Samsung Real-Time Audio/MIDI Solution For Android Now Available

samsung-audio-midi-sdk

Samsung wants to get more audio + MIDI apps running on their devices.

To help do this, they’ve released a new software solutions for Samsung Android devices, Samsung Professional Audio SDK 2.0 and Soundcamp:

  • The Pro-Audio SDK 2.0 provides low-latency audio and MIDI functionality to Samsung Android devices, and it also has zero-latency Audio/MIDI connections between independent music apps.
  • Soundcamp is a Samsung-developed mobile DAW app that harnesses the full power of the Pro-Audio SDK and can be integrated with multiple 3rd party music apps for up to 8 tracks.

Professional Audio provides the following features:

  • Musical Instrument Creation
    • API for creating professional instrument applications
    • Support for all functions of the JACK Audio Connection Kit
  • Plug-ins
    • Plug-ins for acoustic piano, steel guitar and a standard drum kit
    • Support for USB Audio devices
    • Support for Audio input
    • Usage of the real-time scheduler
    • It can make a connection between apps at the SDK level
    • It is easier to move to other apps and support its remote control

Samsung encourages developers interested in making music apps for the platform to register for the 2014 Samsung Developer Conference, being held November 11-13th in San Francisco, CA at the Moscone Center. At the conference, you will be able to get more details about the SDK and Soundcamp, with live demos and their future roadmap.

Details on the SDK are available at Samsung’s developer site.

via Samsung’s Taemin Cho

36 thoughts on “Samsung Real-Time Audio/MIDI Solution For Android Now Available”

  1. This is what we used to bring ThumbJam to the Galaxy Note 4, and there are several other iOS app developers who have brought their apps over (I’ll let them announce when they feel like it). One thing that isn’t completely obvious is that the SDK is currently only available for use on Galaxy Note 4 devices, but they should be opening it up to slightly older devices like the Note 3 and S5.

  2. Is this exclusive to their devices to bring a competitive advantage to Samsung, or will they be opening up the SDK to Android in general? I’d like to see the latter.

    1. How many years is Android behind iOS when it comes to music apps? 4-5?

      If you’re on Android, don’t hold your breath for an explosion of music apps. It’s going to take a lot more than this SDK to get developers and musicians interested in Android.

      There are half a billion iOS devices that can run music apps . While there are tons more Android devices out there, none of them run music apps as well as IOS devices and it’s likely that very few or none will get updated to use this software. That’s because carriers don’t make money testing and releasing OS updates – they make money selling you a new phone.

      So, this SDK only going to be available on a tiny fraction of Android devices – a handful of the Android devices that Samsung sells.

      1. hopefully, the first device of many. The more successful this is for one device, the sooner the rest of us will see something we can use on our own devices.

        1. If you want to run music apps on Android, the best option will probably be to get one of these Samsung phones that ships with this pre-installed.

          Like Terj noted above, carriers have no reason to update your phone OS with this.

          Even though I’m an iOS user, I think this is good news. The competition keeps companies innovating.

  6. Great to see some competition for iOS, but given the erm, rather heavy investment I’ve made into buying apps, this is only have the solution to helping folks make the shift.

    Part 2 needs to make all the apps I have on iOS available for free before I’d consider making a shift.

    Not gonna happen is it 😀

  7. This should have been a Google announcement, not Samsung. I’m not about to buy a Samsung tablet (never mind a phone!), in no small part due to all the crap that’s pre-installed. I’d have to re-flash with a custom ROM, and then you start worrying about stability and consistency… that’s even if the modifications Samsung makes to Android would even carry through to the custom ROM. So in effect, I’d be buying it exclusively for audio apps. But if I’m going to do that, why not just go with a iOS device?

    Google… step up!

  9. While better than nothing, this doesn’t make me hopeful. As Jeff D said, this should be something google is bringing out, not samsung. The fact that samsung is even doing this doesn’t bode well for the state of Android audio.

    I waited a long time to see if android could get its audio game together, but recently wound up buying an ipad. I’ll be more than happy to support android music once its possible, but it just doesn’t seem to be a priority for them.

    Maybe, maybe, fingers crossed, the type of audio chip that samsung is using may wind up as some kind of ‘reference audio platform’ for other android phones, and we wind up with an SDK like this for all (or nearly all) android devices.

  10. When will some clever person give us a midi only sequencer like the early cubase that ran on the Atari?
    I would be the first to buy any device and software that meant straight forward midi sequencing .
    No bloat ware, no soft synths, nothing other than 16 midi tracks . Piano Roll, Key edit. Cut and pasting bars. Scissor tool, Rubber etc…..

  11. If this new sdk works out its very good news for android users. But the fact remains that iOS device owners will not settle for a nexus tablet or a galaxy phone because the difference in quality and build is vast.

  14. Samsung’s SDK isn’t even their own – they just ported JACK (a Linux audio system) to Android and slapped their name on it. It could have been done at any time by any of the other phone manufacturers, or even better by Google themselves.

    Nice to see Samsung still doing what they do best though – taking someone else’s technology and marketing it as their own major breakthrough.

    1. Apple just ported BSD to their hardware and slapped their name and graphics on it.

      but when its Apple who borrows and steal its cool and innovative!

      1. this is music forum….android for music so far is irevelant as everything cool is on IOS…
        This area is clearly dominated by Apple unlike any other type of apps

        1. Clearly you have not read this article, not my comment, nor Matt’s comment, you are just here to sh1t on Android, in an article about Thumbjam being relased on Android. You are the one who is irrelevant here.

