatically. Reverb is a very nice start in the rarified domain of personalized news apps. The user interface is attractive, and stories display in a consistent way. But there are some things that would make Reverb much better. First, it lacks a help feature. When you first run the app there are some explanatory screens, but they are not complete and can't be recalled at a later time. While Reverb is good at noting stories you want, it has no way to eliminate stories from the main news feed that you don't want. You can do this with topics in the "My News" feed, so it should be consistent and let you eliminate stories from all news feeds. Further, I'd like to see the feeds have an option to be mixed, so I don't have to go to multiple places to find news of interest. The king of personalized news apps for my money (and it's free) is Zite. Although Zite has been purchased by Flipboard, over time the Zite technology will hopefully be folded into Flipboard. Reverb is a useful app, and if it grows it could fill the space left by Zite when it melds into Flipboard. In fact, many Reverb users say they were looking for a Zite alternative. Reverb is worth a look if you are a news and information junkie. It requires iOS 7 or later, and it's a universal app.
Majesco creates Midnight City label to handle indie games
Majesco Entertainment (Cooking Mama, Zumba) has created an indie publishing label called Midnight City. The division is headed by former IGN Editor-in-Chief Casey Lynch and Doug Kennedy, former president and CEO of public relations firm Reverb Communications. The pair had previously worked together (before Lynch took the IGN gig) at Reverb Publishing, a division of the PR firm that helped streamline and support the publishing process for indies on various digital distribution platforms. "Over the years we have seen tons of really great games coming from smaller independent studios and our vision at Midnight City is to offer these games and development teams a wide range of services and support," said Lynch. "We're here to help with everything from first-party relations, QA, promotion and community building and to put a spotlight on the titles while freeing the development teams to focus 100 percent of their energy on building the best games possible." Midnight City has announced an initial lineup of ten games, which the company will show off at this weekend's PAX Prime in Seattle.
Sanctum 2 jumps into the fray on May 15 [Update: PC too, PSN soon after]
Coffee Stain Studios' Sanctum 2 will launch for the Xbox 360 on May 15, Major Nelson has announced. We've followed up with publisher Reverb to see if this is the launch date for PSN and PC, as well. Sanctum 2 is the sequel to Coffee Stain Studio's hybrid first-person shooter and tower defense game. Coffee Stain Studios was founded in 2010 by local Swedish students, and its first game was I Love Strawberries on iOS. Update: Reverb got back to us and confirmed the May 15 is the launch date on PC as well as Xbox 360. We're told the PSN version "will launch soon thereafter."
Shoot a glance at these Sanctum 2 screens and trailer
These screens and trailer for Coffee Stain Studios' Sanctum 2 show off the action-packed shooting in the game. Sanctum 2 is slated to launch on PC, Xbox Live and PSN sometime in 2013.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Ravaged
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, 2 Dawn Games' Carsten Boserup talks crowdfunding and indie publishing with his Steam game (now on sale!), Ravaged. What's your game called and what's it about?Our game is Ravaged and it's a multiplayer-only first-person shooter focusing on vehicle combat and car chases in a post-apocalyptic Mad Max environment.Why develop independently, rather than work for an established company?Working with a publisher tends to mean that you are giving away parts of your game's creativity and control. We wanted to create a game exactly the way we wanted and imagined. Going independent also meant that our marketing capabilities were limited, which is why we created a Kickstarter campaign. The campaign was a success and we almost tripled the amount we asked for to help with marketing.Our roots are with modding, as the core team created the popular Battlefield 1942 mod, Desert Combat, so we decided very early on to be 100 percent community-based. This means that we take feedback and ideas from the community and do our best to add it to the game. We also engage a lot with our community by hosting events and opening up our TeamSpeak virtual office to the fans, which is where we spent most of our time.
PSA: Pid lights up XBLA, PS3 and PC today
Pid, the puzzle-platformer from ex-Grin folks at Might and Delight, is now available on PC, PS3 and Xbox Live Arcade for $10 (800 MS Points). But you don't have to spend a dime to watch this launch trailer – well, okay, you pay for internet but you know what we mean. Yeah, you get it.
Beatbuddy bustin' moves on digital platforms, thanks to Reverb
Beatbuddy, a quirky rhythm-based action-adventure game from indie studio Threaks, already has a cozy game page on Steam – in fact, you can download a demo right now. Soon it will be available through more digital distribution channels. Reverb has announced it will publish Beatbuddy, though no exact platforms beyond Steam have been mentioned.Developer Threaks, a small German outfit, has been working on Beatbuddy since 2009. The team said it plans on bringing Beatbuddy to "a wide variety of platforms," and when those exact platforms are announced, we'll be sure to relay the info.
Sanctum 2 defends PC, consoles in 2013
Sanctum 2, the sequel to Coffee Stain Studios' hybrid tower defense and first-person co-op shooter, is expected to launch sometime next year Joystiq can exclusively reveal. The first Sanctum, which has sold over 300,000 units on Steam, was a PC-exclusive title. The sequel is planned for PC and "digital console platforms," with Xbox Live and PSN specifically mentioned."Sanctum has been a huge success on Steam for Coffee Stain Studios, and bringing the next version to console players as well as the PC market is a great next step to share this unique experience," said Ted Lange, executive producer for Reverb Publishing. "We all have logged quite a few hours with Sanctum and can definitively say that what Coffee Stain has in store for Sanctum 2 will blow the minds of Sanctum fans and new gamers alike."Beyond revealing the title to us, along with a release year, details are still tight on Sanctum 2. Doug Kennedy, CEO of Reverb Publishing, told us, "The team is diligently working to get the title ready."Update: After receiving updated information, altered 2012 launch window to 2013.Update 2: Sanctum is $3.39 on Steam today.
