A Masterpiece of Perspective and Utilization of the IPad
Brilliant
Breathtaking
Not very intuitive
I couldn’t figure out how to stop it, so I just closed the app instead.
A superb, great value gem
Using with an iPad Air 1 iOS 12.4.8
First some niggles:
Saving sometimes results in crackling popping interference which is remedied by a relaunch of the app; otherwise fairly sturdy.
The sonic output of the synth, string, bass and arp aspects fall within a sonically predictable (or quickly familiar) range in spite of the input process itself feeling somewhat (and pleasingly) random.
Latency prevents accurate drum programming for the most part but this somewhat misses the point, again the randomness of the app in general can whisk up warp-style offerings pretty quickly, but the same flip side is apparent: I wonder how similar my creations are to everybody else. This apprehension may only be because I’ve made 4 ‘things’ already that I like, with virtually no effort. Ordinarily I’m wrestling with my Octatrack or programming stuff, so I’m not accustomed to this effort/reward ratio!
Can’t work out where the stop button is?!
Positives:
Layout is intuitive and encouraging. Compositional aspects, when used in conjunction with an external sampler, are impressive. The key and note information help wend towards more interesting key segues and will no doubt impart more theory subliminally over time to someone like myself who can neither read nor write music.
Sharing from my iPad to Mac over airdrop worked perfectly. Within this ecosystem therefore, it’s dead easy to take clips and treat them in Logic or another DAW with minimal fuss.
Ultimately this app is a breeze to use, has possible music theory applications to steer you towards interesting transitions and has a well-thought out GUI that’s fun to use, I think £4 is very good value for something with this many components, I was happy to pay a tenner for Huangs Flip sampler, but this is especially decent value.
I’m tending to get a beat going, throw in all the melodic aspects and establish 4 or 5 ‘starred’ snapshots then remove the drums altogether, sample in my octatrack and apply proper drums from my TR-8S. The melodic and structural ideas that you can get from this thing are lovely and I’ve already recommended it to several friends as, at the very least, a superb travel companion, but a worthy tool for sketching out quick ideas and getting inspiration.
More power to the developers, a lovely thing!
Their own paradigm
Great design, really complicated
2. The “clear” buttons are confusing, “clear all” seems to do nothing and “clear” workers but there now way of knowing what your clearing as far as what part of the loop you just created....
3. How can you start over??? I looked for about 20 min and maybe I missed something but I simply couldn’t find anywhere to just start fresh with the same sounds I was working with. I had to use the “clear” button and click it a million times till everything was gone.
There is some seriously amazing functionality and fun with the overall concept but for me it’s really confusing and could use a lot of streamlining to make it more user friendly. If there is anyone that can help that would be awesome, but again no “help” buttons a ay here just the “guide” but that doesn’t explain anything but what the buttons do.
Response from developer
Hi! Thanks for your feedback. You're right, documentation, some key functions and tutorials still need to be improved. It's still confusing to read in the guide and have no option to switch to the function directly to try it. That will be improved in the future. Nevertheless the most of your questions are explained with the guide... 1. The visual interface causes an extra amount of graphic performance, what makes it difficult to reach such low latency like a sound app with a static UI, but it depends also on the device, so on older ones latency is higher on newer ones is faster. It still have capacity to get better. A trick is to swipe inside the play area... 2. Like in the guide explained, you have 7 instruments, each got its controller section to enable several input. the "clear" button clears the values of one controller, "clear all" deletes the values all controllers of an instrument. You have to tap twice to confirm the clear action. 3. There are two methods (you can also find in the guide): inside the cell editor there is a button "clear states", which deletes all values of a cell, but keeps the snapshots. The second way is to got to "Session" and tap on "reset" to start from the scratch (deletes also the snapshots). We really appreciate your feedback, because it forces us to improve the user experience and make it a better product. Cheers!
Bold
Yawl be trippin on mutant
App Crashes
mutantes
Response from developer
Hi, thanks for your feedback. We working on better design for smartphones. You can make snapshots to hold your current as often you like. If you like to save the project, tap on save on the bottom menu or go to Sessions and save it there. Otherwise you record your composition to a wav file. Kind regards
Tactile and intuitive complex system
Edited review
No iPad sound?
No sound. At all. Broken
You’d think a new app, out of the box, would play sound. Especially when other apps like YouTube and Spotify do play sounds.
Well I found that the little switch above my volume button was set to off. Once turned on, the app started playing sound. It’d be nice if the app warned me to flip it on.
Response from developer
The problem that you cannot hear any sound is not the app, but the fact that your device is in "silent mode". You can easily switch it off in the control center of your device. We would like to ask you to test the app again and to rethink its rating. Have fun making music and all the best, your Ectoplastic team.
No sound at all
Crash problem.
Response from developer
Good news, we have massively improved Mutant in the past few days and fixed the problem with the crash when starting the app. Therefore we would like to ask you to test the app and to rethink its rating. Have fun making music and all the best, your Ectoplastic team.
Thank you
Sound problem.
It works fine on my iPhone...
Response from developer
Hi, try to switch the ring on your device or turn on volume in Sound&Haptics. Therefore we would like to ask you to test the app and to rethink its rating. Have fun making music and all the best, your Ectoplastic team.
