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ipod library access in V3.0 and more...
First I want to congratulate you to this app, it is the first DJ app that is usable. I like the clean interface and you definitely do the things right... I have seen your app today the first time and bought it straight away... :-)
I wonder why you don't use the possibility to access the songs directly on the iphone, which is available since version 3.0 of the iphone OS:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/sdk/ila.html
It would be much more convenient. Is there a technical reason? I know you have to decode them in real-time and the iphone allows to decode only one MP3/AAC-stream directly, but I would think it could be done nevertheless... (To keep your app compatible with V2.2, the library access could be an additional feature - only if possible on the device).
If you have empty space on your todo-list I would vote for these features:
- a BPM display for each side
- a zoom area in the middle of the waveform window which displays the samples around the actual time with a higher resolution so the accurate setting of the cue would be much easier
- the possibility to loop parts
And a little suggestion for the interface: I find it a bit confusing that the buttons to change the screens are always on different positions. It would be more clear when there were 3 buttons (left,middle,right) on all screens all the time on the same place.
Finally, the interface lags a bit (on my iPhone 3G), I am sure this is because you use Core Graphics/Core Animation. If you have the time/motivation please think about doing the UI with OpenGL. It would be much faster and more responsive (Here is an interesting comment from the creator of Loopy on this topic: http://michael.tyson.id.au/2009/02/15/developing-loopy-part-2-implementa... ).
Again, you have created an amazing app and I hope you understand my suggestions as a wish to support you :-)
Best regards,
Walchy
Just thought I'd give this a bump. Now you can access your iPhone's Library, if you have a jail broken app. All you need is my app:
Access your iPhone Music Library with iTunes Quixync
Flunkwerx
Thanks so much Walchy,
We are really glad that you enjoy the app. And thank you for the highly technical feedback. It's quite valuable.
We'd love to be able to access the iPhone library, but the APIs that Apple provides are extremely limited - basically you can play the music and nothing else. There's no pitch shifting, DSP capability, etc. We hope that one day Apple will allow finer control and greater access.
The feature ideas you mention are all on our roadmap somewhere, so thanks for the votes! One of the many things that we look at while testing out new features is how much a feature makes the app too heavy (size, performance, interface and all). Then we spend a lot of time figuring out how to do it anyway! That was one of the reasons why the decks are on different screens. Originally, we were going to just have swipe gestures allow you to move between the screens, but we found that they seriously conflicted with the sliders. Imagine having the perfect mix and then screwing it up be cause you tried to swipe right where the track progress bar was. That happened to us in the beginning. Talk about a floor clearer.
That is why we resorted to the buttons. Perhaps thinking of them as "go left" or "go right" might make it a little easier to deal with. You start out in the "middle" where the mixer is, and the decks are on the "right" and "left" of the mixer.
We're sorry that the interface lags on your device. We are constantly working to improve the performance of the app, tweaking as much as we can while adding features at the same time. Part of it is probably that we are using Core Animation for some of the items (and OpenGL for other things). Moving the entire interface to OpenGL may help, but will take a bit of time to replicate all the interface features that Core Animation, etc. provides. Hopefully it doesn't lag so much as to keep you from using the app while we work to improve the performance further.
Thanks for the suggestions and the support. Keep them coming!
The Quixonic Team