Sliver For iPad – A New Tool For Soundscape & Texture Creation

DeveloperΒ Alex MatheuΒ (Glitchbreaks) shared this sneak preview video for Sliver – a soundscape and texture creation tool for the iPad.

It’s been submitted to the App Store review and is expected to be available in about a week, with an introductory price of $3.99.

Check out the sneak preview and let us know what you think!

26 thoughts on “Sliver For iPad – A New Tool For Soundscape & Texture Creation

    1. Not exactly. Music apps like this probably sell in the tens of thousands, not millions. Nevertheless, this looks like an awesome app and I will certainly be purchasing!

  1. Wow it’s been a little while since I’ve given a damn about the ios world but between this and sector I’m pretty stoked. There are already so many ipad synths, and so much good shit is happening in the worlds of analog and hardware, that this is the direction I want to see more app devs going in. Esoteric, experimental shit that lends itself to the format. Cool stuff

  2. Thank you guys, I wanted to chime in and say that $3.99 is the introductory price, and it will go up a little after release. πŸ™‚ I will have more information soon. I am working on the website, and users manual currently.

  3. Great App Alex, right in my need list!

    I can’t believe some of you could consider 4$ not being cheap for an useful music app!
    Making apps, great apps I mean, is a hobby that is time consuming to say the least!

    Alex, it would be much interesting if you could give us an idea of of much time it took to build this app from the first idea to the final version… But I’m pretty convinced that it will need thousands of sales just to pay for the work done and many more to become a profitable business.

    Anyway, choosing the right price is also part of the business and not the easiest choice to me made. Too low, the app is viewed as one another “one day use” application, too expensive (remember different drummers guys) and nobody will even take the risk to buy it.

    At less than 4$ I will buy as soon as it get released, there is no risk involved at such a price and if it is as promising as the demo is showing, it will be a great addition to my iOS music happiness πŸ™‚

    Oh and BTW, it it sells a million an Alex becomes rich, this won’t bother me at all! This will give him a great opportunity to write even smarter and better apps to make us all happy to be able to include 4$ stuff to our music studio toolbox!

    Life is great guys, enjoy it why it lasts!
    Peace!

  4. Thank you!

    I started the app in July 2013. I have a day job, and what I typically do is get to work at 4:30am and code until 6:30am and at Lunch time, and of course at nights sometimes and weekends. I have kids 17mo and 4 Year old so time is very limited in the evening.

    Doing that as much as I could I finished it a few days ago. I didn’t track every hour spent, but I did pour my hear into it. I am also a musician so did spend plenty of time playing with it as well. I love to develop apps, and setting this price point for an introductory price helps get the app recognized, I picked $4 because I thought it was low enough to be an impulse buy but not too cheap to be thought of as a discarded sort of afterthought.

    I am working on fleshing out the website and working on the users manual, and will post those as as soon as I get them finished so everyone can have as much info as possible going into the purchase. I am very passionate about the apps I develop, and am very passionate about supporting my users. I hope that someday creating apps can replace my day job πŸ™‚

    Alex

  5. Great Alex!…looks pretty cool…looking forward to it. Thanks for developing this App and also for the “behind the scene” infos…that makes me supporting this app even more ;-)….

  6. In my estimation, Alex is such a great developer because his apps reflect an understanding of what has been done before on iOS, and what is still missing. It seems pretty apparent that he writes software the he would like to see, not what he thinks will sell. Funny, though, that it is more likely that something like Sliver (which few people would have even known they wanted until they saw it) will far outlast a “safe bet” like a well-written synth app or drum machine on the app store.

    In short, he’s more than a good dev, he’s an artist as well. And a determined and competent one at that.

  7. I admire the good balance between its audio capabilities and accessible GUI. I get the impression that a lot of iPad users buy new apps a bit too frequently without fully exploring the more go-to items like this. If you really wanted to build a powerhouse palette, adding this to Nave and Alchemy, with perhaps a small mixer-with-effects app as a base, would keep you busy for some time. If you delve into that second layer in things, the finer details start appearing. An iPad being a smaller platform would suggest a smaller rig as the way to get the most from it. Sliver seems like a great candidate for the sampler/effects chair.

  8. Seems good … i use Samplr a lot so seems in a similar vain.

    Given that there are so many great apps now … Aren’t we in danger of “next thing” syndrome? It’ a bit like when you look at Future Music and all those guys with their massive synth collections …. How many instruments do we need to make music?

    Still can see me purchasing this one. May be I’ll make more use of it than Grain Science which i can’t seem to do much with.

    Good luck Alex hope it does well.

  9. Looks awesome! Cant wait to buy it!
    I’m really glad that you spent so much time creating an app that does this. It may be similar to other apps, but once again, $4 is nothing to spend on something even if you only generate one good idea with it.
    Alex, I have done sound design and music for a few apps and I would like to make a music creation app of some sort one day. What did you use to code this? I am very curious because of the audio manipulation you are using in this app, it seems like it would be so complex! I find the technology as interesting as the instrument, thanks again for your hard work!
    Joe

  10. Hi Joe,

    I used Objective-C, Core Audio, and a few frameworks. I utilized the Amazing Audio engine from Michael Tyson for my RemoteIO session instead doing it the manual way, which saved time. Also for midi I used the wonderful MIDIbus framework.

    As far which ID, XCode on my Macbook Pro πŸ™‚

  11. This looks pretty much like ‘exactly the app I’ve been looking for ever since I bought my i-pad’. I hope my i-pad 2 will be ‘strong’ enough to handle it. At a price of 4$ it’s ridiculously cheap. I can’t wait to download it and start playing around.

    Thanks a lot for this!

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