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@Flexinoodle I don't want to take this too far off topic, but I have listening experience with various digital systems for > 15 years (Creamware Scope, ProTools TDM, RME HDSP, Emu Production Studio, a bunch of converters from 18 to 24bit, Audient ID22, iCA4+)
I shure can tell if a sound is influenced by converter type or it's handling of sample rates.
Maybe it's considered a sacrileg here, but I didn't find Animoog or Korg iMS20 on my iPad One in any way exciting.
It was cool for portable sound, but nothing I'd like to record, so booth apps went to the virtual shelf.
Later I read in a Positive Grid note, that they reduce the CPU consumption of their app by reducing resources if the app runs on one of those 'old' devices, at the expense of some signal loss.
When I loaded Animoog and iMS20 on an iPad Mini-2 there was a significantly improved performance of the filter. Less aliasing, which is in noway related to the converter chip.
Today there are a some nice VST synths, but go digging and point me to one of 2005.
I have a bunch of non-VST synths from that aera that (still) stand any VST competition.
So there never was a reason to drop them, as there was no reason to buy into VST.
(after countless comparisons)
It took Native Instruments quite some time to get from grainy FM-7 to FM-8, but Tenacious Frog (developer of TF-7) made it in one single leap.
Guitar Rig isn't even in the same league (regarding amp emulation) with Positive Grid, though it took the latter about half a year to get it right.
A fellow here posted a mix which I asssumed was a studio production. It was definitely standing out from most of what's published with Cubase and standard VST.
My guess would have been either UAD or ProTools HD - but it turned out to be Auria.
(I admit I was as surprised as I was impressed)
Not necessarily true, but don't let that stop you being a patronizing dick.
The differences between different apps comes down to the usual things (programmer skill, digital sound expertise, time, 'golden ears', etc). In addition, a lot of the bigger firms have invested years into research, and hang on tight to the fruits of that research. So they have all kinds of clever mathematical/modelling tricks for creating models of filters, creating anti-aliased oscillators (tricky if you want to pull off some of the subtractive tricks we all love from analog). A lot of that has trickled down (the PDF someone linked to is an excellent tutorial on zero delay filters for example, which is essential if you want to create realistic 'analog modelled' filters), but a lot probably hasn't.
And then there's the time that it takes to just experiment. The difference between a filter that sounds 'great' and 'meh' is often just trying lots of different numbers in equations until you get something that sounds good.
Some of the other stuff just comes down to time, trade offs and programming skill. There are loads of things you can do to improve sound quality. Interpolation, paying attention to bit depth, when to use upsampling, etc. All of these consume more resources - so it's about tradeoffs between sound quality and performance.
There are indie developers on Windows/OSX who can absolutely match the big boys. U-He create amazing synths that can match absolutely anyone (though they demand incredible resources). ValhallaDSP create some amazing reverbs. However, they've both spent years to get to the point they're at today.
Agreed on the atypical circumstance of this example; for a company like Korg with multiple product routes into the market they can afford to work on thin margins to extend the brand-
Off the bat - Apple takes 30 points - not an uncommon amount for distribution. If you buy a hardware synth at a store - there's at least that much going to shipping from the factory and the store. Works out to 55.3k in the number posted.
A Google search says mid level programmers go for 40-71k a year; say three people 6 months to code this app, around 90k (based on that they have a large amount of code standards in place from existing products). Add to that marketing, web designers, etc for a month your probably around 110k in development.
Add to that the hours spent on customer support......
Works out to be under 20 points in profit so far. In starving artists terms, if you are getting 10 bucks an hour for a four hour gig and it costs you more than 8 bucks an hour to do it, would you take the gig? Nope. But in this case a 20 point income is worth extending the brand - the products that make 50 points can cover that.... Any level of brand awareness can be worth it, at least in a niche market that we are a part of.
Point being, while 184k looks like a lot of money, from a business stand point that ain't shit. Costs considered, right?
All that said, so many thanks to all the independent devs that give their all for what I can only see as their passion and love of creation, pushing limits, and realizing their dreams. Just for the love of it, just like any musician here, answering their muse whatever she may ask.
PPG apps been mentioned a couple of times as a reference to absolute top-tier fidelity along with the usual Moog, Fab Filter, Korg suspects. I'm incredibly intrigued by PPG but so many here seem to be utterly lost and baffled by the interfaces, that I didn't think I had the expertise to use them. Still on my watch list though.
