Bang Track.

Client & context

Sean Patwell (Sean-P) is a recording artist, music producer and band member. He wanted something close to a portable vocal studio: the ability to capture a vocal idea over a beat the moment inspiration strikes, and share it without going back to a studio.

The challenge

Recording music on a phone is unforgiving. Latency between the beat and the voice is immediately audible; re-recording a whole take because of one wrong line kills the flow; and a recording app is only useful if the result sounds good enough to share. The app also had to sell beats and upgrades inside the app.

What we built

We built a native iOS app on a low-latency audio pipeline (The Amazing Audio Engine on Core Audio units). According to its App Store listing, Bang Track let users:

• pick a hip-hop instrumental from the in-app Beat Store or use a beat from their own iTunes library;
• layer up to three vocal tracks per song;
• fix mistakes with Auto Punch - re-record just the faulty section instead of the whole take;
• share the finished track to Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud.

In-app purchases ran through MKStoreKit, projects were stored locally with Core Data, and waveforms and levels were drawn with Core Plot. A free Bang Track Lite version was also published.

Process & timeline

Audio work needs testing on real devices with real voices, so we tuned latency and mixing with Sean during the build rather than at the end. Delivery took 4 months.

Results

Bang Track was released on the App Store on 13 September 2013 and updated until August 2015 (source: AppAdvice). It is no longer listed on the App Store.

Sean got a working studio in his pocket: vocal ideas could be captured, fixed and shared the moment they came, without booking studio time.

At our current rates, a build of this scope would cost about £22–40k — an estimate from the feature list, not the original invoice.

If we built it today

Today we would keep the native audio pipeline - latency still decides whether a music app is usable - and add cloud sync of projects between devices, collaboration on a track, and direct publishing to the streaming platforms artists use now. A first release of a product like this typically takes 6–8 weeks; our rates start from £49/hour per developer, and £65–£70/hour for a full team with QA and product ownership. Discovery starts from £3,000.

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