Audiosurf is an awesome game which I recommend anyone who hasn't tried to go and download the demo from steam. I thought the dev would have ported it to iphone by now so this week I contacted him to ask why it hasn't been. I won't post his emails as I haven't asked his permission but basically he said that he was waiting for apple to open up access to the music library. I replied that I thought this had happened already and pointed him to a game I own called audio puzzle which takes tracks from you library, splits them into pieces and challenges you to re-assemble them in the right order. He replied that he didn't think there was enough ' low level ' access required for audiosurf to fully scan the tracks and build its levels from. Another game has just come out called tune runner which does a quick scan of tracks from your library before starting each track, its not as complicated as audiosurf, I think it just looks at bpm. So, the question is to anyone who knows enough about this to comment, is it possible or not?
Pretty sure it's not possible for the exact reason he said. I don't know how Tune Runner does it, but it's likely just a workaround and wouldn't be accurate enough for Audiosurf. BeatRider lets you upload songs to their database, which you can then play as the music is accessed and the notes processed elsewhere... I believe there's another app that uses the microphone to listen to the track as it's playing and does it according to that, but then it's subject to delay and background noise. Tags and metadata can be accessed though... that's what Space Invaders uses.
All Audio Puzzle does is cut up your tracks, not analyze them. All Tune Runner does is play the song in the background. Now it does play an original level based on the title/tag of the song, but the level doesn't follow the song rhythm at al. This is similar to what Space Invaders Infinity Gene does. Apple does not currently allow devs to analyze song data, so Audiosurf is currently impossible.
Yeah I don't think they'll ever let you get to the actual song bytes/samples, because then people could do all kinds of stuff that apple wouldn't want, like making apps the transfer songs to other people's phones and stuff like that. Unfortunately, the only way to do this sort of thing is bundling in specific tracks, or allowing users to upload their own songs from their computer to some sort of backend service you create, and then downloading them back into your app. It sucks, but that's just how it is, I guess.
That makes no sense. Firstly, no one in their right mind would even use a P2P app over 3G. Secondly, the only music Apple has the right to limit the use of is DRM'd music, and all they have to do there (and should be doing already, as it's required by law) is prevent third party access to the keys. Thirdly, if anyone is actually stupid enough to make a P2P app for iPhone, Apple can simply reject it, citing liability and the Napster case as justification (or any of the US-hosted P2P clients that have bitten the dust over the last 10 years) Honestly, if Apple are seriously expecting that they can restrict access to our own NON-DRM'd tracks on our own ****ing devices, I really hope someone with a little more money than me turns around and sues the hell out of them. Sure they have the right to set terms for the use of their software, but they do NOT (under European law anyway) have to right to tell use what we can do with OUR OWN ****ING DATA. In the late 1990s Microsoft tried to dictate terms to devs and manufacturers about what they could do with things that didn't belong to them, and they paid the price...Apple will go the same way. As it is, I doubt they really are trying to block this, since there's an awful lot of other obvious features missing in the Music app (and the OS in general), like the ability to edit tags, or specify sorting options. So this is probably just something that'll be coming in OS 4.0, or whatever the next major firmware is....along with wifi support for both music and videos, I hope.
...nah, they actually don't allow it. Sense or no sense, they simply don't want apps f***ing with your music.
I meant read access only, not write access. Apps wouldn't be able to "f*ck with" anything. But yeah, write access would NOT be a good idea.
Yeah I guess, but Apple are weird like that. There are a bunch of things that are strictly forbidden but wouldn't do any harm anyway. They just like having control.
You're really jumping to conclusions here. How do you know their reason isn't just "we haven't coded it yet"? I mean, look at all the other features that were missing from the iPhone at first, like copying and pasting, and the upcoming shared directories for apps. I doubt there was any deep philosophical explanation behind any of those, other than the fact that they weren't finished at the time of release. And I don't understand how you claim adding features lessens the amount of control they have. The only thing that would do that is if they allowed running unsigned code, and that's not likely, nor is anyone really asking for it. From what I'm hearing, developers signed up for the SDK betas have a chance to have their views heard about potential new features and improvements - why don't a few of the guys from here bring this up on the internal dev forums, citing all the potential benefits this would have for developers? Cause it's not just games that could use this, and from Apple's point of view, more popular applicationsc == more profit for them.
Looks like it would be possible now http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/08/ios-4-adds-direct-access-to-itunes-library-iphone-dj-apps-about/
Between that and the APIs that are available from The EchoNest (http://developer.echonest.com/) there should be some fun possibilities.
