Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Play Date Game Machine.
Something left field! Teenage Engineering were involved in developing!
Comments
Elektron leaks their version
Before everyone starts piling on Teenage Engineering. This device is made by Panic. Same company who made FireWatch. They asked TE to help out with the crank and a few other things. This is not a TE product.
Ok. Just wanted to clarify things. You can read the whole thread on twitter if you care to:
https://twitter.com/i/events/1131449299261218817
Carry on 🙏🏼💕
It is indeed a Panic product, but TE helped with the mechanical engineering and industrial design.
And it definitely looks like TE had a hand in how it, er, looks! And yes, they suggested the crank. But they did much more than that. In Panic's own words, T.E. were the partners for the Play Date's design.
Panic have a lot of kudos in the Mac world. This kind of thing will resonate with a lot of Mac Nerds.
Example:
https://daringfireball.net/2019/05/playdate
A lot of Mac tech geeks are going gooey-eyed over this.
If it was a TE product they'd release PD-1 then a year or so later PD-Z. Without a screen. ;-)
A product such as this is typical for our time is it not? Nobody needs it, it doesn't add anything what you can't have otherwise (gaming on a phone, to put it plain and simple). But it something some people 'simply got to have'.
I must confess I'm interested as well, but as soon as I noticed that my non-greedy conscouisness asks me all kinds of stupid questions like 'So...why again is this important? How long are you going to play on this thing before discarding it? why are you adding more junk to your life when we were heading on a new minimalistic path?' etc.
Interesting how the mind works.
I'm going through exactly the same conundrum at the moment. It pushes all my "must-have"-buttons, but when you look at it rationally it makes you wonder what it will offer over more conventional gaming options. Thankfully as a designer/creative I don't have to be completely rational and I can excuse it as source of inspiration and whimsical entertainment. It also seems to be a wonderfully designed physical object.
I just hope they don't forget that games are supposed to be fun. But they have some good indie game designers on board apparently.
took me ages to save up way back when ...
You could say that about anything though. I don't need a guitar, but my life would be quite different without it. And I bet most folks here have a TV and or car, neither of which is essential. Other than food, and replacement clothing, none of us here needs to buy anything ever again.
Knowing Panic and TE, I expect the whole point of this is to make games more fun. Just one game as good as the original Tetris and we're done!
All a device like this needs to do to be more than worthwhile is to make somebody happy.
I’m sure the play date will do just that for some people. It will then have justified its existence.
I don’t want one personally but I’m glad it exists. I think it’s cool that such a small company can make something like this that would have been impossible to all but the biggest companies not so long ago. Panic are even writing their own OS for it.
It is perfectly aimed at a small but enthusiastic market.
The price is actually incredible when you think about it. Low production run hardware like this would have cost an order of magnitude more just a few years ago.
And the exact same reasons that make the play date possible also make it possible for tiny companies to make weird little drum machines or esoteric eurorack modules or grooveboxes, devices for the tiny number of people for whom they will give untold joy. And leave most of us scratching our heads wondering what the point is.
When you are Sony you have to find tens of millions of people that see the point.
With today’s manufacturing supply lines you only need to find a few hundred or so that can see the point to make it worthwhile.