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Re: Everyday Looper - A Looper for the iPhone/iPod Touch



I would suggest that in terms of touch-to-action lag, the hardware itself could be at fault.  Consider the old cassette decks: pre-solanoid switches, one would have lever-based switches, which made it easy to do recordings using quick cues, without much machination at all beyond a good hand on the pause switch/button.  Then along came the buttons on most major manufacturer's cassette decks: no longer the exact manner of the pause-unpause per your own innate timing, but rather the learned anticipation of the amount of time between your pushing the button and (click,rrrr,click click,pomph!) the tape mechanism moving.  If PC-based editing had not come along I'd have had difficulty making recordings with nearly-non-existent gaps between tracks, because of that simple thing.  And it's just not the same process anymore, much less spontaneous frankly...
 
So the possibility that you're contending with touch-to-action lag is quite good, IMHO.

From: Mech
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: Everyday Looper - A Looper for the iPhone/iPod Touch

At 12:25 AM +0100 1/30/10, Raphaël - Mancing Dolecules wrote:
>
>Don't hesitate to tell me what you think about it, or ask me questions
>if things are unclear. On this mailing list will be fine as I read it
>regularly :).

Raphael,

Thanks for coding this, and an even greater
thanks for giving us the chance to quiz you on it
here.

I'm very interested, but I do have one question.
In the past, I've purchased some of your
competitor's products  and found them to be
completely unusable for serious work due to
timing discrepancies (Loopy, for example).

It appears that using the touch interface to
trigger looping often does NOT result in the sort
of critical timing that is necessary for
recording useable loops.  You tap the screen to
begin recording, and in some cases it's right on.
In others, there can be as much as a half-second
lag before it starts.  And in a few other
instances, it ignores the touch altogether.

IMNSHO, this is not 100% due to the app.  It
seems endemic to the iPhone architecture itself
and probably stems from the multi-threading
architecture (or, more accurately, the lack of
it), the pitiful amount of available RAM on the
iPhone (64mb for all applications?!?) and quite
possibly even the performance of the CPU.  I've
had the same sort of lag suddenly attack the
keyboard as I've been typing an email, for
instance.  It's just that email is not a
time-critical application.

What's more, the lag is inconsistent, so it's
impossible to compensate for with technique.

I would imagine that there should be a way to
somewhat mitigate this in the application.  But
since I'm sure a lot of it stems from the iPhone
system, I'm curious what you've done to solve
this issue in Everyday Looper.

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, 'cause
I'd love to see one of these looping widgets
actually work.  It's just that I think there's
some limitation with the hardware platform that
makes this difficult at best (maybe later when
the iPad comes out, there'll be enough horsepower
to make it work).  But if you've found a way
around the issue, I'm definitely all ears.  :)

Thanks again!!!

--m.
--
_____
"we're no longer sure where home is; homesickness is our only guide"