Music Box Composer - Flashback

Music Box Composer was and it's still the best Music Box App in the App Store. Unfortunately the App stopped to be developed in June 2014. After my last review, 2 more updates were released. The App was really beautiful, the generating sound... A real Music Box. The built in sequencer, very powerful with lots of great features. I was beta Tester for this App, and I remember some discussions with its developer... He was a real fan of Music Box instrument, and because of this, he wanted to make an App the closest as possible as a real Music Box instrument... A lot of respect for this developer...

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Apps Store description:
Create your own Music Box music, and easily share your compositions with others.

Designed to aid composing your own music prior to punching the paper strips for Music Boxes, MBC allows you to compose, preview, play, save and share your creations via Twitter, Facebook, Email or iTunes file transfer.

A small but growing library of Music Box Strips can be viewed here, via webplayer or loading into MBC on device:
http://www.jellybiscuits.com/?page_id=763

Demo of composing, printing, punching an playing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWxkoHcPbS0

- Supports 15, 20 and 30 note music boxes.
- Share your compositions with others via Facebook, Twitter and Email.
- Multiple undo
- Disable Notes for temporary changes
- Ripple edits
- Save and Load (access the save location via iTunes File Sharing)
- Sounds sampled from physical Music Boxes
- Save strip to PDF/JPG file.

The physical Music Boxes with the paper punch strips and are great fun - what I found was missing was an easy way to preview either transpositions or original creations. This aims to fill that gap but it's also a fun music creation tool in it's own right.

Rated as a Killer App by Apps4iDevice.

Note that there is a desktop version of MBC available from the Mac App Store, as well as desktop versions for other OS's from the Jellybiscuits site.

OS >= 4.3

Apps4idevices review v2.11
Published on 4 Aug 2012
Music Box Composer is very well done & the sound is really good. The Edit mode is really easy to use, with some clever options. You can share your Song on Facebook, Twitter and Email. If a friend of yours has installed Music Box Composer on his iDevice, he will be able to play your Song with the Music Box 3D player and if you had checked the "Allow Editing" button before to share your Song, he will be able to Edit it! For me, the only drawback is the tempo mode which doesn't displayed the bpm (i know that with a "real" Music Box it is really hard to play in time but...). Music Box Composer is a Killer App !

2 updates more after this review:
2.21
3O Jun 2014
Works on |Pad 1 agaln
Loadnng strlps w|th odd l|ne endlngs no longer ends up w|th all notes dlsabled
2.20
26 Apr 2014
lvl D l|E export |n the ut|l|ty flyout look for the created f|le |n |Tunes F|le Shanng
PDF export as well as JPG |t |s saved w|th the JPG and the offer to ema|l after creatlng now w|ll a ach
we PD f|le
O Note Mapplng Fnx optlon added the prmted note values on the commerclally avanlable 30 no e
r p ere bemg matched but those notes were lncorrect th|s fixes that The notes played are the me
j we note labels and the layout of the Plano mode
Ne Auto Advance when addlng v|a plano note added th|s advances the t|mel|ne by the curren sn p
n1 n when addnng a note v|a the plano
Ex a pnano keys added at each end of the pnano str|p to a|d movlng forward and back |n t|me (mo e by
ent snap |nc ernent) for a more flund compos ng workflow us ng the pnano
bug whe e after us ng the pnano keyboard any button requnred two cllcks to act vate

Apps4idevices review v1.1
Published on 11 Apr 2012
Music Box Composer is pretty well done & the sound is really good. When i've begun to do my demo, i wanted to record No Surprise from Radiohead... Then i realized that there were no sharp & flat notes. So i wrote a email to the developer. Here is his answer: There are no sharps and flats because the scale matches the physical music boxes with paper strips that you can purchase - there is also a 20 note paper strip music box, also with no sharps or flats. I've been thinking I should offer half notes that are 'illegal' for the music boxes, but allow you to compose whatever you want, since I can do anything on the device, so a future version will allow this. Copy and paste is high on my list too. So, Musical Box is a Super App! With this future update it will certainly become a Killer App.

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