Last week, I spoke at the 360iDev conference for the third consecutive conference. This time, in order to make the most impact, I proposed a full-day workshop on AudioKit entitled “Build Your Own Custom Musical Instrument” and I was very happy how it turned out. Since I had all day, I decided to do live-coding and build a few musical instruments from scratch. Some people followed along, and some people just watched, but what they got to see is a very honest representation of how I work with AudioKit.
- Develop in playgrounds
- Make mistakes and introduce bugs
- Squash those bugs to get a working playground
- Convert that playground to an app
We did this for two classes of instruments, a drum kit and a synthesizer.
Mucho thanks to @AudioKitMan for the help at @360iDev ! Super inspired to do more audio programmin 🎹
— Zach McArtor 🧙♂️👨💻 (@zmcartor) August 17, 2017
Along the way, I was able to walk around the room and make sure that people had their Xcode set up to run AudioKit Playgrounds and fix people’s own bugs and problems.
In the afternoon session, Matt Fecher and I mostly helped people with their own audio projects and discussed advanced topics both as a group and one on one.
Zach McArtor showed me a very cool app that he’s working on and I showed him a few things in AudioKit that could help him out. It was great to meet Sean Olszewski, a friend of AudioKit’s own Paul Batchelor, and Jon Bauer from Pandora, both of whom had excellent ideas for the future of music. It was great to hang out with John Groenhof and see progress on his advanced metronome app. It was also great to finally meet Janie Clayton in person!
Delia is showing tremendous enthusiasm for AudioKit. pic.twitter.com/K0InpgCP8l
— Janie Clayton (@RedQueenCoder) August 13, 2017
After the talk, I hosted the 360iDev’s “Night Of Veggies”, an alternative dinner to the conference’s traditional “Night Of Meat” which was not appealing to a lot of conference goers because of dietary, ethical, environmental, religious, and health reasons. There I met more great folks like David Dropinski, who is not only intelligent, but also extremely perceptive. Steve Lipton wanted to attend the AudioKit workshop, but had to settle for getting to hear me talk about AudioKit on the walk over to the restaurant. Steve is an amazing explainer of things and I love his LinkedIn Playgrounds course. We’re definitely “Playground Blood Brothers” and he wrote up a really nice blog about 360iDev in which he mentions AudioKit.
Building a custom iOS musical instrument, starting now at #360iDev #iosDev #musicapp #audiokit #xcode #musictech #creativecoding pic.twitter.com/7X40ruDdeA
— AudioKit Pro (@AudioKitPro) August 13, 2017
Finally, I just want to say that I really appreciate all the hard work John from 360iDev does to put on such a great conference.
AudioKit Folks at lunchAudioKit Folks at lunch
AudioKit Folks at Lunch
