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Comment by rohall | Hacker News Reader

I use a lot (actually way too many) music creation apps. This looks really nice, but there are a few things that made me turn away after only a minute:

1) In order to use any instruments other than piano I need to like or share. I haven't even had a chance to build a song. As a user, I'm not comfortable enough to recommend your app to friends or endorse it.

2) There doesn't seem to be much available in terms of drums / bass. I might be missing something.

3) This is more of a nice to have, but customizing sounds through effects or parameters would be amazing and add to the diversity of sounds.

I really do love the interface. I think with a few changes you could be on to something great!

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1) We definitely don't want to force you to recommend an app you've just started using. Feel free to experiment a bit more. You can also download songs from Discover (the cloud in the toolbar) to see how the different instruments sound.

2) We have drums and bass in two different packs, the Rock pack and the Jazz pack. The drum kits come with pre-set loops as well as individual samples for making your own beats.

3) Right now we have basic echo and reverb effects (in the mixer) and we're working on adding more!

Thanks for trying it out

Dude, why would you weld a nice responsive interface to the sound and sensibility of a cheap plastic keyboard? Make it work with Audiobus, rebrand it as a sequencer, and sell it for $10 to musicians that actually want something that sounds good. Nobody needs another half-assed implementation of General MIDI.

Exactly. It's a giveaway: this product was not designed by musicians who regularly use music software.

Can I pay you and not have to recommend or like anything?

Do you have a recommendation for an app that I can use to make basic music for a game (think Ludum Dare level)? I'm not a music creator, but I want be able to create some sort of music without having to learn much about music creation.

The easiest one I've used is Figure (http://www.propellerheads.se/products/figure/). You'll probably want something on your desktop/laptop to pull everything together. Feel free to reach out if you'd like help with workflow.

I made this using mostly Figure and Garageband (to give you an idea of what can be done): http://rickohalloran.bandcamp.com/

+1 for Figure.

Looptastic HD is quite nice for putting something together with almost no effort.

http://www.drpetter.se/projects.html

Musagi and Sfxr were both created essentially for making basic game music and http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA022293/pxtone/index.html PXtone from the maker of cave story.

Neither are particularly easy in comparison to other tools but because they come out of the game design community basically all the tutorials online are geared toward vg tunes.

Renoise http://www.renoise.com/ (demo seems to be full-featured) is a little more complicated but pretty powerful. It took me a little while to get used to the UI but it's worth it.

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