My Dream App

Whistler’s a strong enough idea that even though I’m not very satisfied with Richard’s UI design sensibilities, I still want to see it win.

I’m glad that he did simplify things considerably in his most recent mockups, but I still feel like the concept needs an overhaul before it could be a successful product.

From a developer’s point of view, I think that even though developing Whistler could be challenging, it would be an interesting app to work on.

It’s a fun idea. I like it’s initial idea about enabling everyone creating cool music on their Macs. The mock-ups don’t quite meet this goal, yet. I like the idea but I’m torn about its current state. The basic idea is cool and fun but it’s interface and feasability is still in question.

this is probably the strongest candidate from a ‘demoware’ perspective — it’s fun, easy and most jetson-like. a great “hey…check out my new mac” application. i’ve seen a couple of implementations of tune/whistle-recognition technology and it immediately resonates with people — it gets them laughing and queuing up to try it. in terms of real composition though, i’m skeptical. for people that want to compose, they’re going to need to go beyond the simple interface and get into a more robust application and get into the complexity of multi-track interfaces. once there, i’m not sure how many people will want to use this as their midi controller since all of the midi and loop-based apps have gotten so much simpler. my mind immediately jumps to audio search. how cool would it be to whistle at itunes or google or spotlight for that song you keep hearing on the radio, but can’t remember the artist? regardless, i can see this being one of those apps that could create a lot of community/viral buzz and have people looking over shoulders in coffeeshops and cubes and having a good time with it

Damn it, I really wanted to put this in my list of “vote fors”. I would absolutely love to code this. At the same time, I’m completely terrified of coding this. It’s hard, and it’s right at the edge of my abilities. It would really be work. At the same time, I’m completely confident that I could pull it off, and the result would be amazing

The reason this one stayed out of my list of winners is the potential market - I just don’t think it’s big enough. MDA is all about creating consumer-level apps, so we’d be priced fairly low, which helps a bit to broaden the market, but not that much. I just can’t see Whistler having amazing sales, and the sales would need to be amazing to offset the amount of work necessary to create it.

Which sucks, because the amount of social good that could come from Whistler is gigantic. Huge. Whistler could change people’s lives, for the better, launch new careers, bring happiness to people. Damn it.

Ease Of Programming: miniscule
Potential Earnings: moderate
Social Good: huge

Finally, Richard seems like he’d be very good to work with. His design skills are phenomenal. My only complaint is that he still seems somewhat nebulous on Whistler’s feature list, but I suspect he’s done that on purpose and that once it came time to begin development, it would sort itself out.

Don’t vote for Whistler. But I secretly hope that you do anyway. I want it, and I want to code it.

Super cool idea but looks like it’s not going to be a hit anytime soon. As an amateur guitarist and someone who can’t carry a tune farther than the first half of the first note, this sounds like a fun way to get little things I hummm down into my computer in a way that I can really play with them. The downside is that everyone I’ve ever met hates their own voice and this may cause rampant whistling and ummm… I can’t whistle. Since I can’t whistle, I definitely can’t whistle in key. This would be horrible around the workplace and will cause ‘going postal’ syndrome.

This application seems like a real killer app. Everyone wants to be able to make music. Doesn’t everyone remember Jam Session? I think if this app could include basic (to advanced) music theory instruction, a lot of people would buy it.

Love the idea, but I question the market for it. This is tough for me to say, because I really believe something like Whistler SHOULD exist in the market, and at an affordable price. But how many aspiring musicians with no musical ability (or the skills to use Garageband) are there really? Then again, I could be proven totally wrong.

That having been said, this one is a really beautiful and clever idea, and one I would be proud to see emerge as a winner from this competition.

I was named after Guy Lombardo, but my music knowledge ends there. Seems cool, but I’m not one to be able to judge this.

In order to attract a more mainstream audience, I think Whistler needs a more streamlined definition but it also needs some simple features that appeal to the musical hobbyist (aka musically challenged individuals - we all know who we are).

This is easily the most exciting idea in the contest. Whistler is for everybody, though I didn’t “get it” at first. Just think of that song you’ve written, or that melody you came up with and forgot, or Garageband that you keep opening and wanting to use but are unable to get a melody line or something in there to start with. Whistler will be the missing piece of Garageband and iLife. You can make your movie soundtrack or your song melody with your voice, and Whistler will convert it to the instrument or instruments you want. There’s no better tool for letting the average iLife user get more out of their system than Whistler. Why hasn’t this been done already?

