App Developers' Testimonials about Superpowered Audio Engine

Patrick Vlaskovits

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It is the doers, the creators, the makers, the engineers, and yes, even the hustlers that motivate us, that inspire us to develop Superpowered tools that aren’t simply more, but paramount, actually extend the makers’ creative and productive capabilities – allowing them to create and make things real – profoundly shaping them, the builders, to build things that weren’t possible without Superpowered technology.

The Superpowered story.

Hello Superpowered, Superpowered has been working great for me so far! I have to thank you for creating such an amazing SDK, it really relieves the latency and the overall seamless feel of the apps I've integrated it with. Looking forward to using Superpowered more and more! Take care, Stephen

Hi Patrick, Just wanted to thank you and Gabor for taking the time to develop (and share) Superpowered. I am not even sure how I came across your SDK, but I honestly didn't believe it was real. I got to check it out over the last few days, and you have restored my hope for mobile music experiences. There are like a million things I could say about all of my frustrations, compromises, etc. over the last three years...but all I really want to say is thanks (seriously, thank you, this is huge). john

As far as my frustrations, I got into Android and audio development at the same time (~3 years ago). I worked my way through all of the Android audio classes (SoundPool, MediaPlayer, AudioTrack), on to OpenSL for a little while, and then eventually settled for AudioTrack while using MediaCodec to transcode any compressed audio files.

While this solved my issue of being able to play compressed audio formats while still having access to the PCM audio data, I was never able to avoid large latencies, under runs, etc. With this setup, I could hack together a few audio effects (beat rolls, poorly designed filters, gates, rewinds, panning) but it still wasn't what I imagined

From everything I read, it seemed like using the NDK was the way to go, but I had previously found OpenSL to be difficult to work with (unlike Superpowered, which I got up and running on my lunch break), and from what I could gather, other than lower latency, OpenSL didn't make it any easier for me to develop audio FX.

And for the last half of a year, that is where I had plateaued...I considered taking a deeper dive into audio development to make my own library, but kept putting it off because I wasn't sure that the likely huge amount of time and effort would actually give me any better results...which is unfortunate, because I had been so inspired by the music experiences I thought were possible with a pocket-sized computer that had motion and location sensors plus the ability to access all sorts of external data in real-time. But thanks to your work, I am happily back at it again!

From 'it still wasn't what I imagined' to 'I am happily back at it again!'.

When we hit our marks, when we deliver on our promises, when we super-power our creators, our hearts swell, not only in pride, but in gratitude too.

Thank you for super-powering Superpowered.