#androsynth

While I was looking for Rainbow World coordinates, I stumbled across these while I was writing the coordinates down, the references of all the ships in Star Control 2!  Courtesy of the Pages of Now and Forever and all credit goes to them!

The “eldest” of the Androsynth Quadruplets(who are actually the exact same age), has grown in personality over the years that he and his brothers have worked with Captain Michael.

Androsynth is an Android app, and I used the free ARCWelder (a Google tool for testing Android apps on ChromeOS) to load up and run the DAW on my Asus Chromebox. I’m using the DEMO version for this review. There aren’t a lot of choices offered whenever setting up ARCWelder, so I’m running Androsynth with the following: Landscape, Maximized, Yes to Clipboard Access.

The DAW starts quickly and beautifully. So far, so good. Keep in mind, please, that this is a review of how well the DAW works on ChromeOS, and not so much how well the DAW works in general. 

There are 3 sections to the app. The sampler, the tracker and something called Effect. We start with the sampler. Clicking on the microphone activates my webcam and the metronome light works (though it feels a bit off ). Audio is a bit crackly, and I also don’t understand why there are two graphics displaying the waveform I just recorded. I can move the start and end points, and I can save the sample to disk.

One thing to keep in mind is that the file system for ARC is a bit wonky. It recreates a whole Android file system, possibly one for each app installed. I still haven’t figured out how to get my Chromebox and ARC to exist within the same file system. Sharing files (to Google Drive, for example) appears to be the best way to keep things tidy and comprehensible.

Ah, the bottom graphic in the sampler is a navigator. I guess, for huge waveforms, this becomes necessary. For a 3 second clip, though, not so much.

Onto the tracker. The first two things I hate. Spacebar does nothing, and you can’t double click. One of these days, some crafty app developer is going to realize that people like uniformity across platforms. Some day, brothers and sisters, someday. There is also no option for zooming.

I load the sample into a track and it plays, still crackly. This might be inherent in the file itself. It plays fine and loops around automatically. You can add effects in the sampler, and you can add effects in the tracker. Being a studio-minded person, I opt for effects I can undo. The demo version allows for seven effects, so I load my sample up.

The DAW can’t keep up, and it turns into a crackly useless mess after only 2 effects. After I cut back on the effects, I decide to move over to the Effects option on the main screen. This is where the “synth” part of Androsynth comes into play. I don’t really understand what I’m doing here, as the section appears to be effects-oriented and/or a modular synthesizer that uses samples instead of oscillators? I don’t really care. It produces a bunch of noise (or beautiful sounds, if garbed digitally distorted samples are your thing), so I’m going to say it works, insofar as sound goes in and sound comes out, which I assume is the goal.

In all, I wouldn’t recommend this app for use on ChromeOS. Its lack of keyboard shortcuts and the crackly audio make it pretty unusable for anything but the roughest of demos. Also, it doesn’t have any MIDI support, which is a bit of a deal breaker for me.