Since Thor has been released it reminded me that I was going to do a review on Propellerhead's Figure which is a great music app for people with only partial (or just plain lack of) rhythm to come up with some really high quality song sketches. The app has a set of tools most apps don't have such as it's musically scaled touchpad keyboard appregiator wheel of fun, x/y effects per track and live transpose features. You can make songs in just a minute or two and spend another 10 minutes tweaking them and come out with something useable. The program's sounds are big, powerful and eq'd nicely and the "power wheel" lets you change your groove with ease. Recording is done live and is quantized if the "power wheel" is set to anything above zero. One feature I like is being able to play live ad-lib on top of prerecorded material on a track. If you find your songs all start to sound the same, use the transpose feature in the song page to get to other scales on the keyboard. This is a great way to give your songs more variation. You can export any loop or one track of a loop by muting the other tracks then exporting. You have two ways of exporting loops. One is using iTunes which will leave the delay trails intact so your loops will not be trimmed to properly loop without alteration in a DAW. The other way to export is using Audio Copy Paste which exports the audio "loop ready" to throw into apps like Looptastic or Glitch Breaks but doesn't leave the delay trails intact so some loops will sound like they are being cut off.
I honestly wish I didn't have to export audio loops to make full use of figure but it's the only way to use it in a multi track scenario. This leads me to my main gripe with Figure which is the lack of midi clock sync. Why the f**k do we keep getting WIST support and no midi clock? WIST only "start syncs" when you have 2 devices paired and the sync sucks and goes out every time you change a patch or tweak a sound. If we were given midi clock support, we could actual sync Figure internally with other apps, over wifi wireless network sessions and hardwired core midi over the camera connection kit and be stable for hours. Don't even get me started on why Figure added the ability to upload to sound cloud direct within the app. Can someone please comment on why that is something to give two flying s**ts about. If Propellerheads just charged more for the app than its $0.99 asking price, maybe they would give it the support it deserves. I would gladly pay for a midi upgrade of Figure. That I would blog with great joy. I think I will hold my reservations about the app on this blog and go bitch in the App Store because after emailing Propellerheads, they told me to start a thread on their forum to get people interested in midi clock but the problem with that is, any time you post a topic, it gets lost in an abyss of threads only a couple days later so that idea was useless. I can only hope that iOS 7's inter-app midi feature can be easily implemented with an update and Propellerheads take note of it. They did get on the Audio Bus band wagon which is pretty simple for developers to add to their apps. I can either wait forever for midi or get cracking exporting loops or just give up and play with my Monotribe.
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