Friday 12 October 2012

Symphonix Evolution Player Rocks on iPhone 5

Well, it's been a busy time over the last few weeks with the release of the iPhone 5.  Those of you who have purchased our Symphonix Evolution Player app will have noticed that we've already updated it to fit the new 4-inch retina display, and the app looks better than ever!


The larger screen is enough room to fit a couple more keys on the piano display, which doesn't seem like much but it makes the virtual instrument much more playable.

More importantly though,  the performance has to be seen to be believed - especially when compared to the earlier iPhones.  In our testing the phone consistently performs extremely well with the polyphony set to a full 128 voices (previously the iPhone could manage between 30 and 48 voices before the CPU started to overload).  This means that most MIDI songs now play beautifully without any dropouts and performance is actually comparable to the iPad 3!  If you already have the app and have upgraded to an iPhone 5, make sure you've edited the app's settings using the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen to take advantage of the additional voices.

Our testing also shows that the inbuilt speakers perform much better than the earlier iPhone models and the app is noticeably louder.

Finally, those of you who use MIDI might be wondering how the app works with the new "lightning" connector.  We've tested the lightning to 30 pin adapter cable with the iRig MIDI and it performs extremely well.

In conclusion the iPhone 5 is highly recommended and noticeably outperforms the 4th generation iPhone in almost every way when it comes to virtual instrument and audio processing.  We're thinking carefully about how we can use this extra power in our apps!