What other apps would you rate at the very utmost highest pillar of iOS sound fidelity? Personally, I'd put Mitosynth up there, and a few others.
Also, if Fab Filter is this good in Auria Pro... if you're looking at desktop options, which filters and plugins for OSX are even better than the Fab Filter bundle when installed in Logic Pro? Or, are the Fab Filter offerings regarded just as highly on the desktop?
Praise Bebot.
Wait, are you trying to say that 1 isnt 1 and 0 isnt 0, just so you can throw insults around on the internet, oh how clever you are !
FabFilter is widely regarded as one of the best, if not the best, for the Desktop as well, skip.
Thanks. While I was reading about their filters before buying several in Auria Pro during the current sale, I read several old postings on various sound design and mixing forums as I skimmed over the last few years worth of user feedback comparing Fab Filters to Ozone and Atlas? I'm not familiar with those, but was curious which OSX desktop filter/plugins are generally regarded as the best of the best.
There is no best, there is no regarded as best, otherwise there would be no gearslutz or KVR, most are as good as the next, the rest is personal preference.
Probably like cameras (more my realm of competency) where most of the brands are pretty much just as capable as the next. Some have very subtle difference in the way they handle color, slight differences in speed, etc. but most of that is moot with digital editing. It ultimately comes down to preference.
That being said, as I mentioned before... of the 6 iOS apps I own that are capable of EQ'ing, its hard to argue... that of what I own, Fab Filter's ProQ2 is clearly the best by a longshot. So, there does seem to be a difference beyond preference at some levels.
No. I'm saying there are other reasons why Animoog could sound different on various iPads. For example:
1) There may be differences caused by 32 bit vs 64 bit.
2) They could switch off certain enhancements on less powerful devices.
The thing on this topic that struck me was when Sampletank went to version 2. It was OK before, but didn't sound a patch on the desktop equivalent. But when they launched version 2, everything sounded so much cleaner and better defined - even on the same sounds as they had before! They had clearly done something with the audio engine which made everything sound better, and I'm no audio snob. So it can be done - and it can make a difference!
I agree, a lot of toy apps. What do expect for $5? than again, the toy apps can be costly also. Like other have said, with a new market there's problems.
What I found personally, is the big companies have some decent stuff: Korg, Steinberg, Line 6, Apple, etc. There are plenty of small operations (or single person) that make decent things also.....maybe
Out of curiosity what do people think of the audio quality of Sugar Bytes apps? I'm more involved in performance than production (I rarely take tracks further than editing stage myself, before passing them on) so my ears are trained to listen for a different set of stimuli. The performative creativity and sonic scope of these apps is phenomenal and they're some of my most used iOS tools, so I'd definitely like to know realistically how the audio quality compares to other pro level software.
@OscarSouth I don't think Turnado sounds all that good but it makes up for it with playability and possibility.
This should be a troubling number! There are developers that can command this much in annual salary. Considering the company, its marketing reach and the instrument in question, I'd feel more comfortable about the state of things if this was $500k.
Just to be clear: the image I posted was revenue for the month of November.
Indeed, but is was also its launch-month, so it represents about 75% of the total revenue (if this were a 'regular' music app).
This is a very interesting thread. Good read. I have hundreds of music apps. Some sound better than others, but I have no experience with DT stuff to compare it to. I have Reaper and some VST's for it. I had an album recorded and mixed and mastered in Protools.
I'd like to know @Tarekith opinions on this quality stuff.
I know he deals with all this stuff for a living.
Sound 'fidelity' has technical aspects and subjective measurements too.
Sound 'fidelity' is hardly the only measurement or criteria for usability and suitability of sound.
The only criteria I suggest is valid in real life use, is that of 'does the sound work well for what is required of it?'
Some points to reflect on:
iOS has plenty of apps that make sound for all uses.
The reasons for choosing one system over another, are often to do with reasons of use over reasons of quality.
There are some limitations imposed by iOS hardware itself that are not the norm when looking at the PC / Mac / High end specific hardware world.
