We’re fired up! Star6, our new music app for the iPhone and iPod touch, arrived in the App Store a few hours ago.

Star6 is a new kind of beast; it lets you perform using any audio sample (ours or yours) as your instrument. We ship the app with seven sample packs, each with six sample loops; but you can upload your own audio too, anything you want. Under the hood in Star6 is a granular synthesis engine, which chops up the audio into tiny pieces and then reassembles them based on your touch and accelerometer inputs. Getting the synthesis engine optimized so that it would run well on all generations of iPhones and iPod touches was a technical challenge to say the least.

The result is totally addictive. During the long testing cycle for the app, I regularly caught myself having just spent the last 30 minutes playing rather than testing. One of my favorites is a loop I cut from James Brown’s The Payback; with a flick of the wrist, James is transformed into an evil chipmunk, the background music into a horror movie theme. This is an exceptionally deep app; unlike other “sound toys” you’ll find on the App Store, Star6 is a performance-grade instrument; there are virtually no limits to what you can do with your loops and the hours you can spend exploring.  Check out the video here.

We collaborated with Jason Forrest (aka DJ Donna Summer) on Star6, and I think the combined effort resulted in something wonderful and unique. Congratulations to the whole team on an amazing new product.

Tags: Star6