Hey guys, thanks again for all the feedback. I just wanted to follow up with a few updates.

Since the original beta release (when we had this discussion), I've made the following changes:
- Improved the latency on Windows quite a bit, things should be more responsive. My goal is that you shouldn't have to worry about quantization until you get to the DAW stage.
- Added external recording from mics and whatever else you can plug in to your computer. (eg. record your synth or beatbox into your mic)
- Added some way better instruments (two new pianos, plus an electric piano, cello, glockenspiel, generally nice sounding things) - http://soundcloud.com/oscillicious/new- … coming-for
- Lots of general polish to the feel of the application - new icon, better handling of projects, etc.
- Better visualization in the loop recorder
- REAPER MIDI export
- I'm also toying around with changing some of the graphics up, for better or worse..

Ant1: I agree - the process can have a really big influence on the music you end up making. One of the advantages of SongStarter is that you can iterate pretty quickly on your ideas or use that workflow to try to whittle down a random jam into something that sounds good. No grand ideas necessary. You raised a lot of good points though - maybe I'll end up spinning it off into a couple of different apps with much tighter focuses (eg. a live performance looper and a simpler designed-to-be-a-toy app, etc. Definitely good food for thought!)

Anyways, there's a couple of bugfixes to push out early this week and then I expect a final 1.0 release in the next week as well. All of your feedback has given me a lot to chew on and will continue to shape SongStarter and influence where I take things from here. Thanks again for all the comments guys, and happy jamming!

some feedback:
a more comprehensive help section!

i can't really tell you any more than that, because i have no idea how to use it...

much of my musical inspiration comes from the process itself, and from feedback between the software and my head, happy accidents, etc ~ so much of it is influenced by the software that i feel that using something else to compose with and then transcribing into whatever other software is going to change the way i write music a lot. is this a good thing or a bad thing? who knows. if i was the kind of person who had IDEAS appear in my head, and needed a way to get them down instantly, maybe songstarter would be great for that. i can't really tell.

anyway, i am intrigued by this software and i think i shall repurpose it as something to write songs from start to finish with. "sometimes, you just want to jam". maybe you should be marketing this as a live performance and improvisation / live-composition tool rather than as a song-starter as such. in which case it needs more features. if it is literally just something to get ideas down with, maybe it needs less features.

i'll play around with it a bit more. maybe i'll write an album with it.

thanks for making it. i hope you get more interest

Have you ever an instrument to >180bpm music?

Played along with it:
http://soundcloud.com/peterswimm/five-m … -dark-room

How do you soundcloud an entire song? its not that clear how you can arrange stuff for rendering purposes yet.. quantize might be a nice feature too!

Dont be, it was your most useful post of the thread

you've completely sidestepped my point - the iPad, in this case, is a simpler, mobile environment designed to get the job done with a minimalistic interface and less functionality, and the desktop is meant to get the job done with a much more complex interface and more functionality. no matter what happens, the job gets done in thereabouts the same time if both are configured correctly. in most cases, if you're going to do something such as write down a quick jam, especially in the field of chipmusic, you would open up your tracker on the desktop, ready your MIDI device, select an instrument, and go - there's no need to have a program ask you 'what bpm do you want?' 'will you be recording sound or MIDI information?' 'which drumloop do you want to start with?' 'which of these 20 instruments do you want to use?'. our DAWs generally are set at the most common BPM we use, and even then all i have to do if it's wrong is grab the BPM control and drag until it sounds right. our DAWs already know what we'll be recording - most automatically detect MIDI signals and play them on the selected digital instrument, and also automatically detect if we're playing an acoustic instrument and picks that up as well. and if you have any sense, all you need is a metronome and a little inspiration to write music, and if you really need a drumloop, or want to hotswap them, it's ctrl-f "drumloop", click-draaag, there you go. and when you jam, the instrument shouldn't matter to the point where you have to make 20 of them like you did.

SongStarter is not a different tool - it's the same tool I've been working with, except its interface has been replaced by a less intuitive one that would simply make me either forget my idea before i could even punch it in, make it sound like crap and therefore make me immediately throw away a perfectly good song, or if I don't have an idea, would simply hinder my ability to effectively write music due to its absolutely silly unquantized, unoptimized, and glitchy solution to a problem that's fairly easy to solve (and if you want to really stretch it, the fact that I can't export to famitracker and/or write it to a LSDSNG file). it feels like an iPhone app designed for entertainment, quite frankly, and that's what's wrong with it - it feels overall like a bad tool to use for serious music creation. keep that in mind while you're developing this.

i kind of feel bad that i just wasted 5 minutes typing all of that.

