I’ve been working on a tuner for Android 1.5 (Cupcake) that displays an FFT graph so you can see the frequencies being played and tune your instrument (to be included in a free update for Musical Pro).  I have all the code for the microphone input and FFT analysis working, however it is having some issues in actual testing on the device.  I’m going to look into it further, but so far, it appears as though recording live audio requires an immense amount of garbage collecting (and therefore CPU).  In fact, in my testing the FFT takes well over 10 times longer if audio input is enabled.  This means that until I find a workaround (if there even is one), there are either two choices: low accuracy or slow update rate.  I’ll post more info as I have it, but for now, if you have any feedback about speed vs accuracy, feel free (as always) to voice your opinion.

UPDATE: It seems this was just a bug in the pre-release I was using, as it now running fine on the final version of 1.5

Google has just released a preview of the Android 1.5 SDK (aka Cupcake). Because 1.5 makes dramatic changes in the sound APIs, any development I make using the old SDK will be counterproductive, so I have decided (unless I get enough email objections from users) that I will continue future development of Musical with the newer SDK. The meaning of this is twofold for users of Musical:

1.  I can add new features that were not possible before: full grand piano, faster response times, smaller application size, dynamic synthesized instruments, and the big one, a real tuner!

2. The downside, is that users won’t be able to use any of these improvements until Google releases the 1.5 update to your phone.  I repeat, there will be no more regular updates to Musical until Cupcake is released (at which point, there will be a very large update with hopefully many many new features).

I encourage anyone who has an opinion on this to email me, but I think it will be best in the long run if I get a head start on the new features, rather than having to rewrite everything later.

I’ve just released an update for Musical with a much requested feature: multitouch drums!  This is currently an experimental beta and requires that you have a rooted G1 with a hacked JesusFreke build (v1.4 and up).  If you don’t know what this means, then you won’t be able to use the multitouch.  When I say “experimental”, I don’t mean it can cause any damage or anything, it just isn’t yet up to my standards (visually and feature-wise).  You may have noticed that the title of the post includes “sort of”.  That is because there are three major caveats of the G1’s screen (which was not intended for multitouch):

• It only supports 2 fingers (hardware limitation)
• You have to try and keep your fingers as far apart as possible.  When your fingers are very close, the screen tends to treat them as one large finger.
• Adding another vertical layer (creating a grid/table), would not work, because the multitouch information only provides the radius and not the actual points (so you could no longer tell what was being pressed)

This is my first foray into multitouch on Android, so I would really like to hear feedback from users.  If it seems like enough people are interested and have their G1 rooted, I will consider adding some more multitouch features (although the piano, because of the caveats I mentioned, won’t work).