Robotic Guitarist App Android Audio Superpowered Case Study
Our technology and business decisions are always measured against our true north: Do we superpower the creators, the makers, the engineers?
Which is why it sometimes better to learn about Superpowered technology not from Superpowered itself, but from those who create using Superpowered audio technology.
We've asked Pedro Estebanez, the creator of Robotic Guitarist to share his experience using Superpowered:
Robotic Guitarist is a guitar app for Android released a few years ago with unique features and great success. For its 5.0 release — a complete rewrite from scratch — we wanted it to look, behave and sound new. The UI was redesigned under Material design and in the audio area, we decided to add some sound effects and improve its overall responsiveness.
Before 5.0 we used to use Android’s built-in SoundPool API, which allowed us to mix some samples. We needed something more flexible and powerful so, after comparing a number of sound libraries, we resolved to give a chance to Superpowered. We couldn’t be happier about our decision.
Since we needed as much horsepower as possible, we rewrote our audio engine with C++. Superpowered naturally fit this scenario. Furthermore, we needed to combine its features with our own filters and again this was easy due to its uncoupled architecture.
In order to squeeze devices up to the last bit of performance, we knew we had to talk directly to the OpenSL ES layer. For small dev teams, time is gold so we are thankful to Superpowered to provide all the dirty setup stuff and let us just focus on strict audio programming.
That from a technical standpoint. Regarding the user experience, which is that matters in the end, users of Robotic Guitarist now have a more powerful than ever guitar app that gives them unprecedented low latency and amazing sound effects.
Furthermore, modest or older single-core devices still can handle the load. For instance, a 800 MHz, low RAM, single-core device popular a few years ago is able to run Robotic Guitarist’s audio engine with no drops or glitches. This is good news for entry-level device owners as well.
And also that means there is a lot of spare processing power. So the question now is: What will we be able to do in the future with Superpowered?
Download Robotic Guitarist for Android in Google Play.
- Android Audio
- OpenSL ES
- Robotic Guitarist
- performance