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.

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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