SpaceCraft Granular Synth 4+

Lives up to the hype

First, the interface lives up to the name. The user friendly xy pads and visual feedback make you feel like you’re piloting a spacecraft into new sonic territories, of which there are many you will find. Loading audio files is a breeze and you can load pretty long ones. I haven’t reached the limit. This leaves you with many many sonic possibilities within just one file. Very musical sounds, cool arpeggiator type thing to add even more rhythm to the sound. Honestly it’s hard to describe, but in the end, it’s a hell of a lot of fun to use and sounds great. The interface is such that there’s nothing to do but dive in and go crazy. Good times. Get it.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the review :)

Its pretty good, but...

There are lots of grain synthesis aps out now so this one has some competition. How does it stand up? Pretty well. Like most of the grain synthesis aps, the audio quality is quite good. It has the usual features but adds a kind of “playability” that is hard to describe but easy to recognize once you get your hands on it. The new version’s ability to use LARGE audio files (something like 20 minutes long) sets Spacecraft apart as very unique and can be quite useful. So on these points it competes pretty well.

However, its integration into the Audio Units world is rather odd. You must use it as an EFFECT in AUM, for example, while it is clearly a source (an actual synthesizer capable of originating its own sounds). When used as an AU, only one of the two channels is available in any one slot. Being an AU, you should be able to launch more than one instance of Spacecraft. But sadly, that will not work. Doing so results in crashing both instances.

The other major problem at this point in its history is that the ap will not save your work; it has no ability to save presets. However, the developer assures us that this feature is coming in a future release.

If these things were fixed, my personal opinion of Spacecraft would go up to rate it at least at four stars because I could actually use it and really exploit its otherwise very good capabilities.

Developer Response ,

When used as as AU effect you can record audio from an upstream instrument or microphone via the import sound button. This is why it is currently an AU effect.

Also in hosts like AUM just resize or double tap the window title to see both blue and pink channels of spacecraft

Sounds great! Can't save or import anything on iOS 9 or 10.

I like this simpler-than-iDensity granular synth quite a lot. It is more immediately intuitive than Tardigrain without losing the wonderful unpredictability of granular synthesis in producing interesting, beautiful, arresting, terrifying sounds. The interface is one of the better distillations of granular parameters that I have seen so far on the App Store.

Unfortunately, Spacecraft does not truly support Audioshare; it supports Apple's Files app, leaving users on iOS 9 and 10 with only iCloud for sound import/export. Nor does it store presets internally. Those have to go on iCloud as well. I don't use iCloud, and don't see much point in uploading my samples there to redownload them into a single app when Audioshare has everything already here on my iPad. So for now, Spacecraft is a demo on my iOS 9-running mini. A really nice demo--I hope to be able to make better use of it soon.