Music app maker Smule finally gives Android some love
It references an interview discussion I had with Smule CTO Ge Wang last year (December 2011) in which he said that Smule had not released Android apps because of the platform’s audio latency problems. However, as GigaOm’s article rightly notes: Smule started with Songify because the app doesn’t have the realtime audio needs that other Smule apps do. But she said that Smule has come up with a work-around for Android’s latency problem that will be deployed in Magic Piano.
Songify and Magic Piano are not, however, typical of the real-time audio processing found in other Smule apps like I Am T-Pain or Ocarina. Songify sends an entire audio segment to a server for processing and then returns the completed audio output. Magic Piano reacts to fingers touchs. I Am T-Pain, Ocarina and other similar Smule apps produces audio based on sound as it is produced by someone singing or blowing into the iPhone’s microphone. This is quite different from the batch processing going on in Songify or zero audio input processing of Magic Piano. I’m not quite convinced the the audio latency issue has been quashed quite yet. But, perhaps I should call Ge Wang and ask him about this. In the meantime, you can listen to the entire discussion I had with him last December in which he discussed the then recent acquistion of Khush and the Android audio latency problem.