Band goes official for the iPhone - Available via the AppStore

By Aaron Besson at 9 June, 2008, 2:00 pm

MooCowMusic took the stage at the WWDC to announce that their app Band will be made available via the AppStore shortly. I expected and hoped for this, this was truly one of my favorite apps and it truly is a great way to utilize the phones fantastic hardware and iPhone touch OS X.

No idea of pricing yet, but hopefully it will be under 10.00 and will allow for free instrument packs or some sort of affordable updates and expansions.

Features

Play and record multiple instruments
- Drums, bass, guitars, keyboards can all be played and recorded into one song from the same application.
- There are no limits on the instrument interface, enabling not only standard instruments but also unusual, outlandish, or completely novel instruments to be created and played.
- MooCowMusic:Band can be expanded with future instrument packs and user-created instruments.
- Multitouch - press up to five keys at once for complex chords.
- Animation shows keys being pressed, strings being struck, etc
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User-definable instruments
- All instruments in MooCowMusic:Band are defined as simple text files, making it easy to create your own instruments to use within the application. As long as you can edit a text file, create or find some sound samples, and create a graphic backdrop, then you can design and build your own instrument. Alternatively you can import instruments that other people have created for you by simply copying them to the application Instruments folder.
Recording and Playback
- Any instrument can be recorded, or overdubbed onto a previous recording. The only limitation is note polyphony.
- Each instrument has an overlayed panel at the top of the screen containing all the common controls for recording and choosing an instrument.
- Via a settings menu, the user can erase any mistakes by erasing select instruments from the mix, or even the last few notes recorded.
- After erasing, the user can go back and overdub replacement notes onto the track.
Metronome
- To aid in timing, a metronome is available which can be enabled or disabled during recording.
- The metronome tempo is configurable, as is the number of beats per bar.
Advanced audio engine
- Mono or stereo samples. 14.1Khz 16Bit.
- Multisampled instruments, with each key triggering a separate sample.
- Samples stop when you lift your finger, allowing more expression.
- Configurable Attack stage of playback allows samples to fade in gradually.
- Configurable Release stage of playback allows samples to fade out when you release the note.
- Samples can be defined to loop for as long as the key is pressed.
- Each instrument can be indepenently panned and its volume set, to position it in the mix.
- Each instrument can be muted.
- Each instrument can be soloed (mute all other instruments and just allow this one to play).
- Play along to your MP3s.