Sonosaurus has announced that the iOS instrument ThumbJam is coming to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 4 ‘phablet’.
The announcement is good news for Android mobile musicians, because ThumbJam is one of the most playable mobile instruments. ThumbJam lets you customize how your gestures are mapped to expressive features like volume, filter or vibrato.
But the announcement also highlights how far Android is trailing iOS as a platform for mobile musicians. ThumbJam was released for iOS in 2009, close to five years ago.
“Thanks to Samsung’s new Professional Audio SDK, latency is much better than it used to be on Android devices so we decided to take the plunge,” they note. “At first it will be available on the new Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge, but later it should also be available on Note 3 and S5.”
Pricing and availability for ThumbJam for the Galaxy Note 4 are to be announced.
Leave a comment and let us know what you think about the announcement. Is the tide turning for Android music software?
This is a solid app from a very solid developer. It’s been a most stable app since release. It’s one of the very few “old school” iOS apps that are still used across the board due to the developers commitment and constant updates with more features.
I firmly believe that he will ensure a most smooth experience for the galaxy users.
Good on him
Thanks for the interest, folks! Unfortunately I had to take down this particular video, but a new and improved one will follow just as soon as I can make it with a shiny new Note 4.
Samsung’s Professional Audio SDK definitely brings some welcome latency improvements as well as inter-app audio and MIDI routing to Android. Behind the scenes it uses the JACK audio connection kit technology that Linux and Mac users have been using for a decade. It will be interesting to see if other companies follow Samsung’s lead on this.
When you say Samsung’s Professional Audio SDK… Does that mean that the Note 4 will have something baked into the OS that other Android phones simply don’t? I have my eye on either the Note 4 or the next Nexus (Nexus 6)… But if Samsung is specifically addressing better audio apps with a special SDK, that might edge it out for me…
David, that is correct, this is a Samsung exclusive feature for the time being, and at first only on the Note 4. You should definitely weight this heavily in its favor if you plan to do the music app thing on it.
Samsung and not Google jump on this Latency problem. BTW I am a regular user of Thumbjam and I love the Strings…
Here is a replacement video for the original one we had to take down:
http://youtu.be/qNr4TcQUCcI
Seems even the full version for android lacks a lot of features. Is it possible to export midi?