I set out, in mid November, to try to fully understand and realise, just how many audio, sound, keyboard, synth or guitar / guitar effects applications I was going to lose permanently…if and when I finally updated to ios 11.0 on my devices.
The list started out OK, I basically started opening all of the music related apps on my most-used main music ipad, going page by page, app by app – and found a startling number with the ominous message attached “this application will not work in ios 11.0”….far more than I expected, and a lot more than are in the list.
So here are these very pathetic, and very, very incomplete lists – which I abandoned almost as soon as I started (and I am sure that others have compiled proper lists out there, if you really want to understand the full horror of this nightmarish scenario…) in the meantime, you can see some of what I was faced with, in terms of what I was about to lose:
Apps About To DIE in ios 11.0
(Very Much Partial!) List of iPhone apps that WILL DIE in the iOS 11 update – 20171115
ELectus
Fast Tune HT6
Jam Player
Key Chords Mini
MIDI Designer
Nano Studio
Reap DFX
Rhodes Piano
Swipe Guitar
(Very Much Partial!) List of iPad apps that WILL DIE in the iOS 11 update – 20171127
Audio Palette
Cantor
Electric Piano Synthesizer
Grantophone
Groove Maker – 3 versions (but not Groove Maker Free)
ImproVox
LH Rubbing
Mini Synth Pro
Mixtikl 5
Oblique Strategies (Black logo)
Organ+
Spacelab.
Synthmate (already dead)
Thereminator
Vio
Yamaha AR and DR Pad
Guitar Apps
Pearl Guitar
SHREDDER SYNTH
12 String HD
And I am not sure, but I believe that Drone FX, another one with an eternal album dedicated to it (music for apps: drone fx) and an ambient music application of incredible capability and beauty – in a league with perhaps, Eno’s Scape and very, very few others – I love Drone FX, I truly do – strangely, when I went to open it – I didn’t get the warning message – but I believe it is one of the doomed apps anyway. Only time will tell.
If Drone FX disappears – well, for one thing – there will be no more additions to the eternal album dedicated to works created with it – and I would then have to live in hope that the developer of Drone FX, decides to revive it or create a brand new version that I can purchase someday – and then, I could continue to create and upload new drones to the eternal album. If the developer doesn’t – and Drone FX dies – so does my eternal album of the same name. Dead – gone – stuck in time with the pieces I’ve done to date, with NO HOPE of the addition of additional tracks in future (the whole POINT of an eternal album, I might mention). If it is gone, and doesn’t come back – then it’s a sad, sad day for lovers of the truly beautiful and the truly ambient – Drone FX is one of the finest apps I’ve ever used – mixing up to five ambient sound streams into a live, evolving ambient composition…it sounds absolutely amazing – but don’t take my word for it – please, have a listen.
So I stopped working on the lists, because I realised it was just futile,and I also realised there was not much I could do about it – because I will need to update to ios 11.0 just to keep my devices secure. But – there are considerations, and in the case of musicians like myself, that work in many, many different apps all the time – I can and often do have, many, many partially finished, unfinished, nearly finished or completely finished songs, on many apps – at all times.
Now, intellectually, I understand why Apple are doing this – but my human, emotional reaction is one of unmitigated DISMAY. I just don’t welcome the death of some of my favourite (and some, less so) applications, and one or two of the intended victims of this purge, upset me quite a bit – because I have a personal attachment to them, and a long history of music making with them, too. This includes not only the examples I’ve given, but other groundbreaking or awesome musical applications, anything from Mini Synth Pro to Cantor – all gone.
I don’t think that Apple, representing Giant Faceless Corporations Everywhere, but trying to appear like a harmless old man shuffling down the street, understands the devastation that their little message “this application will go up in flames when you update to ios 11.0” can cause to the dedicated Application Musician. Real dismay, real upset, a real sense of loss.
I am here to set the record straight, to let Apple know, using just one or two examples of applications that will cause me grief in more ways than one – that to me, these are the senseless murders of beautiful creative tools. APPLE – are you listening??
Example 1: Nanostudio
Nanostudio was one of the very first music applications I ever purchased, something like five or six years ago now – and I have spent many, many hours recording, composing, mixing, and uploading tracks made with it. It even has its own dedicated “eternal album” on my bandcamp site, “music for apps: Nanostudio” which contains the bulk of the work achieved with this humble little app.