This is a tough one. I have liked Whistler from the beginning. But I’m starting to see some cracks and fissures in the execution of the concept and at a time when it really should be coalescing into a clear, developed idea. Unless Richard is able to really refine his vision for this app, I think it is losing focus. It seems to have had its initial appeal in that it’s primary target was someone who couldn’t carry a tune, but still had one stuck in their head dying to get out. There has been an increasing tendency to include more “Pro” features which I’m sure comes from Richard’s more professional background and I can see the temptation to do so. However, I also agree that for Whistler to really succeed, it doesn’t need the “Pro” features. The pros are already going to have their Logic and various other tools to play with.

IMO, Whistler should be strictly a gateway drug into the world of music composition. It can be a learning tool to help train your ear when you’re singing, but it needs to be easy as pie and slick as spit. Whistler definitely qualifies for Dream App status and the heart of the concept is there, but at this point, I’m not sure if it is ready for prime time. I’m on the fence on this one and I’m leaning on the wrong side.

As a musician, I love this idea. Whistler would be great to have on my MacBook to get down the quick riffs I always have in my head. Right now I have to run downstairs and record it with GarageBand — you can’t always just drop everything and do that. However, using Whistler I could just tap or hum and get what I need into the computer and then work on it later.

This one is just getting cooler and cooler. Most of the tech details are now ironed out, at least in rough form, and Richard’s mockups are just amazing. Bringin’ music to the masses, yo!

Switching gears into business geek mode for a moment, this one is a paradigm changer. Revolutionary. I hope it gets made.

We demoed a program exactly like this on the Screen Savers five years ago. It worked fine, but it never went anywhere. I don’t see any reason to think the world has changed its mind.

Whistler is a darn cool idea. I’m with some of the digg commenters that implementation is going to be very tricky, and I really don’t think that this is going to let a completely tone-deaf buffoon like me start conducting symphonies, but if it helps composers get a leg up on something they’re noodling with or gives them a way to “write down” a ditty in their head they wake up with in the middle of the night, then great. The interface has me a bit worried, though — it’s looking mighty involved already — I thiink it ought to be greatly simplified.

I’ve been waiting for this product since, well, forever. There are a lot of us who have musical ideas in our heads but simply haven’t been trained in an instrument that will let it escape into the world! GarageBand supplies a great canvas for amateurs with tunes locked in their heads — Whistler provides the missing link for the instrument-compromised. Excellent!

Last week I commented that Whistler has too much complexity and I’ve been asked to go into more detail about why I feel this way. Whistler’s target audience is non-musicians…that’s it. In the mockup there are several “power-user” controls that have little or no meaning to people without formal music education. Furthermore, the feature list is pretty bloated as it is now.

I think with razor-sharp focus and removal of much of the featuritis, Whistler can be a fantastic product. But Richard needs to take a step back and concentrate on his core users first. One of the quickest ways to failure is trying to please everyone.

Just a note from a 20-year veteran of Macintosh music programs. First, the spirit is in the right place—anything that lets the musician out of ordinary people is a welcome development!

However, it’s not a new idea. In fact, you can already buy transcription software for single-line melodies, so this might be much effort about nothing. Here you go: http://www.wildcat.com/Web/Wildcat/Html/Site/Homepage.htm

Also, I hate to say it, but if anything should have set the world on fire with undiscovered musical talent, it would have been GarageBand. Unfortunately, GarageBand remains the ugly little iLife stepchild, the one that hardly anyone even opens. That doesn’t give me high hopes for Whistler’s adoption curve.

As an ex-pro musician and (failed) music grad student, and as someone who still dabbles in composition, I find this idea absolutely killer — but not just for its welcome versatility in input and output, its way-cool “sing-along” fun, or even its great collaborative capabilities. What I like best about it is its “draft mode,” “brainstorming,” “note-taking” capabilities. I would love to be able to sing or whistle melodies to my Mac, experimenting with different variations, and not have to worry about notating anything. This app would save me tons-o-time, and encapsulate my musical musings. Build it, and I will come!

At first I was a little bit skeptical about this idea. It sounds great and it could be a lot of fun to use. But is it really feasible? I don’t know much about audio processing so I’m not able to answer this question. But if it is feasible then it would be a cool application. The concept is solid even though it has to be refined and tightened a little bit more. It should focus on getting the whistling recognized and make it able to use it even for novice users who don’t know much about the music background.

I totally love this idea and can only imagine how fluid and seamless the entire music making process would be. I really want this app to be made just to play around with it. The entire interface is simple, straightforward, and focused around sampling audio input and spitting out nice sounds.

All I have to say is if this ever comes out, I’ll probably be making a career change. Like countless millions I compose timeless masterpieces in my head while taking out the garbage but am unable to retain them as I can’t write a single note. This concept is pure brilliance incarnate. It looks in the comp as if the current note being whistled is lit up and as the next note is registered, the previous fades, drifts down and streams back into the cloudscape. Wow. How on earth can anybody not love this one. I would find the Cookbook concept the most practical, but this is the one I’m most dying to play with by far. This one is almost borderline revolutionary.

