October User Reviews

Top reviews

Please help

Can you please show and teach us how to make music in this app

You should add an YM2126 To it

It’s cool and all but what would make it more cool is an YM2126
Chiptune to the app :)

Love this app but there’s one problem

See, when I mute the noise channel before playing a song, it makes this ear piercing noise that won’t stop until I stop the song or the song ends. Otherwise, this app is a little complicated but it’s easy to use once you get the hang of it. and, it has no annoying ads!

App is amazing!

I’ve seen about 3 reviews from 4 years ago so im making one now!

It’s complicated but i’m getting used to it
I love everything about this app

Amazing

It’s really cheap, and personally I find it easy to get the hang of right off the bat. Easy to export the music as-well!

Great software, some suggestions

I’ve been using October for a while now to make chiptune covers of popular video game music for YouTube, and I have a few suggestions for the software.

1.) Allow an option to customise the waveform in each of the sound sources. This would allow dampening which would make the final product sound way better.

2.) Allow more sound sources in each song. It’s very limiting that there are only three per file.

3.) It would be very nice to see a desktop version, as I love the UI, it’s a very comprehensable program, and just overall is very worth the purchase.
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You have to be a masochist!

Tedious, monotonous, and tedious and monotonous. I mean translating cuneiform has to be easier than using that 1980s throwback. It’s just not worth the effort.

Great for chiptune creation

Needed a chiptune version of a song of mine for the outro of a music video, and this app was really fun and easy to work with to create that.

Wow, really nice

UPDATE: Thanks for the reply! Double-tapping cells is currently how I am entering notes, but it would be much quicker if the note editor just stayed open until I closed it manually (e.g. with an ‘x’ button) or if there were buttons to move to the next/previous note (← / →) within the note editor.

Entering notes is very slow and involves mostly waiting for (standard system framework?) animations to finish. Otherwise a very cozy tracker at this price. Simple and well thought-out, with some very handy macros. Export to various formats is 👌.
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Response from developer

UPDATE: I’ll look into what it would take to keep the note editor active, and allowing for moving around between notes while it’s onscreen (possibly including an option to adjust this behavior). The biggest hurdle I can think of is landscape mode for small phones, where the note editor UI is already a little cramped, but it might still be doable. Thank you for your review! Starting in 1.8, you can also double-tap for certain actions to avoid the built-in delay of the press-and-hold context menus. For example, you can double tap to add notes or loop instances to an empty spot in the timeline, or to navigate into a loop instance on the timeline in the full song view. I will also check if some of the animations can be sped up, particularly when bringing up the note editor view.

I do not get this at all

Yes I don’t know how to do this there’s no actual way for you to make music it’s just a matter of time it’s just you listening to music if you want to do you have to download files from your laptop I don’t have a laptop so what’s the point so yeah so I’m kind of disappointed in this app because my dream was to make video game music in my dream is kind of being destroyed your address please respond to this😣😣😣😣😣
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Feature requests

Great app! Really enjoying it.

Would you consider adding controls for the envelope and sweep on the pulse channels per NES APU specs? The combination could be used to customize the sounds further.

I’ve found the drag / drop to be a little temperamental. Sometimes the app tries to scroll when I want to drag a note.

Would you consider a mode to create/edit a note on long press? Or do it via a gesture? The context menu is ok - just slows the process a bit.

Any suggestions for creating distinct notes? I’ve tried shortening by a 16th or manually decreasing volume over time. If there were an option to release a note just before it’s duration (simulating lift) that would be helpful.
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Response from developer

Thank you for the suggestions! I agree not having sweep and envelope control are big omissions. When I was first building the app, these features were a little beyond my own understanding. I’m using some simple equations to generate the different waveforms right now, and I’d need to do some research into how the waves would need to change based on sweep and envelope. It’s not in my plans for the short term, but it is definitely something I want to add, because without it, it’s harder to give a song more personality. I’m also looking into some ways to make it less work to add notes, but I just want to do it in a way where accidental input doesn’t happen too often. But perhaps I’m placing too much importance on avoiding accidental input, and not enough on just making it easy. There is a an undo feature, and a lock switch on the toolbar, so making note entry as frictionless as possible should probably be a higher priority for me. I find that using faster tempos helps with having more control over the sound, especially on the noise channel. And on the square channels, the faster tempo allows placing multiple notes after another for switches in duty cycle and volume, which can give the notes a little more character. But I agree it’s not ideal, and having full control over the APU capabilities is the right way to go. I have some ideas on why drag and drop is finicky and I will be looking into that soon. Thank you again for your rating and I will keep these suggestions in mind as I work to improve the app.

Perfection.

Amazing app, Amazing user control, Amazing overall. The one thing I suggest is a learning mode. I bought this then was mad because I couldn’t figure it out, but once I did, It was amazing. 10/10, would recommend.
Somethings to keep in mind:

- Custom sounds would be nice!

- Tutorial mode

- More sounds to toy with.

- Maybe percussion..?

Once again, keep up the good work! I hope this app gets big.
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Response from developer

Thanks so much for your review! Progress has slowed a little lately but more changes are coming 🙂 I’m going to work on making some actions more discoverable in version 1.8, especially so that it’s easier to get started after creating a new song. I also plan to add support for the NES DMC channel in a later release to allow for some rudimentary sample support, which would allow for some more custom sounds and percussion.

Custom sounds?

This would honestly be the best music making app if we were able to import our own custom sounds/instruments and/or if you provided this from the get go. It’s still a wonderful app though. I use it all the time.

Response from developer

I’m so glad to hear you are enjoying the app! It would take some time to implement, but I plan to add support for the NES DMC channel in the editor. This would allow for samples and custom sounds, while still staying within the limitations of the NES hardware, so ASM6 code and NES ROM exports would still work. There are still some other features that will need to get finished first, but I will keep this in mind and try to make it happen as soon as possible.

Like this but needs improvement

I like this, you can make awesome chiptunes on this app but what it needs is to fix the triangle section, the triangle doesn’t sound right so I was wondering if you could make the triangle sound accurate 😄

Response from developer

Thank you for your review! I was wondering if you could send an email to octoberchiptuneios@gmail.com with more information on what you're hearing with the triangle channel.