Making Musical Apps

Chapter 7. Outlook

We have reached the end of our introduction to making musical apps with libpd. It’s been a short book, but then again, libpd is a small library. You now have all the technical knowledge you’ll need if you want to make musical apps for Android and iOS. You have learned how to patch for libpd, how to code with libpd, and how to define the interface between audio and application code. Of course, many challenges remain—coming up with a good idea, creating a great patch, designing a compelling user interface, tweaking parameters until they are just right, and so on. All this takes work and patience and experience, but the potential payoff is immense. I truly believe that artists and engineers have barely begun to explore the musical possibilities of ubiquitous mobile devices with numerous sensors and powerful CPUs.

We have focused on the basic software development kits for Android and iOS, but most of the ideas and techniques we discussed apply to other platforms as well. At the time of writing, libpd already includes support for C++ , Processing, openFrameworks, and Python. Processing has been ported to Android, and openFrameworks to iOS, and so they offer yet another way of creating musical apps with libpd. One team has already built an app with libpd and Adobe AIR; support for PhoneGap might be in the offing. Several people have expressed interest in support for .NET or Mono, and it is only a matter of time until somebody creates C# bindings for libpd.

Unfortunately, ...