Chop beats with your MacBook Touch Bar for free with Samplr
The developer of Samplr for iPad has spent lockdown working on a new version of his app.
Marcos Alonso, the creator of Samplr for iPad, has unveiled a new, free, unique app for lucky owners of an Apple MacBook equipped with a Touch Bar.
The Touch Bar is seldom used for much more than turning up the volume or brightness of your MacBook, mostly. There are a few third-party apps that can bring new uses to it, but until now, it would be very unlikely you’d find an app suited to music-making. Using the MacBook’s internal mic, Samplr for Touch Bar can record audio samples and provide you with a variety of options to slice and playback the sample.
Samplr for Touch Bar takes the basic principles of Samplr for iPad, with four different play modes.
Slicer can playback sample fragments when tapped. Automatic detection or a specific number of slices can be selected in the Controls menu. Looper will allow you to loop a section of the audio with two touches. You can also create multiple loops of the same sample with different durations. Bow mode makes use of granular synthesis to play a tiny fragment of the sound, with multiple touches here allowed too. Finally, Tape will let you play the audio at different speeds from -200% to 200% of the original speed. Again, multiple touches are allowed.
There are also a host of controls and effects to quickly navigate the app. Play controls allow you to adjust the attack and release of the envelope, while transpose will let you alter the pitch of the sample and adjust the number of slices for the Slicer play mode. Three effects are onboard; a filter with low-pass and high-pass curves; a delay with adjustable time and feedback amounts; and a reverb with a dry/wet slider.
Samplr for Touch Bar is a free app, but you’ll need a MacBook Pro from 2016 or later with at least macOS 10.15.
Find out more about the app at samplr.net
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