XyNo: I PMed you and hopefully we can figure this out and get you up and running ASAP!

Aeros: Is an iPad useless to anyone who owns a computer? Why would you buy an iPad when you can wait for your computer to boot up, enter your login password, wait for your desktop to appear, double-click on the Chrome icon, try not to get viruses, and save yourself $600? Anyone who's proficient with a desktop computer can replicate the the iPad with double the functionality...

What I'm trying to say is, SongStarter is a different tool. It's not going to replace your DAW, and it's not trying to. It's a different tool for your toolbelt, for solving a different problem (helping you songwrite, quickly).

It sounds like there's MIDI issues with the beta on Windows, so I'll definitely take a look at that. Thanks for sharing.

by that I meant relative to chrome and the cloud - that's the only reason I would use this sort of tool, as I could simply start up FL Studio on Windows and be able to do ten times more with it just as easy as I could with this little tool.

i think what i'm trying to say is, SongStarter, as-is, is pretty much useless to anyone proficient in a DAW, because they could just as soon set out a drumloop at a BPM limited only to rationality, turn live mode on, use an instrument preset that they're fond of, set it as a template that runs on startup, and replicate your program with double the functionality in half the time you'd need to start and set your program up, saving $40 in the process.

oh yeah, and the interface is unintuitive, it DOES look and feel like more of a toy than anything, it's limited, looks too compact, and the jam interface simply feels unpolished altogether, e.g. if there is note quantization, it's ineffective and not immediately configurable; there's no visual beat measurement and the patterns just feel like they start randomly in some cases, the MIDI system seems, by the way, rather glitchy (sounded like i was playing with a noise wave, using w7-x64, windows version, w/ akai mpk mini), and overall it sucks.

I'm using Win 7 64-Bit, browsing on Chrome !
I think it was this file, will give it another chance and will edit this comment if something's happen !
Edit : Nope, same thing happened !

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback. I'll respond to as much of it as I can:

XyNo: Which version of Windows are you on and which web browser are you using? (this is the one you downloaded, right? http://www.oscillicious.com/songstarter … -win32.exe  - should be 60.7 MB)

Aeros: SongStarter has full MIDI capabilities on the desktop, and it doesn't lock your creations up like Audiotool. With Audiotool, you're trapped in the cloud. There's no MIDI export as far as I know.  And while SongStarter's interface may be different from anything you've tried before, I think you'll still find it's very easy to use.

Teradaktyle: I think SongStarter offers a better workflow for that initial, creative songwriting part of production than using DAW, and I've made it as easy as possible to move stuff over into your DAW, to make it so it's not convoluting your workflow. It's about adding an extra tool in at the start of your workflow to help you write better music, and I think that's worth an extra drag and drop. Thanks for the comments though and I'll re-evaluate where a mobile app fits into my broader plan.

Saskrotch: If you can spare a moment, would you mind elaborating on what didn't go well when you messed around with it in Chrome? Also, what part of the impression you got from SongStarter made you think it was a toy?

Thanks again guys, it's been insightful to read your comments!

this seems like a tool that should be marketed towards non-musicians, honestly. i tried messing around with it a bit in chrome, which didn't go too well, but it seems like more of a toy than anything. also, i write pretty fast music, so not being able to go over 180 is a problem for me

I'm going to have to agree with this. You've made a great looking product that's good for prototyping songs, however adding this to my DAW workflow would frankly only convolute it as I'm used to starting my songs in the DAW I'm going to finish them in.

After playing around with this I can't help but think this would be a better mobile app, seeing as when I'm on the bus or something is when I'd be more likely to not be able to compose in my DAW, but might still like to do something musical. This would be really helpful if it could export files in a format a DAW could use from a mobile device.

It would also be great if there was some kind of piano roll I could look at to change misplayed notes or something.

tl;dr It looks and works great, but even then I don't have much use for it.

I hope this feedback is useful

the setup don't want to work on my comp...like if everything in the installer wasn't there at all !!! And I already downloaded it  2-3 times yesterday ! :S

i could just as easily open up audiotool and have MIDI capability, better instrumentation, more control and a familiar interface.

there's your brutal, honest feedback.

-Yeah, it works!
-Oh, OH there it is. It's just that when I hit save as from the file menu, it says "wav" like that's the only thing I can save it as.
-As a sequence. The point of this is to feel what a transition from one riff to another is like.
-Audio input would be great! :B

...Heh. Jar. Jam.