The first video outlines what you’ll need in order to use FuzzMeasure properly: a USB/Firewire audio device, a microphone, a sound source, and the appropriate cables to attach them together.

The second video walks you through the process of setting levels for a successful measurement. It’s common to forget or rush this step, so I went through the process myself—making sure to mess it up a little bit.

The third (and final) video demonstrates the automatic correction feature using a loopback cable. This process tends to confuse most new users, but it is very important for guaranteeing accurate results.

My hope is that these videos will make it easier for new users to dive into FuzzMeasure and begin making useful measurements more quickly.

The big star in this release is the new audio slowing engine that I licensed late last year. I had a very successful year of sales in 2011, and decided to put a chunk of that cash towards improving Capo’s audio quality. I already went all out on the visual side, so naturally it was time to deliver on the audio side as well!

Integrating the audio library took quite a bit of time, because I ended up using the re-architected audio engine that I built for Capo on the iPhone. Now the two products share much more common code on that front.

One thing to note is that the iPhone version of Capo has already been using this audio engine from the start, though the quality isn’t quite as high as the new Mac version due to the lack of resources on the mobile devices. That said, the audio quality on the iPhone is actually better than the previous Mac versions!

To mark this new release, I added a new ‘Audio’ tab to the website at http://capoapp.com, so you can hear the new engine at work. I’m quite excited about how much better it sounds than before, and I think you’ll also enjoy the improved clarity when slowing your music way down.

Of course, this is a free upgrade for all existing users of Capo 2 for the Mac! So what are you waiting for? Go buy, or update your copy now!

With all the success of last year, I am trying to ensure that I can continue growing in the future while also trying to focus on refining the products that got me here. This is going to be harder than it sounds.

I am asked repeatedly about adding new products to the lineup. While I have some ideas in the pipeline, I am having trouble staying on top of the existing lineup as it is. Between the support effort (for which I thankfully have help), and constant revisions to Apple’s OSes, it’s hard to find the time to come up with more products (and huge feature additions) when you’re constantly playing catch-up. (See: Fire and Motion.)

With that said, I’m excited about what this year holds. There is a lot of work to do on every single one of my products, and that’s a great problem to have. I have no shortage of work to do, and I look forward to continuing my work on a lineup of products that I’m proud to have built.

So to answer the question: What’s coming in 2012? Exciting updates to all of my products, and hopefully the release of one that I’ve had in my back pocket for a while now. Stay tuned.

See, slowing audio properly requires a lot of CPU power. On a desktop Mac, there’s plenty of power to spare these days. Unfortunately—this is not the case in the mobile world. Because Capo is both graphics- and audio-intensive, it eats up a lot of CPU power.

When version 1.0 released, Capo was eating up about 80% CPU while playing audio in the foreground (i.e. with graphics visible) on a 3rd Generation iPod touch, and maybe 75-80% on an iPhone 4. The CPU/RAM improvements on the iPhone 4 were offset by the increase in pixel density pushing the GPU a little harder. C’est la vie.

If I wanted to do anything else with the app, I’d have to fit it into approximately 20% of leftover CPU.

Capo’s effects are both graphics and CPU-hungry, so I had my work cut out for me to add them in the next version. This was especially challenging, because I wanted to keep the live-updating spectrums in the effects control backgrounds as I have on the desktop version. Go big or go home, right?

Luckily for me, there were optimizations added to the slowing engine I use, as well as some further optimization work on my part. That 20% margin increased a little bit more, so I was able to shoehorn an initial implementation of the effects UI into the mix.

The initial approach simply sucked—it caused various skips in the audio, and the graphics were very choppy. It was especially noticeable when you’d scroll the effects controls while they were enabled.

The first culprit was my effects implementations. I built my own Equalizer, but it was taking about 15% of the app’s runtime according to Instruments. I had to take care of this, and re-wrote the tight loop using NEON intrinsics. That took it down to 1.5-2%—sweet!

I also had to re-write my FFT-based vocal reduction to use the Accelerate version of FFT rather than the implementation I previously used. I don’t recall the specifics, but I think the result was approximately 10x faster—the performance optimization team at Apple really kicked ass with their FFT implementation!!

Unfortunately, there was still about 30% of runtime being allocated to my live-updating spectrum drawing. I initially implemented the spectrum drawing using Core Animation and Quartz. That had to be thrown out, and I instead re-built the live spectrum views using OpenGL ES 2. A few custom shaders and other black magic made short work of that—reducing the runtime to about half of what it was before—15-18%. It cost me the prettier anti-aliased curves, but the speed boost was worth it.

In the end, I’m proud of what I shipped today. I know that the progress isn’t as quick as I’d hoped on the iOS side of Capo, but I think I truly nailed this effects implementation. Because of this extended effort, Capo will continue to be the best tool for learning your music by ear on your iPhone, iPod, or iPad.

I can’t wait to find out what else I can shoehorn into that “last 20%” in the future…

Just before the work term ended, Marie helped me put together an updated screencast video that demonstrates how to set up Soundflower for use with TapeDeck. She did a great job with it, but unfortunately she finished her work term before we had a chance to record a proper voiceover track.

Now, her full-time replacement, Nathan, has stepped up to fulfill that task.

Here’s the latest video to come out of the SuperMegaUltraGroovy studios:

Nathan’s also a fantastic drummer, so you should expect to see some drum-related Capo videos in the near future.