PPG WaveMapper Review – ‘An Incredibly Deep Synthesizer’

PPG_WaveMapper_appFrancis Preve offers his take on Wolfgang Palm’s new PPG WaveMapper for iPad in the latest issue of Keyboard magazine.

Preve calls WaveMapper ‘an incredibly deep synthesizer’ and praises its user-friendly approach to patch-creation:

Palm takes an elegantly simple concept – mixing and matching important aspects of multiple synth patches – and implements them in a manner that’s strikingly like a board game.

Under the hood is a three-oscillator synthesis engine with a sweet sounding resonant lowpass filter, stereo amplifiers, a delay, and a bunch of performance features like multiple LFOs and a groovy little arpeggiator/sequencer. But with WaveMapper’s approach to synthesis, the intricacies of all of these parameters are a moot point. Yes, they’re there if you want to build your sounds the old-fashioned way, but if you’re new to sound design you can dive in and create your own sounds with extraordinary ease.

See Preve’s full review in the latest issue of Keyboard or at the magazine site.

And, if you’ve used WaveMapper, let us know your take on it!

13 thoughts on “PPG WaveMapper Review – ‘An Incredibly Deep Synthesizer’

  1. I’m not an iPad user, but i’m thinking about it. I have an old question for you: can you a get sound quality of at least 16bits/44hz with an iPad ? Or do you have to buy a soundcard especially made for the iPad ? Thanks

    1. The ipad DAC and mini-jack output is quite okay, the normal pipeline is in 16bits/44.1khz and the latency is all right (it’s more consistent than what I get on my badly configured PC) Some apps manage 24bits at >44.1khz format but I’m not sure if the integrated hardware can actually render that.

      External sound cards are interesting if you want additional input/output and standard DIN midi connection. I use an alessis IO dock, I like it because of the midi i/o and the fact it makes a nice little “stand” that charge while I use the ipad (with a midi keyboard and a midi groovebox in synch) . I’m pretty sure there is no sound card/DAC in it, I think it just reroutes the ipad analogue audio through the old-school dock connector and provide some amplification for phantom power inputs (that I rarely use)… The dock is cheap but not future proof: it does not use the newer lighting connector found on the iphone5, ipad 4thgen and ipad mini.

      Anyways, I will soon buy an iConnectMidi thingy: these boxes are really great for connecting /filtering multiples midi devices and they also output uncompressed digital audio to a PC… Also while charging the ipad.

      1. If you want to use a physical keyboard with the ipad and drive PPG or the other excellent synth apps, you don’t have to invest a lot of money on MIDI hardware (the ones using midi din connector).

        There’s a bunch of USB keyboards that can be plug directly on the iPad with a camera connection kit (CCK).

    2. Yes.

      If you stay ‘in the box’ to record, it’s equivalent to what you’d get on the desktop.

      If you record from the built in audio jack, it’s comparable to recording from your computers built-in audio jack.

      If you have a USB audio interface, you can generally hook them up to an iPad with an adapter.

      1. No need to thank 😉
        We are all very grateful to you for creating truly amazing app and let’s not forget another one of my favourites – the WaveGenerator… Simply brilliant 🙂
        Thank you.

        1. But there is a problem that is rarely mentioned to my surprise: The audio input of the iPad goes through a low cut filter at 100 Hz! That means you cannot record anything lower than 100 Hz, i.e. no bass. It’s a major drawback and for me the most important reason to use an external audio interface.

          The low cut cannot be switched off – it is assumed it is meant as “wind cut” for telephony functions (rather on iPhone). I really wonder how some companies can sell bass amp apps for this…

            1. Mr. mention are you only refering to recording through the iPad mic, or in general??? I play bass guitar and use JamUp Pro, Ampkit+ or sometimes direct connect via Audiobus. I use an Apogee Jam 30 pin as my hardware input on an iPad 2 and the sound is amazing. Some of the amp sims are not spot on and seem a bit muddled, but others are beyond expectations…

              1. I was talking specifically about those types of “iRig”, which are no interfaces but in fact just adapters. There is one especially for connecting e-bass, I believe.

                The information here http://www.studiosixdigital.com/iphone_hardware/iphone_3gs_microphone.html is very interesting of course. So the lowcut of the internal mic can be switched off since the arrival of iOS 6. The question now is if that also applies to audio fed in via some adapter like iRig, and which apps that accept audio input use the ability to turn it off?

                I was trying to filter bass through Filtatron last year and wasted many hours because I thought my cables were all broken…

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