For a couple of months now, Soundtoolz.com has been selling TranscriberTrack, a Windows and Mac app developed by Springbeats that facilitates the work of musicians wishing to learn and transcribe their favorite songs. It lets you load any song you like by simply dragging the file onto the app: You can then use the integrated 8-band EQ to emphasize the instrument you want to listen to specifically: Record yourself while looping on a specific section: Tapping the tempo lets you align the loop on the song’s bars. Slow it down while keeping the correct pitch and record yourself at lower speed: Speeding the playback back up also adapts the speed of your recorded performance. Apply VSTs to your recorded track to match the original performance: You can try and purchase it online from the official website, have a look!
Last November, we attended the Audio Developer Conference in Goldsmiths University of London. It is an event organized by the company behind the JUCE library that we, at Springbeats, use to develop audio applications for our clients and for ourselves. Two days of conference on topics related to audio programming, right in central London, which, by the way, is a pretty cold place to live in 😉 Clear trends If you look at the program, you’ll probably notice for yourself the trends of this year: Machine Learning Embedded systems Embracing new techs / practices / standards It is funny to see how machine learning invades every field, even sound related ones where you might not expect it. The demos that were made looked pretty convincing so I’m guessing many companies will start integrating this type of technologies in their products in the coming year. Embedded and mobile systems seem to have reached a more mature state, where the latency and power restrictions no longer hinder the possibilities in terms of mobile audio. Not really a new trend, but we also see the expressiveness of controllers improve over the years. Roger Linn stated it in his talk, and the products from ROLI are a good demonstration as well. Overall impression The organization was flawless, and the event gathered twice more attendants than last year, with all the big names of the industry, and many many small developers like us. My general impression of the talks was that they did not go into enough technical details for my taste, probably because of the allowed duration for each talk. I heard from small developers, and it was my impression too, that there was not much material for plugin developers. But in the end, I’m curious to see how it evolves, and will want […]
A few months ago we released our very own Virtual MIDI Cable Driver for Microsoft Windows. Some users quickly reported that it was not recognized on the latest versions of Windows 10 (build 1607), because Microsoft now requires a different certification level than the one we had. We’re now proud to announce that we did what was required from Microsoft to solve the problem, and that is now working very well on those systems too 🙂 So if you had downloaded the previous version and encountered this kind of error: Be sure to checkout the latest release. Uninstall the previous version, and install this one instead. But what does Springbeats Virtual MIDI Cable do exactly? Glad you asked. It’s a Windows driver which installs 8 new MIDI devices on your system. Each of this device can be used to carry MIDI data from one application to the other. Just like a cable would do if you were dealing with hardware instead of software. A typical example would be to route MIDI notes from your MIDI controller, that were first transformed by an application, to your DAW. You’d then be able to record the transformed notes. This is how AutoTheory works for instance. It takes the notes from your USB MIDI keyboard, changes them, and lets you get these changes in another app, via our Virtual MIDI Cable. The good thing is : it’s totally free for personal uses! More than that, it is also opensource. The only restriction being you can’t embed it with your own app if you’re a developer, without our agreement. Checkout the product page to read more and download.
Music theory can be a little bit scary for learning musicians and producers. The goal of AutoTheory has always been to make it more accessible to everyone. In this quest for accessibility, the teams behind AutoTheory designed a new interface for the app, that we brought to life here at Springbeats. AutoTheory 3’s new UI is now fully vectorized, which means its controls are crispier and its window can be scaled even to full screen display if you need to. The concept is still the same: a standalone application that makes the bridge between your MIDI controller and your Digital Audio Workstation, or any audio software that accepts MIDI input, transforming the MIDI notes on the fly. It adds a handful of new features: Illustrated dialog to help you configure your DAW to work with AutoTheory New Scales! Now totalling an impressive total of 35 scales to choose from 🙂 New chord types New Arpeggiator mode in Melody Lock Save current preset Piano display at the bottom to see the notes that are being generated … plus the usual bug fixes Check out this presentation video unveiling the new user interface: Video doesn’t exist anymore. You can buy it directly from the official website or from plugin boutique. But wait, there is more! If you would like to try things out before buying, we also made a trial version. It has an integrated sampler, which means you don’t even have to configure anything, since it already includes sounds (which will automatically be downloaded the first time you run it). It is the perfect way to discover the different scales and playing modes, without worrying about anything technical. You can download the trial version from the downloads page.
You might have already noticed that Springbeats’ website doesn’t exactly look like before. We’ve switched servers and at the same time decided to redo the design so that it’s more coherent with what’s on the blog. Also, we were not showing properly the work we did as JUCE experts. Now if you want to hire us for custom development, you can see what we did before (only the projects we didn’t sign an NDA for though, unfortunately), and you have a clear contact form. Besides, mobile navigation wasn’t very good with the previous version. Now this should be much more readable! For the tech guys out there, there will be a post on my dev blog about how it was deployed with docker-machine and Let us know on facebook or twitter what you think of the upgrade!