I love Nanostudio – so I was horrified to realise that it was one of the apps slated for the chop. Not just because I love it – that’s almost beside the point, but because I have a number of finished but not mixed, or unfinished and not mixed, tracks sitting in Nanostudio, that I really MUST finish and upload before the dread 11.0 ios arrives. If I don’t do that – I will lose them.
Why – well, because the makers of Nanostudio, have wisely decided to retire the app gracefully (heartbreaking!) and release Nanostudio 2 – which of course, I will have to pay for all over again – so they are saying goodbye to Nanostudio 1. Now – maybe, maybe I will be REALLY fortunate, and I will be able to import projects from 1 into 2 and continue working on them in real time.
However – I seriously doubt that, and being somewhat pessimistic sometimes, I have to assume the worst – that there will be NO backwards compatibility – and that if I don’t complete, mix and master all the tracks IN Nanostudio 1 – they WILL be lost forever.
Now – take that nightmare scenario – and multiply it across any and all apps that you can record with, that are going to die in the update – and you can begin to see why it’s not just upsetting, it’s downright threatening to the creative work that I have completed, but not mixed, or is nearly complete – I now MUST finish those tracks, at all costs, PRIOR to updating.
Example 2: Shredder Synth
This app – well, this one really broke my heart, it’s the single most amazing guitar app around, a working audio-to-midi guitar synth that I’ve been using for years, with which I have created a few pieces of extraordinary beauty, playing my guitar through an iPad. I love Shredder Synth, it’s a very creative and beautiful app, and I don’t actually know what the developer is planning if anything – I HOPE for a Shredder Synth 2, but I am too afraid to look it up – so I am letting it be a mystery to me.
I had such a blast with this app when it first appeared, I could not BELIEVE (and still can’t really) that someone could design and build a GUITAR SYNTHESIZER that you could play on an iPad !! That is truly remarkable. I only have one other such app, and it is not nearly as capable. Of course – it’s going through unharmed, while the one I love – is being destroyed.
So – using the apps above (and below) as my working examples – these are living, breathing music creation tools that this update is MURDERING. It’s KILLING them, and all of the beautiful musical dreams they have inspired – but, worst of all, are the unfinished pieces, trapped in a strange limbo of impending death, hoping that I will make the time to save them from destruction by at least mixing and mastering them and eventually uploading them to bandcamp.
But that is just one facet of this issue – there is another issue. Most of the beauty of working in iOs music applications, is the fact that you can create variations, or completely different versions, of tracks – by making copies of an existing project, and then making changes, deletions or additions until you have created something completely different – and often these “spin-off” tracks are more interesting than the originals. The problem is, though – that you HAVE to have the original app they were made in, so you can open them and work on them.
Over in Garage Band, which is not under threat (thank God) I often will create multiple versions of tracks in progress, to try out different ideas, or, to make sure there is a snapshot of the track in its current form, which I am totally happy with – but, I want the OPTION of trying other versions.
Again, not knowing what kind of backwards compatibility will exist, with any of these apps, throws real uncertainty into this scenario – I am assuming, that for every lost app, I will then LOSE the ability to work with the track in an editable form – all that will be left are the MIXES – and what if, for example, you suddenly hear in your head, a version of a track where a certain bit is REMOVED to create a space, and you can no longer achieve that because the song has been completely mixed down – and unless you can open the original file, and use the current version of the app to edit “old sessions” – you are out of luck. Completely out of luck.
Example #3: Mixtikl 5.0
A third example is Mixtikl. I “grew up” using Mixtikl 5.0 – in which I created more than 60 unique compositions, some of which are quite extraordinary (please see “music for apps: mixtikl”) so I felt so sad to find out that Mixtikl 5 is one of the victims – while 6.0 and 7.0 (both of which I also own) will continue on.
Or at least, 7.0 will. Now – 7.0 is fine as far as I can tell, but it won’t be like 5 – and I love 5.0 – it’s the bee’s knees. Sure, I should like 6.0 and 7.0 more – but it’s just not necessarily so.