Im just saying that iOS is a valid music making option. Some use scenarios are much better with a PC / Mac solution or combination. While the discussion can make for an interesting time sink, the real life analysis of perceived quality in any system eventually becomes secondary to what the musician can do with any tools. Yes, some tools are better than others, but an over emphasis on 'fidelity' will eventually just seem like 'cork sniffing' as suggested earlier.
I only base my opinion of having once owned plenty of high end studio gear and now owning an iPad and hundreds of apps. I have absolutely no doubt the only issue I have is with my own skills and not what is possible within iOS. Yes, some apps are better than others, but that is the same on all systems.
iOS is only young and has plenty of room to grow and improve in certain areas, but it's ability to make quality sound has already surpassed my skill to make quality music, so to be fair, I couldn't give a funk what comes next unless it actually makes the processes of music making easier still
Interesting topic. Like me, you may not hear a 320kbps MP3 on its own and say definitively that it is an MP3, but can hear a world of difference when directly comparing it to an original, uncompressed .wav or .aiff file. Digital sound quality, and digital sound degredation can be subtle.
With soft synths, it has been touched on before, one of the main keys to sound quality (not character) is avoiding digital aliasing. You get aliasing with digital synths, unless you are clever, because you are confined to doing your math 44,100 times per second. Seems like a lot, when, say, an A is at 440 Hz. You can, after all, reproduce a very nice sine wave in a system that has a hundred samples dedicated to each cycle of the sine wave. but unless you are playing sine waves, the note will have many harmonics, so if you are using, say a sawtooth wave, you'll have a second, quieter sine wave-like harmonic at 880 Hz, and a quieter third harmonic at 1320hz, 4th, 20th etc, all the way up, well past the limit of human hearing at 20kHz. They will start to get pretty ragged, with only a few samples to describe each cycle of these high frequency sine waves. Your harmonics will go up past the sampling rate of 44.1kHz, and in these harmonics is where the bad sound starts, because you can't describe a harmonic at say, 39kHz, at all, in a system with its resolution at 44kHz. You get nyquist aliasing, which is a repeating error, an unwanted lower frequency overtone, totally unrelated to the note being played, that is created by the repeating errors in the 44kHz system resolution, not being able to describe the 39kHz harmonic in a satisfactory way, because the harmonic wants to be repeating at a frequency that is in between the samples. Each succeeding 44kHz sample is hitting different cycles of the harmonics, at different points, sometimes when its climbing, sometimes at its peak, sometimes when it is falling, but in a repeating way. How often the pattern of errors repeats decides pitch of the unwanted, lower tone produced.
indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/digital_audio/chapter5_nyquist.shtml
If a synth has aliasing problems, they show up in the high notes sounding weird, and especially in slow pitch bends on high notes. There will be weird, unrelated overtones mixing in, and bending the opposite way.
Designing a soft synths is not as simple as it should be. The way some designers deal with it is brute force, internal oversampling, so the aliasing is so high and minimal, as to be negligible when you downsample to 44.1kHz. The way others deal with it is "band limiting" which is by not producing waveforms with any harmonic content over 22kHz, so there are no harmonics being generated in the first place, that would cause the aliasing artifacts. They do this by painstakingly recreating say, a sawtooth wave, with many seperate sine waves, one for each harmonic, up into the limit of human hearing (about 32 harmonics). These all get mixed together to approximate your sawtooth wave. It takes a lot more computer resources.
Side note, our audio interfaces have a sharp brickwall filter at 22kHz, so that all audio being accepted into the analog to digital converter will be band limited, and not contain harmonics that would cause aliasing. Same phenomenon.
The way the software designers deal with these issues decides the purity of the sound. There are a lot of clever people with a deep understanding of digital audio figuring out workarounds to get nice sounding synths. And there are some that haven't gotten there.
That may be the case for Korg. I don't know. I can only tell from my own apps (admittedly that's only 3 at this point, so my experience is limited) that after the initial 4-6 weeks the revenue stream becomes a drip on iOS. So as a dev you have to take into account that your investment (development time, etc.) must be made back roughly in that time period. So if you don't, you have to either leave the market, reduce your invested time or raise your prices.
Korg probably gets a longer tail on these sorts of apps because they're visible as IAP to the entire gadget user base. Still, I'm sure it's a curve down after the initial release like pretty much every other kind of product ever.
Yes, I'm expecting Korg to have a slightly more steady revenue curve on their apps due to their general visibility.
