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I would suggest that in terms of
touch-to-action lag, the hardware itself could be at fault. Consider the
old cassette decks: pre-solanoid switches, one would have lever-based switches,
which made it easy to do recordings using quick cues, without much machination
at all beyond a good hand on the pause switch/button. Then along came the
buttons on most major manufacturer's cassette decks: no longer the exact manner
of the pause-unpause per your own innate timing, but rather the learned
anticipation of the amount of time between your pushing the button and
(click,rrrr,click click,pomph!) the tape mechanism moving. If PC-based
editing had not come along I'd have had difficulty making recordings with
nearly-non-existent gaps between tracks, because of that simple thing. And
it's just not the same process anymore, much less spontaneous
frankly...
So the possibility that you're contending
with touch-to-action lag is quite good, IMHO.
From: Mech
Sent: Saturday, January 30, 2010 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: Everyday Looper - A Looper for the iPhone/iPod
Touch > >Don't hesitate to tell me what you think about it, or ask me questions >if things are unclear. On this mailing list will be fine as I read it >regularly :). Raphael, Thanks for coding this, and an even greater thanks for giving us the chance to quiz you on it here. I'm very interested, but I do have one question. In the past, I've purchased some of your competitor's products and found them to be completely unusable for serious work due to timing discrepancies (Loopy, for example). It appears that using the touch interface to trigger looping often does NOT result in the sort of critical timing that is necessary for recording useable loops. You tap the screen to begin recording, and in some cases it's right on. In others, there can be as much as a half-second lag before it starts. And in a few other instances, it ignores the touch altogether. IMNSHO, this is not 100% due to the app. It seems endemic to the iPhone architecture itself and probably stems from the multi-threading architecture (or, more accurately, the lack of it), the pitiful amount of available RAM on the iPhone (64mb for all applications?!?) and quite possibly even the performance of the CPU. I've had the same sort of lag suddenly attack the keyboard as I've been typing an email, for instance. It's just that email is not a time-critical application. What's more, the lag is inconsistent, so it's impossible to compensate for with technique. I would imagine that there should be a way to somewhat mitigate this in the application. But since I'm sure a lot of it stems from the iPhone system, I'm curious what you've done to solve this issue in Everyday Looper. I'm not trying to be confrontational here, 'cause I'd love to see one of these looping widgets actually work. It's just that I think there's some limitation with the hardware platform that makes this difficult at best (maybe later when the iPad comes out, there'll be enough horsepower to make it work). But if you've found a way around the issue, I'm definitely all ears. :) Thanks again!!! --m. -- _____ "we're no longer sure where home is; homesickness is our only guide" |