          And clearly you have never heard of Caustic, born on Android, now one of IOS top music apps.

          Who cares if Apple is dominant in the music app business. They borrow from others as much as anyone else and nobody complains when they do it (which was the point of these comments which you missed it because you didn’t even read them)

          1. i read them. thumb jam is not coming to android. it’s coming to the galaxy note 4, with a promise of two other devices soon.

            its a drop in the ocean. i have apps that ran fine on an iPhone 3g and iPad 1 with near zero latency, years ago (nano studio, beatmaker. hell, auria ran on the iPad 1 – just). and what’s available now : auria, cubasis, garageband, gadget, beatmaker, nano studio, the korg apps, the arturia apps, the propeller heads apps, the virsyn apps, the kymatica apps, the sugar bytes effects, xewton music studio, samplr, csgrain and cs spectral, all the yonac awesomeness, genome, oscillab, traktor, and on and on and on it goes. plus, you can link them all together with IAA and audio bus

            it would great for everyone if samsung opened up this sdk to everyone and to other handset makers, but why would they?

            and fwiw, caustic is awesome – one of the best feature sets and lowest cpu usage of anything – but why do you think the dev ported it to iOS? massively bigger market and near zero piracy which means more money.

            1. Of all the things you mentioned, caustic is still my fave because I don’t really need to bounce in and out of apps. Not that the AB/IAA workflow is an impediment, but sometimes I like working inside a workstation, even when on a mobile device.

              And creating one instrument by chaining 5 different modular instruments is FRIGGIN AWESOME.

              Still love all the other apps you mentioned tho…

      2. Maybe not the most informed statement you could make. Also, trolling.

        Here’s a developer view on how they are related:

        “Back in the days of OS X 10.4 I spent some time failing to write a VFS for OS X. In those days, of the major subsystems of the kernel, only the network stack and the VFS were still truly BSD. At that time, even the VFS had been partly rewritten to make it more modular (all the BSD VFS data structures became opaque pointers and the API was through what were called KPI functions). I believe the network stack was going the same way. There was also a thin layer at the interface with userland that made the OS look like BSD to userland programs.

        Everything else had been pretty much rewritten or replaced: memory management, process management etc came from the Mach microkernel; the device driver subsystem was written from the ground up by Apple.

        In terms of userland programming, OS X is very similar to BSD and programs written for BSD should be easily portable. However, OS X has a lot of APIs that aren’t available in BSD. These include almost everything to do with the user interface – graphics, sound etc. There are also other interfaces that don’t exist in BSD such as the launch API which is the OS X preferred way of launching background processes.”

        http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3446231/how-close-are-mac-os-x-and-bsd-related

      3. So where in BSD are CoreAudio or CoreMIDI? Or the Cocoa API? What about the Quartz engine? There’s a difference between building a new product based on existing technology (a lot of which is open source by the way) and taking an open source project, renaming it and passing it off as your own big breakthrough. Samsung’s name shouldn’t be anywhere near that SDK – all they did was include it in their Android build.

  15. Don’t hold your breath. The source code for this is available on the web, and audio I/O is still handled by OpenSL ES and the Android media server.
    It does solve “inter-app” audio connectivity with 0 latency, but it doesn’t solve audio input/output latency.

    1. I don’t think this is accurate for Samsung’s implementation, Gabor. I was told they have bypassed the media server and are using the ALSA audio device layer directly.

  16. Why think about what might be in the future when we have great stuff on iOS NOW!

    People who hate on apple and refuse to buy a superior device due to this hate are missing out NOW

    So, be in the PRESENT MOMENT dudes:)

  17. how do companies with the pretty software end up being only available to apple consumers? I always assumed apple payed them in such instances. Why do people actually think one or the other is “better”, and care why other people might not? I assume apple generally makes “better” hardware when it comes to computers that you would shop for at the computer store and phones that you shop for at the phone store, because thats what people always say and would make sense given higher costs ive seen that you would expect for stuff that looks like stuff they make. I’ve heard descriptions of why or how their computers are better for certain things than other computers, I haven’t yet heard a description that helped me understand how for instance apple products could be considered better than “not apple” ones and why. I would Google it but i can only imagine unreliable notions competing to see who can argue the longest what is mostly opinion. I’m just interested and that person that said that everyone should just get apple since they have more applications available(?) Made me wonder why musicians care so much. Like this guy that got something from me off craigslist a few months ago (sold him a sp-555) saw my laptop and was baffled that I was using windows 8 and that i didnt hate it as he did. He was a fan of windows XP apparently, (as am I) Can anyone tell me why it could be beneficial to buy one over the other for music? I use computer for random stuff, mostly for mixing and mastering tracks taken off portable multitrack devices (tascam 8 track and OP1 and phone), I am however interested in the whole tablet thing because I have been employing my phone lately for random uses along the way mostly as an experiment to see if it turns out useful. I am getting an oplab soon too so op1 with that and the synths and a tablet might be nice. might not tho. i kind of hate tablets outside of their music stuffs. But if anyone knows why apple is or at least was ( i remember when people would just say the apple thing pretty often but from what ive been told i honestly dont feel safe even assuming it has better anything weather it applies to music or not. Musicians are certainly not immune to good advertising/marketing and unfortunately to a degree we are targeted and often taken advantage of. Anyone ever take a look at one of those catalogs for “audiophiles”. There is a lot of cool stuff but its pretty funny to see some of it, i enjoy trying to imagine how they determine a price for some of it. haha i searched audiophile and sarah palin came up. definitely feeling a strong pull back to that tab i will stop typing now

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