Poly 2

Rediscovered, again. And, again, I grow and Poly 2 grows with me! Every time I think I’ve come to a limitation of Poly 2, it turns out that it was really mine. lol Right now I’m listening to one of the moody’ish ambient music loops I’e ever heard. ‘Swollen Pads’. I’ve made 6 variations of their original. So much fun on an iPhone 12 on iOS 17.6 and not a single problem and the ‘smartest’ iPhone music app ever! It’s as if I had given them both a features list as well as the perfect iPhone user interface, documentation, and sound quality. Right here in the ‘palm’ of my hand, watching the World translating it into sound.

I recently returned to the Poly 2 sequencer and it still stands out as a unique, creative tool. It’s a really fun app to explore. Customization took a little time to figure out, but I’m very happy with the overall design and development. One issue -which after 5+ years still hasn’t been addressed- is the lack of sustain/voice ring-out when the transport is stopped. When playback is stopped—whether through the internal transport or an external hardware MIDI sequencer—the project’s voices do not sustain or ring out. I couldn’t find any updated preference settings to address this. Taking into consideration delay and reverb settings applied for each track, I would expect the voices from each of the eight tracks to sustain naturally when stopped or paused. To be candid, I had totally forgotten about this until I came back to the app. A limited workaround is to switch to an empty pattern, which lets the active patterns ring out. However, this is restrictive since one of the 16 pattern slots must be allocated for this purpose. Even then, it doesn’t fully solve the issue: if the transport is stopped mid-sustain, the entire project still cuts off instead of letting the tails fade naturally. You have to wait until all voices finish ringing out before stopping. This is worth noting for live performance or recording, unless you’re employing an alternative DSP option to compensate. Lastly, as an alternative workaround that retains use of all 16 patterns, you could modify the patterns in real time by changing their playback length values to something other than INF in order to close out the set. It feels a bit counterintuitive, but it’s another option. Just wanted to pass this along. It’s not a dealbreaker for me—I can now address it with an analog pedal or by syncing another FX app—but I wonder if the absence of this feature has impacted the app’s ability to attract or retain users. I realize it may be too late to submit this as a feature request, but overall, this is still a great, unique app and a real joy to work with. Well done, James! I still get a lot out of this app.

This is a great app. I never do reviews, but this is a lovely gem of software art. It opens up a completely novel and creative way of making music. Beautiful.