android music studio

Making sounds and music on Android is my entertainment. This is an attempt to document the setup.

Apps and tools

These are some apps sorted by approximate frequency of use

VLC open source power player for audio and video with music scanning, playlists, directories, variable playback speed, equilizer. Top player out there. App available from f-droid or Play store.

g-stomper studio by planet-h.com, started to use it because it was the first meaningful music app out there that supports Ableton Link to synchronize with a session over wifi in the studio. Classical approach 32 channel drum machine and sampler plus 5+ synths plus a lot of mixing, effects, arrangement functions. Made for performing live, nice synthesis engine.

Nanoloop by nanoloop, legendary early Gameboy music app reincarnated for Android, probly Apple as well. Unconventional approach, 8 channels freely assignable to four types of instruments, pulse-wave synth, fm synth, noise synth, sampler. Best bit is supports full polyrhythmic sequencing for each channel, at least in the live loop mode. It seems that recent updates have fixed the polyrhythm issue for exporting song arrangement as well. Super nice, no audio glitches ever, totally live suitable.

Lexis Audio Editor straight forward audio editor, load file, clip, trim, compress, reverse, etc.

RD4 Groovebox by our friends at mikrosonic, has a drum machine, one 303-style bass synth, and two generic synths, sequencer, pattern composition, export etc. Unfortunately didn’t get the Link update until now, so phased out in favor of g-stomper.

Audio Evolution Studio, multitrack DAW app, does the job but is just too crammed on my phone so not really using it.

MobMuPlat very nice idea, mobmuplat is an app that lets you build graphical interfaces to libpd based patches that can run inside the app. Need to design your patch and GUI, then send that over to the phone to use it. Never really picked it up, mostly because getting externals into libpd is not exactly trivial.

untested

Caustic, looks decent fully blown tracker, synth, sequencer, drum machine sampler. Never really got into because other options. Still.

OSC

Some apps for sending OSC control from screen interaction or phone sensors.

touchOSC, classic.

sensor2OSC

termux power w/ command line tools

Termux is superpowers for the phone and v/ handy if you like working on a linux shell. Let’s you use Sox, aubiocut, the scientific Python stack, even pulseaudio with a driver for OpenSL ES, and much more. Does require significant attention though to get things working.

ReSampler

High quality command-line audio sample rate converter on https://github.com/jniemann66/ReSampler.

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