LaDiDa: A new way to make music on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Introduction

I was looking through the app store the other day and discovered LaDiDa, which is, in my opinion, the most wonderful app for creating music on your iDevice. It is an autotuner that applies effects to your voice and automatically puts a beat into your music!

This makes it very different from other music apps such as I am T-Pain. The songs that it comes up with are pretty funny and sometimes even worth listening to, because it makes your voice sound different, almost like that of an electronic music singer.

To listen to some of my songs so you know what it sounds like before you get the app, go to my LaDiDa folder on Dropbox.

the application costs €2.39 and can be downloaded by accessing its iTunes Store entry.

Working the app

When you first launch the app, you'll be in the studio. From here, if you move according to screen order, you get the style button. Clicking it will open a slider with 6 styles: We have 2 pop styles, one weird jazz and 3 rap. All you have to do is choose the style in the slider. To get to the slider, tap near the half bottom of the screen - You can't get to it otherwise.

to the right of this slider, there's another slider, which is tempo. When you're in the style area, you'll hear a metronome. if you move the tempo slider, the metronome will get faster/slower depending on where you moved the slider. If you move it upwards, the tempo is faster; If you move it downwards, tempo slows down.

Once the style and tempo are set, hit the ok button at the top. You'll be back in the studio. From here, you can hit the record button. You'll get an alert saying "sing in 3, 2, 1..." The best thing to do here is turn speech off so it doesn't interfere with your singing. Just sing in tempo and double tap. If you didn't move the cursor, it will be on the stop button, so double tapping will stop recording. If you flick right twice from this record button You'll find a label which will say either processing or hit play now. While it is processing your audio, flicking right from this label moves you to a progress bar telling you how much of your audio it has processed. When it's done, you can hit the play button to hear your results. If you don't like what you hear, you can hit record again. It'll ask you to overwrite, just say yes.

Saving

To save a song, just hit the save button. On recent iOS versions, it will say cancel, but the truth is that you are on an edit field, so just touch the keyboard and type the name of the song, then hit enter or ok. The song will then save and automatically put you in the my songs area.

The my songs area

From here, you can listen to any song you have recorded. There's also an unlabelled button called glove icon. This is share. If you have configured your Facebook or Twitter account in the settings, you'll be able to post your songs as links. You can also send them to yourself as attachments, which is necessary if you want to convert them to mp3 (I'll explain this below). I will not tell you how to configure LaDiDa with your accounts, because the settings dialog is pretty straightforward. If you need help, post on the forums.

I like my songs, can I put them on my computer?

Indeed you can; however, you'll need to configure LaDiDa with Facebook, because it needs to upload your song to their network. Go into settings and use your Facebook credentials. If you don't want to use Facebook, you can create a LaDiDa-Me account which I haven't done.

Once you have configured Facebook you can send your song to yourself as an atachment. Just make sure you click the LaDiDa-Me button inside the share area to upload the song and that the song has finished uploading before you click the send as atachment button. This will open up the IOS email program. Just type your address, review and edit the message as needed and hit send. You will hear a sound letting you know that the email was sent. You will get your song in AIF format, which iTunes can open; however, you might not want this in your library, so you can listen to it with QuickTime. From QuickTime, if you have QuickTime pro there's an export dialog which lets you convert your song to a bunch of other formats.

If you don't want to use QuickTime, because you don't have QuickTime Pro, I'm sure you can find a converter somewhere. I used www.media-convert.com for a while before I found out that QuickTime could convert it.

I encourage you all to post your songs on the forums. If this app gets popular enough, I'll create a small LaDiDa community site where everyone will be able to post their stuff.

Discovery

the discovery area is really nice, but it can be frustrating at the same time. Here, you can hear other people's uploaded songs. The problem is that this part of the app crashes often when VoiceOver is enabled, so you have to disable it. Also, you can't save other people's songs because they come up in a video window. It also has a weird design, but you'll eventualy get used to it. There's an edit field where you can search and, to the side of it, you find some buttons which say Domestic and World. As you might have guessed, domestic will show songs done in your country, world will show everywhere. Then, there's recent, or newest, and top, which is best rated. Yes, there's a rating system. To the right of the songs you get 5 star buttons to rate them. So, since you'll get 5 buttons to the right of each song I recommend just sliding your finger across the screen to hear the diferent song titles. Once you click on a song, hit the home button 3 times fast to disable voice over if you don't want the program to crash and go boom on you. When the song ends you can enable voice over again and you'll be back in the list where you can rate or listen to another song.

Conclusions

LaDiDa is a great app, it can be really fun at times and I've had it for about 3 weeks and I'm still making songs with it. It's hard to get bored with it because if you have lyrics in mind and you can sing half ok, you can do neat stuff. The chord progressions it does are good, and it almost always knows what you're trying to sing.

Just try it out, and if you have any comments, let us know!

• Login or register to post comments