I always wanted to be a DJ or a performance artist

There is a new app for iOS as I have just got my hands on called BossJock and it is just made for anybody that wants to be a DJ or once to record their own radio show. For the younger members of the audience, a radio show was something that put out across the airwaves in the days before podcasts. With this application BossJock, whose name comes from what they used to call the best DJs who were really rocking it, you can add sounds to a cart and play them as and when you need them.

So the first step when using BossJock is to fill up the buttons in the cart with sounds and these can be bumpers, stingers, jingles, sound beds and pre-recorded interviews. So you might put down a musical sound bed or or a background audio which could lead people to believe that you were in an airport terminal or at a party. You can hit the button to play the jingle to start your radio show, podcast and as the jingle fades away you can press the microphone button and start talking over the top to your audience. I say over the top because when you press the microphone button to cue in your microphone the sounds that are underneath will be ducked so that your voice will take precedence.

When you’re pressing your buttons to add your bumpers and the stingers you get some fade in and fade out as the sound is used. This way you get a nice smooth transition from the sounds as you use them and it is amazing how easily it is to sound really quite professional and like a proper DJ. If there are sounds that you want to use throughout the whole of your podcast you can adjust settings and make them sounds which loop. Then there is a setting which will do a auto rewind and what this does is to put the sound back at the beginning even if you are only played it a part way through.

When you really get into using this application you can use the volume sliders which are to the right hand side of the screen to adjust the volume for the microphone, the cart and also for the mix. You can make these volume adjustments on the fly in case you have something that you want to manually fade out or fade back in. More fun than just making a plain recording in Twisted Wave audio editor It is more of a performance. The BossJock app also works on the iPhone, obviously you don’t get as many places for storing the audio clips.

I did try out another audio editor for iOS and it well wasn’t very good, because it had a weird sort of interface. I also have a number of audio recording applications on my iPad and iPhone, but none of them were any good for editing audio. I had seen that there was the application called Twisted Wave, but I had hesitated in buying it, as it was going to cost nine euros to buy. In the end I realised that it was good value for money if it gave me what I needed in order to be able to properly and efficiently edit audio on iPad. The main requirements I have for an audio editor for iPad or iPhone use is that it should have a visualisation of the audio waveform. I need to be able to see the audio in the app interface so that I can do what I need to do. It is so much easier when you can see where the spaces are in the audio track for when you need to select areas of audio. I have been using my iRig microphone with TwistedWave.

Editing audio on iOS with Twisted Wave

The view that you have of the editing space in Twisted Wave is clean and functional. There is a row of icons at the bottom of the screen space that allow you to do all you need to do with your audio. The usual play, pause, stop and record and then you have things like fade in and fade out; cut, copy and paste; redo and undo and then you have your crop tool. The other icon which is to the far right allows you to put on the device clipboard any audio that you have selected, so that it can be used in other audio applications that you might have installed. On the Mac there is a version of Twisted Wave but I already have AmadeusPro bought and paid for.

In the bottom left hand corner you have a button giving access to settings and it is just as colourful as all of the other icons for the controls. This is where you can choose the effects that are available, such as amplify and normalise. You will also find options to add silence to your track, filters, delay, a dynamics processor and an option to change pitch and speed. You can even take the selected part or the whole track and make it play in reverse.

Using Twisted Wave to share your iOS audio recordings

There is the usual share button available for you to send your iOS audio recordings out to the world. From here you can choose the format of the audio that you send out and you have eight different formats available to use, both lossless such as the AAC format and the Wave format as well as the compressed format of MP3. You can also choose the compression bit depth from that same menu.

From the export audio drop-down menu you can send to iTunes, FTP upload, send by email, send to dropbox, send a selection to a new document or to open in another application. You could send to an audio notetaking app. A particularly good option from this menu is to Send to Soundcloud and this is useful because from there you can have it sent out to things like Facebook, Tumblr and anything else you have set up within Soundcloud. It would be nice to have the option there also, to send to Audioboo. I have used this to send audio to iMovie for iPad.

The NoStylus verdict on a Twisted Wave

I really like this iOS audio recording application as it is simple to use and does just about all that I ask of it. If you are a user of Soundcloud, it is extra useful for sharing out whatever you record as audio on iOS. It is only a single track audio editor and it would be nice if at some point in time it would be possible to have multiple tracks of audio. That would make it much more useful to podcasters that use audio effects and bumpers along with their voice recordings. I believe though that there is a specialised podcasting app that could do that for you. That is called Caster and I hear it is not that good. There are other Digital Audio Workstation apps for iOS you can look at. Twisted Wave gets a big thumbs up from NoStylus.

This is an application for adding filters to your photos on the iPad. It can be photos that you have taken already and are in your camera roll, or it can be photos that you are about to take. In fact, these artistic filters can also be applied to iPad video . These will be the sort of filters that you could expect to find in something like Instagram and in terms of general usage should be used sparingly. If every photo that you shared online in the various places for sharing used these filters, then it could get very old hat, incredibly quickly.

A wooden interface for Pencil Camera

I suppose to a certain extent the interface does look quite nice, but at the same time I don’t think it makes full use of the design possibilities that are available within iOS. Do you really need the illusion of carved wood on the sliders for the exposure, contrast and line quality? Is it really necessary to have the ripped paper frame around the photos that you are working on? Despite the overuse of the wood theme the application is okay to look as and pretty easy to use. You get an immediate feedback on the changes that you make using the sliders and also when you are changing from one filter to another.

Read about Ink Artist iPad

Pink glasses and Life on Mars?

You can tap on a button and pick your filter and choose how you want to enhance or destroy your photo, starting with a water colour effect. You have 18 filters to choose from and you can only choose them one at a time. The only way to have a cumulative effect with your filters would be to save an image out with one effect upon it, bring it back in again and apply another. Whether you are using one filter effect or more than one, it is possible to come up with some quite interesting looking images.

Some of the filters work by adding a texture to the overall image and then some other filters work more by finding the edges in the image. When those edges in the image are found by this application for your iPad, it does things like thickening up lines for emphasis. You can get some sorts of effects that imitate the use of watercolour or crayons and it can also make your photo look like it was drawn with soft pencils.

Hipster culture and video

There was the movie called ‘A Scanner Darkly’ that had Keanu Reeves in it, that was Roto scoped to give a weird moving cartoon effect to the standard filmed movie shots . It was very strange to watch this movie with it being not normal video and neither was it cartoon. When you shoot video using Pencil Camera for iPad, something similar happens with the action looking stranger the more you crank up the settings. Not something that you would want to do very often, but could be entertaining if used sparingly.

The NoStylus verdict on Pencil Camera

The effects that you get are quite specialised and are likely to only be useful in occasional circumstances. Despite that, the application is quite useful and fun to play with. I would recommend that you give Pencil Camera HD a try and see if it fits in artistically with what you want to do with your photos and video.