Rhythm Studio Updated With New OP-1 clone

Developer Pulse Code has announced an update Rhythm Studio, its virtual studio for the iOS:

The fourth update includes the addition of a powerful three operator FM (frequency modulation) synthesizer, the FM-3.

The FM-3 has been designed to allow maximum results with minimal effort. The complexities of FM synthesis have been simplified to allow you to create great sounds right from the start.

In addition, we are adding a help link within the app to a full set of online tutorial videos. The video tutorials touch on all the major aspects of Rhythm Studio. From navigating the song browser and its options to interacting with all of the virtual synthesizers and other audio gear in the workspace, the video tutorials will help you learn Rhythm Studio faster.

This looks a lot like the extremely cool OP-1.

Voco touch controlled phase vocoder

Voco is a touch controlled phase vocoder.

Sounds can be manipulated by touching the screen, and played like like an instrument. Time is represented on the horizontal axis, and pitch on the vertical. The yellow bars display the sounds intensity.

Sounds can be sampled through the microphone or headphone socket, or loaded via iTunes.

There are also features to constrain the pitch to different scales, and to glide the playing point around the screen to make rhythmic loops.

Strange Attractor sound generator

Strange Attractor is a novel sound generator and effects processor based on chaos theory. At its heart is a feedback system which can spontaneously oscillate, or respond to incoming sounds, processing them into fractal sonic textures.

It generates a wide range of undulating sounds, controlled by touch, which slowly evolve in unpredictable ways. The sound is visualised as an ever-changing dynamic form.

Roughly 70% of new apps are made for iOS

A new report from advertising and analytics company Flurry demonstrates just how dedicated developers still are to Apple’s platforms, with some 7 out of every 10 new apps being made for iOS, versus only 31% for Android in Q1 of 2012.

The firm measures the ‘new project starts’ by recording how many developers are downloading and implementing its analytics SDK in order to fire up a new project. Because developers normally integrate analytics some time before launching apps, these numbers are actually good projections of where new products are going to be launched.

There are several factors that Flurry says contribute to new projects being begun on iOS, rather than Android. Among those is that Android developers actually make 4x as much revenue on iOS than it does on Android. Flurry says that for every $1.00 a developer earns on iOS, he can expect to earn about $0.24 on Android.

The second major reason that could contribute to the disparity is Android hardware and software fragmentation. In hardware, only one device (the Samsung Galaxy S II) accounts for more than 10% of the top 20 devices, with 17 of those holding a share of 6% or less as of May 2012. This makes it more difficult to support a wide array of devices for some developers of apps like games, which have specific hardware requirements.

The fact that some 70% of devices on Flurry’s network are still on Gingerbread, an OS over a year and a half old, is also a problem. Flurry points out that Froyo, which shipped before both ICS and Honeycomb, Google’s ‘tablet optimized’ version of Android, has more penetration than both of the new ones combined. Users on versions of the OS that shipped over a year ago make up the majority of the platform’s users, that’s terrible.

This means that developers looking to support new user conventions and features that were shipped in later versions of the OS are limited in what they can do, preventing them from offering the best experiences in their apps. Compare this to iOS where some 75% of users are already on iOS 5+, introduced just this year.

Flurry’s tracking uses data from 70K companies across 185K mobile apps and 1.2B end-user sessions across 100M devices. That’s 36B sessions across half a billion devices a month.