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Writer's pictureJeff Ranasinghe

Wrote an app instead of buying batteries

I wanted to film a guitar loop and my improvised solo over the top, keeping the parts separate, yet in sync. A mixer would help with that - but the batteries died. So I wrote an app instead!


Wait, what?

In fairness, this was pretty silly. I left the mixer on overnight, meaning when I wanted to record some guitar playing it was well and truly dead. Yes, I had a main power supply but it required 240v as it had accompanied me here to the New (110v) World from Blighty.


It was about 9.30pm so there weren't a lot of options that didn't require effort. So, time to dig the old iPhone6 out from the crypt, sling it on charge whilst I get to work a new iOS app project.


Doctor.  Batteries or nah?


Why even use a mixer, or app, or whatever?

I wanted to film two layers of guitar playing. It was pretty inevitable that filming a guitar solo via a mic and looping a phone recording of the rhythm guitar, which also needed to be captured by the camera, was going to result with mismatched audio. If I allowed the microphone hear to my solo and the loop the same time they'd be recorded in one lump and be a muddled inseperable mess. It was important to keep these parts separate, ie. no looping rhythm guitar poluting the guitar solo audio, and vice versa.


Of course, *I* needed to be able to hear the rhythm guitar looping so I could treat it as a reference play along. I just could not allow the mic/camera hear me hearing the guide. Headphones would take care of that. As long as the camera got the same direct feed as my headphones, and the microphone didn't, AND everything synced up, I'd be golden.




The process

It actually wasn't that hard. The usual gotchas, like microphone permissions, reacting to external audio devices correctly. These were the early code tests. Turns out that the iRig DUO already handles mono audio inputs as separated Left and Right channels. All I needed to do was allow a low latency pass-through so that the correctly panned audio could be sent to the camera.





Let me know what you think - especially if this was hard to understand. I'd like to get better at explaining my adventures! :D

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