ShapeMix [iTunes link] — available now for $4.99 — was developed by Colin Owens, a musician and graphic design professor at RISD, as well as Legion Enterprises. ShapeMix is the first company to come out of Legion Enterprise's incubator program.
Owens thought of the idea after exploring audio mixing interfaces on the computer in the pre-tablet days. “I thought they hadn’t translated well over the computer,” he says. “As a musician and engineer, I thought we could do this in a more interesting and intuitive way.”
At the time, he was working with a touchscreen he had imported from Korea, but when the iPad came out, everything came together. The d evice replicated the tactile sensation of working with a mixer much more than anything he had experienced on a computer.
The app itself is extremely easy to use. Full disclosure: I have absolutely no experience mixing music, but I was still able to pick up my iPad and navigate through the app rather rapidly.
Within the app, there are more than 100 free tracks that one can use to create a mix. Each song within the app is broken down into such tracks, which are basically instrumental sections (piano, drums, organ, stutter, boom, etc). One can also mix tracks from different songs — so, for example, you could add the drums from “Dirty South” to “Ghetto Blaster.”
Once you’ve chosen all of your tracks, you can toggle between two screens. The first comprises a series of colored circles denoting an instrument, which you can move up to make the instrument in question louder, and down to do the opposite. Moving them left and right changes the panning of the...
