Praxis Beats – A New ‘Retro-Elegant’ Software Drum Machine

praxis-beat-ipad-drum-machine

Praxis Beats is a new ‘retro-elegant’ software drum machine for the iPad.

Here’s a video intro:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebIHwXV2Ifo

Features:

  • Drum Rolls: Instantly glitch or retrigger any beat.
  • Fetch samples directly from your Dropbox, Box.net, Gmail, or GDrive accounts. (You can also use iTunes File Sharing.)
  • Individually control the volume, panning, and speed for every sound down to 1/128th notes.
  • 2 touch-controlled effects pads, programmable to control any of 9 different effects.
  • Record your sessions as wav files. Upload them directly to Dropbox, email, or SoundCloud or use iTunes File Sharing to retrieve them manually.
  • Save and load different songs. Praxis Beats autosaves for you as well. And, you can back up your compositions using iTunes File Sharing.
  • Sample precise rendering from 10 to 999 BPM.
  • Controls provided to clear out the sequencing for any row or for the whole song.
  • Randomize the sequencing for any row or for the whole song.
  • Individual controls for each sample track, including mute, solo, volume, and panning.
  • 7 royalty-free drum kits are included for a total of 112 drum samples. Made by EioN and James Frame.
  • Audiobus Support: Stream audio from Praxis Beats to other apps.

Praxis Beats is available now in the App Store. If you’ve used it, leave a comment with your thoughts on it!

29 thoughts on “Praxis Beats – A New ‘Retro-Elegant’ Software Drum Machine

  1. Are you serious? This demo looks like something from a Commodore 64 and sounds about as bad as one too. This is 2013 not 1988! What a joke!

    1. You are so wrong – a high-quality Commodore 64 music synthesizer on the iPad with full SID chip emulation (particularly including good filter emulation) would be totally awesome!!

    2. ‘Retro-Elegant’ ?? Yeah, they, to do that :p 🙂

      The choptone, 8BIT, etc. is very big if you look around. I love the sound and I’m not gamer. 🙂

  2. I don’t understand when developers nowadays come up with an app and don’t bother to release good video and audioreviews of the app at the same time as the app is released. If it had a free version then, yeah, its fine, but when it costs 15 bucks… C’mon! its 2013 outside…

    1. Dude Matt is right a Commodore sounding app would be pathetic. It’d be fun for maybe 10 minutes but after that it would be useless. I agree that this app looks like junk! Waste of time and money!

  3. The worse the promo, the more money and attention to the actual product according to my past experiences. That said, this sets my expectations pretty high…

    1. Right now you have to solo, then export. Are you more interested in being able to record individual tracks within Praxis Beats, or in routing the individual tracks through Audiobus?

  4. Why do all apps seem to just be replicas of apps from last year of the year before. Have we reached the ceiling in innovation, for the iPad?

    Anyway, no real midi so no interest. Oh and the promovideo is awful.

    I don’t want to moan I am just waiting to see a Drum machine for the iPad that can out do the Korg iElectribe which was one of the first music apps for the iPad. Come on developers make me love my iPad again.

  5. seriously?
    more and more are jumping on the ios wagon believing is the jackpot
    less and less understand the difference between good and bad design and development
    let’s try to support the ones that do
    disregarding the ones that don’t

    1. The samples provided in Praxis Beats are free and are there to get you started immediately and give you a sense of what the app can do. They were made specifically for the app by two producers from LA. There are also several options to import your own samples so that you can work with your own sounds.

  6. I dont like being negative about other peoples work, but a developer should ask themselves basic questions and get feedback from outside their family and friends…

    Would you release a word processor app that didn’t allow use of the space bar? No
    Would you release a photo editor that didn’t support JPEG’s ? No
    So why would anyone release a drum machine that has no way to keep in time with the outside work (i.e. MIDI or as an outside bet WIST)….what is it that they think people will do with their tool?

  7. Any clue if any other iOS drum machine have the feature of “mute/solo” tracks directly from the step sequencer?
    I have searching a lot of iOS drum machines and none have this feature. Now only this app

      1. @Phildcm

        not really, by setting volume for each step, turn on/off each step do the same job anyways. Almost all iOS drum machines do that.. That’s boring and lame I guess, because when you need the instrument playing again on the song, you need to re-program the steps/volume settings.
        Mute the entire channel instead of mute a single step could help for making great rhythm variations.
        Such a common feature from the DAW world, but I can’t find it on iOS. I’m not meaning open a pop up or tab and mute the channel on a mixer tab or so, just mute/solo the channel directly on the built in step sequencer from the app, that’s cool for fast drum programming and sketch a rhythm

  8. Hi everyone, I’m one of the developers of Praxis Beats. Check out our other drum machine app Pocket Beats (which is free to download) to get a better sense of what Praxis Beats is about if our video demo isn’t doing it for you. In a nutshell, both our drum apps focus on creating rapid retriggering and glitchy sounds that you can vary quickly and easily on the fly. Feel free to get in touch if anyone has questions or feedback.

        1. What would you change or add? We know MIDI is a big plus. This is a new app and its functionality isn’t set in stone by any means.

  9. I don’t see what is so bad about this. It interested me when i first saw it. Yes the $15 seems a bit high, but i haven’t used it and don’t really know all that it can do. I would be more interested in finding out for $5 though.

  10. If you’re developing an audio app on iOS, it should have:
    – Core MIDI support
    – Audiobus support
    – Audio copy/paste
    Existing drum machines like DM1 have all of this as well as other nice features like WIST.

  11. If it has coremidi sync it would be great. DM1 has it all and is the one to beat but they for the life of them can’t implement a bpm midi sync. that’s why beatmaker 2 still outperforms the rest in a live setup. Really just a solid live drum machine app that can properly sync load samples and effects is all that is needed

  12. The feedback in general here seems overtly negative for this app – by folks who haven’t used it i might add. I’ve yet to try Praxis Beats myself but i will as my stance is that there can never be too many apps of this nature: beat sequencers with clean parameter control, the ability to import user samples and output through Audiobus. I’ve got most of the drum-focused apps and despite ample Feature overlap each one earns its keep for different reasons which on paper might not make sense but in practice they produce distinctly unique results. In general i believe we should be more positive to those who are developing the tools – hit or miss – that we might use for our music.

  13. Yeah, um, guys. Look around you, this idea is very popular around the net and there are many composers who are making their living using apps, like this. Making sound tracks with these apps for games and anime. If its not your thing cool, but to diss it, be cause it is not “modern” is to be a bit crotchity and old manish, no?

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