Square Waves 4+

A Solid Performer

I’ve been using the application for approximately a year or more at this point. I think it does a great job at being a media player for VGM files. I love the ability of isolating the different channels, you can really hone in on the different sounds and synths involved in some of the music, especially tunes that tend to have louder channels that overshadow underlying synths that would normally go unnoticed.

As it sits right now, the only thing I wish that could be added is the ability for custom VGM files to be used. Aside from that, this application is solid!

A solid app with some notable issues

This was the app I’d been looking for, one that could play and shuffle a wide range of native game music files! It has a clean logical layout and the baseline features for a respectable media player without a cheesy retro aesthetic. I paid for it and then started into more heavy use. Two bugs came up for me that have spoiled the experience of using it however— and additionally, a small but important missing feature.

1. The PCM audio tracks for mega drive vgms generally don’t play. Maybe it depends on the source, but I have a big library of more recently-produced vgm files, exported from deflemask and vgm music maker which consistently seem to omit the sample channel. (It shows as present, but produces no sound).
2. The app will never successfully add a zip archive containing compatible files, it tries to, and sits for a while but then nothing new has been added. I’ve tried individual games in zip files as well as the master project2612 archive multiple times (stored on the local device, not in the cloud).
3. Not complex, but a pretty important omission imo: there really needs to be an artist category- many formats can store this meta data and there is real value in being able to filter/sort by a single creator.

Developer Response ,

Hey thanks for the review! I’ll definitely be looking into the bugs you shared. If you’d like, you can file bugs here: https://github.com/a-busman/SquareWaveSwift/issues as this app is entirely open source.

High hopes but hasn’t worked out

I was a big NoisES user, and basically every chiptune player I’d found for iOS was just… too bulky or came with seven thousand hours of unremovable pre-installed music. So, was happy to find this app.

On the plus side: it’s minimal, it has all the functions I’d want, and it plays just fine.

However, in my ~3 days of use, this app has been seriously buggy. A selection:
— loading files from iCloud or Google Drive does not recognize .nsf files. At all. It will load .7z or .zip with an .nsf in it just fine, but trying to add the .nsf alone doesn’t work (its greyed out)
— songs work fine, for a while, but within a few uses of the app, the songs remain in the UI but playing them does nothing. If you look at the “Voices” menu for those songs, they’re empty, so there’s nothing to play

I assume these are growing pains of the project, so I’ve got high hopes for the future, but for now I think I’ve got to shelve this until some of the kinks get worked out.