The ZoozBeat iPhone app we had so much fun making beats with in December just went social. A new sharing feature lets you save the loops you make on a sharable web page.
The lack of export and sharing features had been our only real gripe with this otherwise excellent app. Now that it’s fixed, you can now share your sonic sketches by uploading them to MyZoozBeat, from where you can send them to your Facebook profile or Twitter feed, download them as MP3s for e-mailing and posting elsewhere, or listen to the tracks other people have made.
To put my money where my mouth is, here’s an example I whipped up in a couple minutes with ZoozBeat Classic ($3; $1 for the Lite version):
Plenty of programs over the years have promised the non-musically-inclined the magical ability to play music, but few deliver. Judging from the songs people are already uploading to MyZoozBeat, this app one really does let people from anywhere in the musical experience spectrum make "beats," as they call rhythm and melody loops these days, then sing, rap or talk on top of them — and, with this latest release, share the resulting recordings.
With all of the sharing of other people’s music that goes on, it’s refreshing to see that this app encourages people to share their own creations — and puts such easy tools in their hands that they have a decent chance at making something worth listening to, if only by themselves and their friends and family. (If you make your recordings public, other MyZoozBeat users will be able to hear them too.)
These sharing features are welcome additions — but what would really impress us is if it were possible to trade beats back and forth with a friend in real time.
Back in March, Zooz Mobile founder and Georgia Tech professor Gil Weinberg demonstrated a direct, person-to-person sharing feature for Wired.com that ran on two Nokia N95s, which allowed two people to literally throw beats back and forth between phones, each adding new elements.
Weinberg says implementing that sort of thing on the iPhone has been more difficult, but that peer-to-peer music creation could be coming to the iPhone when Apple releases the 3.0 version of its iPhone software.
"For the iPhone, we actually had to change the way we were doing it, following up on Apple’s instructions of Bluetooth support in their 3.0 announcement last month," Weinberg told Wired.com. "We plan the new peer-to-peer version (which will work even better than the way we were doing it) to be released in a month or two. And it will definitely be ready — well, as definite as things are — for the public release of 3.0."
It’s easy to play all of the instruments in ZoozBeat, do some editing later if you’re the type, record your voice on top of your creation, and share the result via Facebook, Twitter, and other avenues. Reassuringly, any new track (or note) you record can be cleared in an instant, giving you a fresh canvas to work with. This helps the budding beat-maker not worry so much about making mistakes, so they’re free to experiment.
The simplest way to use ZoozBeat Classic is to swing the iPhone down like a drum stick in various rhythms, to make beats and play instruments over the supplied beats. The faster you swing, the higher the note, and in the new version, latency is minimal. The more detail-oriented will find the app’s two composition modes preferable most of the time, because it lets you tap notes on a scale to record them (switching to landscape mode provides the most control). Meanwhile, tilting the phone can warp beats and effect the sound — more details here.
In addition to the new sharing feature, Zooz Mobile also busted out a new Latin music version ($1 in the iTunes App store) with instruments and backing rhythms for making Salsa and Tejano music.
