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Ask SN: Music Recording on Android?

posted by LaminatorX on Sunday March 09 2014, @12:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the OK-Computer dept.

Ethanol-fueled writes:

"After many years of lambasting smartphone users during my tenure at "The Other Site," I finally broke down and got a recent-model Android phone, and I'm appealing to the musicians in the audience for help: Which apps for music recording on Android would you recommend? Any stories, bugs, or gotchas of which we should be made aware? Features provided, number of tracks, backing tracks, effects, etc.? I'd prefer Android-specific information but discussion of music recording on iOS or other mobile platforms, heck any digital recording, would be welcome. Cost is not a factor, but stability is very important.

I've done a good amount of recording using Cubase on PCs so I'm no stranger to digital recording over all, one of the reasons why I'm asking you all is because most 'reviews' online seem untrustworthy, the two I'd think I'd like best are full of bad reviews and I need the straight dope from a technical crowd.

Thanks in advance for your stories and suggestions!"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by M. Baranczak on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:38PM

    by M. Baranczak (1673) on Sunday March 09 2014, @02:38PM (#13612)

    Last I checked, Android was useless for music creation due to the high latency in the audio system. A delay of 200 ms is acceptable if you're just playing back an audio file, but not if you're playing a software instrument, or overdubbing music. Just to give you an idea: an eighth note at 120 beats per minute is 250 ms.

    Admittedly, this was a while ago, and the devices may be better now, but I'd still be cautious.

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:39PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 09 2014, @07:39PM (#13681)

    They are better (though not perfect) but if you're dealing with any kind of music creation, the acid test is the ability to create a mixdown to wav or mp3 or whatever. So no, Android isn't useless - it just has certain disadvantages in certain respects, which disadvantages are rapidly mitigated by advances.

    Sunvox does quite a nice job of playing back realtime synthesis, as long as you're not swamping the CPU.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @03:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 10 2014, @03:50AM (#13775)

    Yep, that's still a problem. Actually, I think jitter in latency is an even bigger problem.

    I've installed a bunch of audio apps on my note 3 (arguably one of the faster android devices out there), and ALL of them sucked. Typically people can compensate for latency fairly okay, but jitter, well, what can you do?