Happy New Year!
Big news about my “MIDIChanter” and “MIDIPipes” Scottish and Irish Bagpipes MIDI practice chanters, “MIDIFlute”, and “Trapezoid MIDI” apps for the iPad!
For those of you who are interested in another option for practicing Scottish or Irish bagpipes on the iPad, I wanted to tell you about “Universal Piper”, a MIDI bagpipes sound generator app for the iPad that I discovered a few months ago.
http://www.universal-piper.com
Unfortunately, my MIDIChanter and MIDIPipes apps didn’t work with it because I didn’t originally implement the virtual MIDI output ports required to work with Universal Piper.
Previously, both apps would send the MIDI note data stream to all other synthesizer apps running on the iPad. This works for most use cases, but having the option to have a named virtual MIDI output port opens up all kinds of interesting scenarios, and in the case of “Universal Piper”, makes it possible to use the app. Apps like this require that you pick your MIDI source device from a list of known MIDI devices, and before this update, my apps would simply not show up on the list.
I’ve just submitted updates to all of practice chanter apps to add the virtual MIDI output port feature and they work perfectly now with Universal Piper, MIDIBridge, and other MIDI apps that require the virtual MIDI ports!
This is a pretty big deal!
As part of the update, I’ve put together tutorial videos for my users showing how to configure both my apps and Universal Piper.
Here are the links to the tutorial videos:
“MIDIChanter” – Configuring MIDI Settings for “Universal Piper”
“MIDIPipes – Configuring MIDI Settings for “Universal Piper”
Both apps have the proper fingerings for the style of bagpipes they support.
I’ve also updated “MIDIFlute” to add the virtual MIDI port support:
“MIDIFlute” – Configuring MIDI Settings for “ThumbJam”
“Trapezoid MIDI”, coming out soon, also has the virtual MIDI port support:
“Trapezoid MIDI” – Configuring MIDI Settings for “ThumbJam”
I am looking for anyone who would be interested in testing pre-release TestFlight beta versions of the apps.
You will need to purchase your own copy of “Universal Piper” or can use the apps with other MIDI synthesizer programs that require virtual MIDI output port support, like “MIDIBridge”. They still support the “Omni” send option of the previous version for those apps that don’t require the virtual MIDI output ports.
All of the updates as well as “Trapezoid MIDI” should be available as free updates to those with the previous versions around January 10th.
Please send me your email address if you like to be a beta tester for any of the apps, and I will add you to the invite list. You need an iPad running iOS 7.1 or later as well as have some familiarity with using MIDI apps on the iPad.
Click here to send me an email requesting access to the beta versions.
Cheers and thanks,
Michael