When I started in the music software world (after Hammerhead), I introduced a number of shareware applications in the early 2000s, Tuareg/Tu2 and Tunafish. These were priced $20 and $30 respectively - which was a really the low end of the shareware spectrum even then. Ironically such pricelevels can only be commanded on iOS by established brands like Moog and Korg - and even then people typically wait for a sale. On the other hand - as this thread indicates - people do expect iOS apps to have pro/desktop level feature sets and sound quality. So there is something quite unhealthy going on on this platform.
Being quite new to the platform (and having gotten here sort of 'by accident') I'm still trying to figure out how to get to grips with the oddball economics of iOS
Sugar Bytes do almost the same in sound what I'd call 'average VST', not bad, but nothing to record or particularly inspiring.
Except for the performance aspect you mention - and in a live context with ll those room problems not a problem at all.
that's the side effect of oversampling or processing at 96k and above.
No golden ears needed to detect this.
It would be like spending time watching a grainy old black and white movie with a decent sound production of that time and even though you are totally engaged maybe even moved to tears you don't stop your enjoyment and say " you know this would be so much better if this movie was in full color and looked and sounded much greater on a 4K screen with thx surround sound" but then again some would say that
It would be like going to an art museum and looking at a great painting that stirred your soul to such heights but then you get distracted momentarily and notice the paintings' entire surface has a fine network of cracks and all of a sudden you're displeased and fail to see the artists greatness anymore only to promptly leave the museum never to go again
I've never once found myself wishing that apps on the iOS platform were better sounding. Like their desktop counterparts, there's a lot of different sounding apps that aim to do different things, so I don't see any difference based on platform.
And really, "sound fidelity" is such a nebulous concept anyway. What we hold up as examples of audio perfectionism in the past often pales compared to what we are able to do today. Yet most people don't notice. I think we are inherently biased towards what sounds familiar as being better too, so everyone has their own take on what they think the "ideal" sound might be.
valid points, but my comment above is only a small section of the whole story.
In fact I do like aliasing a lot - it's a core element of classic wavetable sound, and there's a certain type of 18bit converters that I prefer over many 'better' modern devices.
A pure IOS only production would bore me to death with it's crystal clear sound, most of my own tracks include VST effects (Valhalla DSP) as essential for the final result.
But: things are only good in their own domain, high quality software faking lofi sounds shit to me.
Bitcrushers have their own special sound, 8-bit reductions will never sound like hardware from the early digital days, there are too many side effects.
I focus on high quality in IOS, because there are devices that do it really well.
For lofi I prefer lofi gear.
One if my dream teams would be 2 iPads with a Tascam Portastudio... with more time available, I'd certainly run something like that, but IOS is so much more efficient...
I mean for the most part, I can't say I've noticed much of an issue with overall sound quality. Obviously there is such a thing as an objectively bad synth but on the whole, discounting plain BAD programming, a synth is a synth. I'm sure there are some academic/technical differences but I'm always a little sceptical as to how sensitive people's ears really are. I mean I've been producing for well over half of my life now and as much as I trust my ears, I don't think they're magical. I can't tell the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and a WAV, or even a 128 and 320 MP3. And honestly, most people can't either. There are plenty of sites that offer blind tests. Your success rate is basically the same as guessing a coin flip, in most cases. So when it comes to things like whether your iPad is 32-bit or 64-bit, or whether an app does this or that...I don't think these amount to appreciable differences in the sound.
Of course I do notice a difference in the sound of something like, Model 15. To my ears it's a hell of a lot fatter and rounder than a lot of other synths out there. Without knowing a thing about coding, I couldn't say why but I'm assuming it uses virtual analogue oscillators as opposed to wave based ones, and a lot of time has been put into the filter section too (I suppose they have all the equipment necessary to emulate their own filter hardware).
But yeah like I said I think overall, the sound quality is actually pretty good. The issue for me is just functionality. Like, synths not saving settings in projects. Or having to constantly change MIDI settings depending on whether I'm sequencing from on the iPad or from my computer, although tbh it's so much easier and better on my computer I don't really bother with the former any more. There's really no shortage of good, usable synths on iOS in my opinion. Where I'd like to see improvements now is in greater implementation of state saving and - dream of dreams - a file system I can access so I can manage my presets, and more easily import/export samples without creating tonnes of redundancy and duplication.