From Chicago to Berlin, the buzz around the take off of Star6 has been really tremendous. The breakthrough app that we collaborated on with musician Jason Forrest has already achieved a top 10 ranking among premium music apps selling in the App Store for $5.99 or more.  Not surprisingly, the press has been all over Star6.

Pitchfork, the popular and influential Chicago-based music site, has a line in their write-up that I love: “Will I look silly tapping this app while using public transportation? Probably, but it’s worth it.” That’s exactly what I did — on the ‘A’ train in NYC!  My colleague Phil, who’s one of the best ruby developers you’ll find anywhere, was pretty psyched when he saw Star6 on Giles Bowkett’s blog. Jason and our team have been delighted to see folks aren’t shy about their praise for Star6. TheHype.FM said, ”We don’t plug many products through TheHype.FM, but we knew you would all love this” and iSmashPhone.com said, “…one of the best GUIs I’ve seen on an iPhone app. If you’re a musician, or just someone who likes playing around with beats and samples, then this app is a must.”

As someone who’s enjoyed working on five continents around the globe, I’ve been especially pleased to see the international interest in Star6 — from NME, the UK’s biggest music website, to Belio Magazine, an awesome design mag based in Madrid, to engadget German.  All that and more, in just the first week after launch!

However, I know I speak for our entire team and Jason when I say the testimonials of Star6 customers mean the most to us.  One of our customers, Spyced, said, “Must say this is the best performance tool for glitching beats and the GUI is topnotch.” Another customer, Keywiz, commented, “This app is a total sonic party.”

To all our customers and 500+ fans on the Star6 Facebook page: Thank you!

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.

A wonderfully creative use of GuitarToolkit by Korby Lenker.

Several of the latest Apple iPhone spots sport the GuitarToolkit flaming pick logo.

“Check”

“Itchy”

One of the more frequent questions we’ve gotten about GuitarToolkit is, “can I use it on my iPod Touch?”. The answer is yes, but the Touch doesn’t have a microphone, and therefore the tuner isn’t available. A bunch of folks have written in to say that they’d like to see a version specifically for the Touch, at a reduced price. Sans tuner of course.

GuitarToolkit Lite is exactly this. You can now find it at your local App Store for $5.99 (direct App Store link), or read more at GuitarToolkitLite.com.