We’re excited (and a bit surprised) to report that Star6 1.1 has hit the App Store –  a quicker-than-expected approval of the update has left us scrambling a bit! This is a substantial release, many new capabilities, but for my money, the #1 new feature is quantizing; specifically, quantizing when you jump from one sample to another.

Jumping between samples is a core activity when you’re jamming out with Star6.  In release 1.0, you had to hit the sample button at exactly the right instant to keep your music “on the beat” … tough to do, even for experienced DJs. In Star6 1.1, jumping between samples is automatically quantized. You simply select what beat interval you want to quantize on, from 1/16th of a beat up to 4 beats. Then when you jump from one sample to another, Star6 automatically delays the jump so that your sound stays lined up on the beat interval you selected.

Besides keeping you lined up on the beat, quantizing also makes it possible to easily alternate between two samples, playing, for example, 6 beats from sample A followed by 2 beats from sample B, and back again. For me, this one feature makes Star6 1.1 a huge improvement.

Another big win in 1.1 is a raft of BPM-related changes. First of all, we’ve put the BPM control right on the main process screen. This control works in three different modes. First, you can touch the + or – buttons to move up or down a single beat at a time. Next, if you touch and hold, you get “alarm clock mode” where the BPM moves up or down faster the longer you hold. And finally, we’ve added a very nice scrubbing mode: if you touch and hold the BPM button, then move up or down, BPM follows that movement. So you can move from 120 BPM to 303 BPM in a split second by moving your finger up an inch — fun!

Also new on BPM is the ability to control whether pitch varies with the BPM change. Previously Star6 always used granular synth magic to keep the pitch the same, but in 1.1 you can toggle it so pitch varies up and down with the BPM. This can produce some great effects (think James Brown as fast chipmunk) but also causes less distortion when you modify the BPM on certain types of music. For example, if you’re working with the ambient loops from FM3’s Buddha Machine, BPM changes work much better in “vary pitch” mode.

Previously, Star6 would force all samples within a session to run at the same BPM. In Star6 1.1, you can now vary the BPM for each sample. This is helpful when you’re working with samples that are less beat-driven than the typical club / dance music — again the Buddha Machine samples come to mind. And finally, we’ve added a tap-to-BPM bar on the options screen, so you can easily match speeds with the music you’re listening to.

One more notable change to Star6’s control interface is around the reset button. Star6 has always had reset, which returns the six granular synth settings back to their starting (neutral) position. In 1.1, the reset button has been expanded to also reset effects and reversing; so if you have a sample playing with synth effects plus DSP effects plus running in reverse, a single tap of reset puts everything back to neutral. What’s even more powerful in 1.1 is that, if you tap reset again, it “un-resets”: that is, all those processes and effects you just turned off are turned back on in a single click. This makes some really amazing toggles possible, from wildly crunched to original sample, back and forth, just by toggling reset.

We’ve added support for downloading and installing entire sample packs in a single click, via Mobile Safari or from within Star6’s News area. We did this by registering a custom protocol, star6://, when the app installs. If you then click on a star6:// link within Mobile Safari, it automatically loads Star6, downloads the sample pack, and creates a new session for those samples. The format of a sample pack isn’t complex, just a zip file with the samples and some optional metadata, so you can publish your own star6:// downloads if you choose to.

You’ll notice a fairly significant change to Star6’s look and feel in 1.1. We had a chance to sit down and walk through Star6 with Apple’s Eric Hope, an iPhone User Experience Evangelist, at the recent Tech Talk in Seattle. Eric enjoyed Star6’s rather unique and non-standard styling and colors, but suggested a more rounded, 3D look. We’ve taken Eric’s advice and think you’ll like the results. We’ve also cleaned up many other aspects of the UI and UX, particularly the session listing screen.

All in all, in our most humble opinion, Star6 1.1 is twice as much fun! Let us know what you think.