Now, I think in the case of Mixtikl, that there may be the ability to work on old sessions – so in 6.0, you can still load 5.0 projects and amend them – but I am not sure about that. If that is so – great, that avoids the dread Nanostudio Scenario – but, it’s still not the same, because the tools within 5.0, gave the tracks made with 5.0 – a unique musical identity – and to my mind, if I used 6.0 to update and amend a basic track made in 5.0 – it would NOT be as good as if I had been ALLOWED to complete the track within 5.0.
Why not keep them ALL alive? If you can keep six and seven going – why not five too?
To be honest, I’ve barely looked at six or seven, just enough to briefly assess what is going on, but I’ve not used either to make tracks yet. I have not been in “applications mode” for a while, but I am planning on working more with applications again starting in December 2017, and moving on into 2018 – and I would have loved to have had Mixtikl 5.0 available to work with. (Sigh).
Oh well,
Again – intellectually, I understand the need to move forward, for both Apple, they need to move to a 64 bit architecture (I assume that is the main reason for 11.0 but I don’t actually know!) and for each affected developer, there will be one of three scenarios I should think:
- Upscale the existing app to work in ios 11.0 and give it out as a free update to users
- Retire the existing app, and replace it with a completely new version with the next numeral identifier incremented upwards – (note: variable on this scenario – the new version MAY, or MAY NOT, be backwards compatible with the old version) – I continue to assume “MAY NOT”.
- Do nothing, let the old app die – and replace it with nothing.
I think that for developers, those are the choices, and I doubt if any of them seems all that palatable.
It all means a mass of work for them (except for 3) which they can ill-afford to do, and I couldn’t actually blame someone for choosing number 3 above.
It’s my hope though, that most will choose 1) or 2), and there will be some kind of continued existence for these remarkable music-making applications – which mean the world to me – I love them all.
Is there a workaround?
Well – maybe. I have a vague plan to update some devices (my main one has already been updated to ios 11.0 – luckily, I did not have anything in that particular implementation of Nanostudio except for a very forgettable drum track, so I exported that and then “pushed the button”.
However – on other devices, where there IS unfinished content in various states of development – I may choose, as my “workaround”, to NOT update them for many months (at some considerable risk) or at least, for long enough for me to mix, master and upload all of the unfinished tracks leaving me free to finally upgrade that device.
This is my vague plan, not sure how well it will farm out, but I have to try – I have to. I want to save the work where I can. Other, lesser apps may have had tracks that were mixed, but I have decided to just bite the bullet and essentially destroy the working masters in the apps – what choice is there, really?
You can save a mix. You could even save the individual tracks and rebuild your session in a future version (with a lot of painstaking work, you could do that) but if you import those tracks into a brand new version of the app, and then do work on it in that “new” app – I can guarantee that the finished track WILL sound different, to how it would have if completed in the original, now “dead” application.
So I suppose there are some positives here, but I am struggling to really see them – mostly, it just feels rotten, and despite understanding, intellectually and technically, “why” this has to be done – emotionally, and as a musician who is fond of his musical creations (for those of us with no actual children, songs can often become like our children) I don’t like the thought of losing unmixed or incomplete pieces of music, so I will be spending some time, trying to SALVAGE what I can, for example, from each implementation of Nanostudio – I’ve got songs on my iPhone, I know – so I will need to get that sorted out ASAP so I can wipe it by installing ios 11.0.
I don’t mind change, when it’s change for the common good. But in some ways, this change feels wrong, and I do wonder if the people at Apple ever think about the very human consequences of their actions – i.e. how will the users react to the idea of their favourite music apps being gone forever, and, to having works in progress suddenly be sentenced to death – and having to scramble to save them, so the inevitable update can finally go forward – and my instinct tells me that they have not given it a single thought – it’s just business as usual, who cares about a few “old” applications, anyway?
I have a feeling I am not alone in this, and that other musicians will have their own favourites, which they will be, like me, bemoaning the loss of due to the 11.0 update.
Not to mention, now having to scurry about, seeing what unfinished Nanostudio pieces are on which devices, and trying to finish songs that perhaps, you weren’t ready to finish – but now you HAVE TO, because a clock is ticking…you have no choice any more.
Speaking of that ticking clock, I had better get to assessing what work is sitting unfinished on which devices, find SOME way to complete them, get them mixed and mastered and offloaded – and then kiss the working files goodbye, forever – forever, that is – forever.
It’s all in the name of progress – I promise. It really is.
Until next time, then
Dave 🙂
pureambient / dave stafford 