Surprise! Animoog from Moog Shows Up on BlackBerry Z10

In the exciting world of Things That Arent An iPhone, Moog Music have announced, out of the blue, a version of their popular Animoog synth for BlackBerry Z10.

Animoog for BlackBerry Z10

In a tweet to CDM, Moog Music reflected, The more creative tools artists have the more music the world will have.

I couldnt agree more. But platforms have posed some serious hurdles to making development pay off for independent music software makers, with technical hurdles that can make performance a challenge. If BB10 is something different, thats good news.

These kinds of ports arent necessarily so odd. A lot of the most significant code in a music app is DSP code thats portable from one hardware platform to another. Theres still a lot of effort in working with native APIs on those platforms, even if the UI is rendered largely in technologies like OpenGL or Web renderers more so if not. But then, that becomes a question of the resistance level of the platform itself: will it be pleasurable or painful to do that work, and will you be able to verify the results? (On Android, for instance, its often been the latter where things fall apart the APIs are nice enough on paper, but dont always work reliably on the myriad devices people actually own, sometimes breaking down altogether.)

In this case, Moog touts that they are the 1st leading synth manufacturer to introduce a high-powered music creation tool for the new platform. Thats a slightly dubious honor, and probably doesnt need so many qualifiers; I dont know of any other music devs going after BlackBerry. (Though Id be happy to be corrected any CDM readers developing for the Z10?) The big question will be not whether Moog is the first, but whether theyre the last.

In any event, someone who did get one of these phones now has a great synth to try out. And perhaps others will follow.

Speaking of Android, it doesnt appear theres much news to report from Google IO. There is one session covering high-performance audio, with a nod to OpenSL ES. I hope to find out what the presenters there are talking about, and if the new Nexus version of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 or Samsungs own OS build will support the low-latency audio profile for Android. We saw that a full year ago, and since havent seen other devices.

In fact, the presence of Animoog on BlackBerry before Android seems yet another negative endorsement for Googles platform, which has been rightfully, I think widely maligned by frustrated audio developers.

Ill let you know when any of you should bother glancing up from your iPhones and iPads.