Thursday, July 28, 2011

Retronyms' New App Tabletop in the App Store!



So you might've seen from our little teasers posted over the past few weeks that we've been working on a new app.  Much to our delight (and hopefully yours as well), this beautiful new piece of software is now in the App Store!  This one's just for iPad, and is a music production environment called Tabletop

Tabletop, as its name might suggest, emulates a tabletop of audio gear.  The app comes with a variety of instruments, effects, mixers, and controllers that one can pick and choose to use as needed.  Here's a little video to get you acquainted with the app:


Now that your Tabletop appetite has been whetted, here's a little walkthrough with some accompanying pics to give you more detail on how exactly the app works:


This is the main view where you pick a session to work on and create new ones.  Tabletop comes with eleven demo songs and six templates that you can start off with, or create a new session from scratch.  Once you edit and save a demo or template your changes are stored in a new session.


When you create a new session, it opens to an empty tabletop with just the Mr. O master output device.  All audio must be routed through Mr. O to be audible.  Tap the device menu button to open the list of devices.  Each will be labeled owned or list a price, according to whether you've purchased the device or not.  Just tap and hold to drag a device to the table, or open the detail screen to see more info, buy the device, or tap to add it to the table.


Once you've got the devices on the table, route them up by tapping the routing button in the top right and connecting outputs to inputs.  Again, a device has to be routed properly to a mixer and/or master output to be heard.  You can either play a song on the fly with the devices routed through a mixer and Mr. O, or add the triggerator to your session to construct a song.  This sequencer allows for more precise composition by creating editable blocks of music with trigger controls.  Here's what a finished song might look like:


That's just the briefest of overviews to get you started, but the user guide has full descriptions of all the devices and their interactions.  So what exactly comes with the app?  Well we're having an incredible launch sale - the $4.99 purchase price gets you 9 out of 15 devices:
  • Mr. O - Master Output
  • Gridlok - Touchpad Sampler
  • RS3 - Polyphonic Keyboard
  • M8RX - Tone Matrix
  • Filtr LP - Low Pass Filter Effect
  • Spinback - Turntable Player
  • Goblin MX8 - Eight Channel Mixer
  • T101-Triggerator - Sequencer/Master Controller
  • Recorder M2 - Input Recorder
You'll also be able to get these additional devices as add-on purchases:
  • Ekko - Delay Effect
  • Filtr BP - Band Pass Filter Effect
  • Xpand - Chorus/Flanger Effect
  • Verve - Reverb Effect
  • XFade - Crossfading Mixer
  • Goblin MX4-FX - Four Channel Mixer with Sends
More devices are on the way, so pick up the app while this great deal is available!  You can also see the full spec list here.  And just for you, most treasured first readers of this post, is a promo code for the app:

TT69PWPTY7RF
EMTHPEA76RYF
WAA794XKNP4W

These are first come, first serve, so hurry up and grab one.  Enjoy!

9 comments:

  1. WAA794XKNP4W taken!

    Thanks!

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  2. TT69PWPTY7RF is history ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. EMTHPEA76RYF is mine

    ReplyDelete
  4. Any chance of a future module for line-in sources, like guitar or mic? This is a huge omission from apps like NanoStudio and Beatmaker 2.

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  5. Great ideas! Yeah, we'd like to do stuff like this

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  6. I want the same thing, Unflattered. It pains my heart to record vocals onto drum pads. And I can't figure out how to use the aux input on the goblin mixer... I was thinking maybe that was the solution, like to maybe line up a bunch of instances of the recorder module to create your own multitrack within the same environment where you're composing your MIDI stuff. But I can't wrap my head around what the routing would be; the plug has nowhere to go…? It's like one inch over my head. Or you just can't do that yet.

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  7. Edith, I also replied to your post on Palm Sounds, but the MX4's aux in is only for connecting another virtual device. It allows you to do things like chain multiple MX4's together. We'll update the user guide to clarify this.

    More sampling and recording from external sources would be a great addition. Are there any tools on iOS that you really like for this currently?

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  8. Thanks so much and sorry for the confusion. I'm having a blast playing with the modules either way. I would be very happy with even the simplest capability to record mic or line-in, but I'm trying to imagine how that would work. ONE track in one module would be thrifty if you only needed one track, yet versatile if you could use multiple instances. But to save space on the table you might need to put 4 together or something, like a mini-4track app. The way you did with the goblin mixer.

    ReplyDelete