Smart and stylish – bleep!BOX Review

David, the creator of bleep!BOX, is great at keeping users updated about improvements. That's how I found out about the newest 1.1.1, and I'm glad WAV recording is in here, as that's a fundamental link between my desktop-based production and making beats on the go. I wish there was a way to batch-export trimmed loops and that the RECORD button gave feedback, but it works easily enough, and it's pretty neat how the TRANSFER mode works — I had no idea my iPod could connect via wi-fi like that. However, iphone.local didn't work, so I had to use the numeric IP. The sounds themselves ("no samples" as advertised) can be phat and squelchy or crunchy and metallic. The paging system took some time to get used to, but in retrospect, it works well with the iPod Touch/iPhone's screen layout, and made me take a refreshing approach to the UI paradigms involved. The general layout is sensible and clean. Tapping and flicking becomes easier after you find your way around, and I'm glad the INIT button is easily accessible to start from scratch. One of the unexpected-yet-joyful surprises came when I entered PERF mode, held down on a column of the parts to do a live stutter edit, then dragged back and forth to focus on that moment in time. Very neat. The PERF pads are lots of fun to tap, but they'd benefit from velocity sensitivity (I thought this was the case earlier, but was mistaken) to enhance dynamics and complement the MOTION values. A global delay effect makes me hope for more effects like a tidy bitcrusher to be added and tweakable in realtime, enabling a beautiful fusion of step-sequencing and live jamming. I also hope the pixelfont used in some areas will be enlarged, because there's still space and it's quite hard to read. Overall, bleep!box is a fun romp into the world of iPhone music-making and an educational one at being able to understand, in realtime, what different parameters do. It requires some getting used to as I mentioned, but since improvements have been ongoing, I look forward to what's next.
Review by Torley on bleep!BOX.