We’re excited to announce the Star6 Video Freakout contest! Enter a video that shows how creative, fun and crazy you can be with the Star6 app. In addition to the fun you’ll have making the video, there will be two Grand Prizes worth up to $500 each!

The first place winners in both the People’s Choice and Judges’ Choice categories will each receive a $250 Apple Gift Card or iTunes Gift Card. But wait, it gets better! If the Star6 Video Freakout YouTube group has more than 3,000 members by 12:00 midnight EST, September 27, 2009, the Grand Prizes will double in value to $500 each! So invite your friends to join the group and ‘FAVORITE’ your video submission! For more information, visit the contest web page.

To give you an idea of what we’re looking for, check out these videos: Cissy Live Jam with Star6 and Mashed Music Video.

Jason Forrest, the Berlin-based musician with whom Agile Partners collaborated to create Star6, wears many hats: electronic music producer, performer, record label owner and photographer, just to name a few. However, if you take a look at the Tutorials section of the Star6 website, you’ll see why I think teacher should be added to the list.

The Tutorials section has everything you need to know to make the most of Star6. My tutorial began with a quick look at the features diagram on the landing page. It’s a “must-see” chart for every new Star6 user because in 15 seconds you’ll get a 10,000 feet perspective of the app’s key features (“Wow, the app does all that?”). If you’re a pro user of Star6, the At-a-Glance Features chart may be all the instruction you’ll need. Fortunately, for novices like me, “Professor Forrest” provides us with much more.

I next opened up a PDF file titled, Sample Editing 101 (remember, I’m a novice). My eyes wandered to a “Sampling (music)” wikipedia link and I was amazed by the amount of information in the article. There’s a history of sampling that begins in 1961 when James Tenney created Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”) from samples of Elvis Presley’s recording of “Blue Suede Shoes.” I sampled (sorry, pun intended) the rest of the article and bookmarked it because I was more interested at that moment in learning how to make some cool new sounds with Star6.

Back at the Sample Editing 101 PDF, I found a link to dmoz.org which provides “a list to other sites where you can download more samples.” Super! Up to then, I had only experimented with the free samples that come with Star6. I was eager to find new samples on the Internet and I wanted to try the upload/download manager that is built into Star6.

I quickly jumped over to the dmoz site and was thrilled to find a long list of samples and loops (“Wow, I could spend a lot of time here!”). After checking out a bunch of links, I ended up at looperman.com where I registered, found some awesome loops, and downloaded several of them. The Star6 upload/download manager worked flawlessly; a physicist might call it “frictionless.”

Using one of the simpler loops that I downloaded, a blues guitar loop, I took the time to really understand the differences between the six process effects — Pitch, Gate, Speed, Jitter, Size, Random — that Star6 offers. To do so, I first went through the Process Effects section of the Star6 User Manual PDF. Professor Forrest did a great job putting together the User Manual — it’s fun and colorful like Star6 itself, and filled with Goldilocks explanations (“Not too much, not too little, just right!”). The User Manual includes lots of helpful images which does make the PDF larger, however a text-only version is also provided on the site if download time is a concern.

Next, I watched Professor Forrest’s Grain Mode Tutorial video which steps through through each of the Process Effects in Grain Mode. (Star6 has two audio engine modes, Grain Mode and Sync Mode. More on that in a future blog post.) Watching the video was really helpful for three reasons. First, the video reinforced my understanding of what I had just read in the User Manual. Second, I stopped and started the video to experiment as Professor Forrest stepped through each Process Effect. Last, but not least, the video was shot outdoors in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz which sure beats a boring classroom and blackboard setting any day of the week!

With Star6’s rich feature set, the tutorial resources already on the website and additional video tutorials to come, I’m sure I’ll be learning a lot more in the coming weeks and blogging about it here. For now, see that screen shot at the top of this post? Well, Star6 also comes with Help Topics built into the app itself. You see, Professor Forrest has you covered!

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.