Daniel writes: "Have you heard about anyone using the new Sony PSP as a portable synth/drum/fx station? With the built in USB and wifi, could be lots of fun for jam sessions..." I haven't, but has anyone else?
Posted by Tom Whitwell.
Comments:
Not so far but I was actually thinking about the very same thing on the train today. My train of thought on this was spurred on by discovering Phoenix Studio for Pocket PC - very promising so far, It's a joy to use and so far the best solution for electronic music on the go that I've found. Here's my first response to it anyway...
I am writing about the use of portable games system for the live jamming and composition of music for my dissertation.
I have been thinking recently about the PSP in this way. I think that once the homebrew market opens up and someone hacks the PSP, we will see sites devoted to the development on the system.
Rather than seeing commercial music software released (ala Electroplankton on the DS) I would like to see a series of small 'soundtoys' created by independant developers and artists that could be downloaded on to usb stick. If you have seen soundtoys.net you will know what I mean. Each soundtoy would likely to have a unique interaction and process of sound production.
I'd love to see Rebirth on the psp. Then with a pro duo memory reader for your pc (I assume it exists) you could cleanly get your waves off there. There's a project underway to get linux on the psp. After that we should see various apps of all varieties.
How are you planning on tweezing those teeny weeny little ReBirth controls on a teenier weenier PSP screen? Rebirth was a cool concept back in the day, but even the fanboys found the interface dauntingly small on less than a 19 inch screen.
The analogue stick would be the mouse, when you're over a knob you click the "x" button, this changes the context of the anologue stick to now control that element, so you could literally do circular resonance sweeps and so forth. To exit control of that knob you would press the triangle button. The shoulder buttons could be used to toggle between various parts of the interface, like switching from the 808 to the 303. If someone put thier mind to it, it could be a clean port.
I would think the DS stylus and touch screen would be a more appropriate interface to work with in regards to music composition. The DS has a game coming out called Band Brothers that supposedly has an MIDI sequencer and allows you to compose your own music for use in the game. I'm not sure about saving the files for use on the computer, but it sounds like a cool thing to have if you want to jot down any quick passages.