A new Finnish music app that passed the “woah check this out” test in the office is Cotracks, a collaborative music iPad app released today. We’ve all seen beatboxing or music creation apps, but Cotracks maximizes the iPad’s real estate for realtime collaborative music creation with up to four friends.
It could be complete chaos, but Cotracks is designed to make it easy to record and playback in sync, which is important when up to four people are riffing on the same beat. As you can see in the video, Cotracks lets you copy your friends’ beats to add new things to them, and lets you find a common tempo.
Right now if you want to collaborate in real time to brainstorm a beat, it requires hooking up your laptops, which can be a hassle. “When we first learnt that these touch devices can handle lots of simultaneous touches and process realtime audio at the same time, it became obvious that something like Cotracks must be developed,” says Matti Jokipii, creator of Cotracks.
We downloaded it in the office (which is probably why this article is coming out later than we would like) and while there is some learning curve to figure out how to get to the multi-user view, and how to interact with all the controls, we were making admittedly awful, but fun music in no time. It’s cool taking the beat of what your friend made and then immediately adding a synth layer on top of it.
The loops you create may be exported as separate audio clips or as a mixdown audio clip which you may then import and use in any audio software supporting the common wave audio format. In this sense it’s good for brainstorming, and creator Jokipii says that they’ve tried to make the sound quality high enough that you could take the tracks and develop it further.
In the future Jokipii has more collaboration features in mind, such as being able to drag and drop a lot more than just synth beats.
At launch Cotracks is $4.99 in the app store.