I just want to write two things about this idea - congratulations and oh my God does it look sweet! Whistler introduces a completely new way of interfacing with sound editing apps, which is so intuitive and simply human, that I’m actually astonished that I’ve never heard about it before. Interface needs some planning and polishing - top area is a little bit unclear to me (except the wave visualiser in the background, it’s amazing!), it would require opening Help and reading what is going on there. I believe it can be resolved - simplified and streamlined to be even more intuitive. Also those five icons aren’t top-notch but I’m sure that if this app gets executed, they will be improved. Also I think it might look better if both main window and options sheet had the same width. Integrate them and you get a nice, flowing, dark panel.

I love the idea, but I’m afraid that Richard’s latest mockup just seems overly complex considering what Whistler’s supposed to do for users. I hope this makes this week’s cut and that Richard puts a lot of effort in refining it so that it’s a tool that people with little to no formal music theory knowledge can have fun with.

Gorgeous interface! I like the icon designs a lot. Perhaps you could introduce a second color for emphasis? Right now it all looks like it’s greyscale, by introducing a slight bluish shade it turns into Graphite or silver, which makes it even sexier! I really like the glow effect around the letter G. Perhaps that could wind up elsewhere in the interface?

A great idea for an application and for anyone who has had this problem of a tune stuck in their head, but no way to get it down on paper, a blessing. Not sure how marketable it would be however and I’m not exactly sure how well it would sell. Challenges there to be sure.

I adore this idea. And I was pretty sure it was feasible, but I hadn’t thought it through completely. Thanks to some lively chat with Devon on the forums, I’ve now thought things through much more and am pretty much convinced that this app can be written! Whoo, Whistler!

Whistler seems like a really neat idea. Creating music in such a dynamic and straightforward way appears to be a surprisingly untapped area. While the app is entirely dependent on its implementation to prove that its worth using, the idea definitely gets me thinking. I, for one, would have a blast just tapping my desk and hearing it play the notes back.

Once I sat down and thought about this one I really saw the potential. This is definitely a neat idea that can take advantage of a bunch of different technologies that you wouldn’t outright assume make good combinations.

This will be a blast with many musicians I know. As it requires a certain amount of talent, it is not for me, though.

Fun fact! Dave, one of our brilliant Panicgineers and the guy behind Unison, basically already wrote this app. Well, he never took it much further than “idea proof” beta phase, but it’s around here somewhere. He was code-goofing around and came up with an idea where you can basically draw points on a waveform to define frequencies as note triggers. So, if tapping the desk just right makes a sound at x frequency on a waveform, you just mark that as your “bass drum” trigger, and you can bass drum away by simply tapping. I bring this up only because it means that this idea — which might at first seem technically ridiculous — is actually probably quite possible and could be amazingly awesome. And, of course, great minds think alike.

This is just awesome. Someone make it, please. The greatest thing an application can do is allow users to do something that was once too difficult or complex to be feasible. The learning curve and cost of making computer music is way too steep, even with GarageBand. It has to be accurate and easy to use, but Whistler would be a useful tool and a phenomenally fun toy.

Generating notes by whistling would be awfully cool, and there are sure a lot of things you could do with those notes once you have them. For a 1.0 release, I’d recommend figuring out one particular thing that you want to do with those notes and focusing on making that particular solution work well.

I love this idea, and it’d be fun to code. I think I’ve already talked quite a bit about the tech aspects, so I’ll just summarize what I think can be done without too much trouble:

• Recognize pure tones, transcribe them to midi, and pitch correct them, probably to nearest half-step
• Apply vibrato if it seems like what the user wanted
• Recognize percussion
• Normalize tempo, probably to within nearest 32nd note
• Map different percussive pitches to different instruments

I’d love to see some sort of Muppets Animal type of monster playing a virtual drum set as I tap on my desk. I’d never get another line of code written if I had this!

Fun and innovative, and I think it’s practical, but it’d require some real signal processing skills. There’s a lot of ways you could expand this application once you get the basics working — you could recognize notes played, say, on a trumpet, and input them as MIDI, and then have a MIDI version of your existing trumpet for just a couple bucks instead of $2,500.

It is unclear who would use this tool. Anyone who would turn this into a real melody afterwards would likely be proficient with a real MIDI keyboard and so prefer that.

I could however see a great benefit in having this tool when trying to get a feel for which sounds translate to what notes. This would change Whistler to more of an educational tool, but I think the two goals can be combined.