11 More Band Instruments, and a Warning (Updated)

Posted by Eric March on May 11, 2008 at 1:06 pm

The instruments keep on a-coming. To be fair some of these existed prior to Band’s official release, but I didn’t think to check MooCowMusic’s forums for them. (Yeah, not very bright, this one.) We’ve got 10 more for you this time. These are all going to be manual downloads because to the best of my knowledge they are not yet available on any repository.

I should warn you however, that Band does have limitations. Specifically, it only has 128 megs of RAM (112 after the OS consumes its piece) and Band loads everything it finds in the instruments folder. These two facts will turn up to bite you in the butt if you have too many instruments at once — usually in the form of crashing. (Yes, those of you who have experienced crashing issues can attribute them to having too many instruments loading.) It isn’t actually the number of instruments so much as the overall size of the instruments being loaded. The bigger they are collectively, the more memory they require to load, and if you hit the limit — well, Darwin doesn’t do virtual memory, so you’re SOL. To manage this, copy over only the instruments you want to use via SSH, and delete instruments you don’t want to use. Hopefully Moo will create a method to load only instruments you want in future versions.

Now, without further ado, on with the instruments!

Musicbox: The plinkety sounds of a music box.
Cello: A cello with a keyboard interface. Decent sounding, but short samples.
Electric Piano: For those that want a honky-tonk vibe.
Pizzicato Strings: A very nice-sounding set of classical plucked strings.
MooMoog: The classic Moog sound, now in Band! Short samples, but very good.
Timpani: A nice set of timpani drums for that big epic orchestral sound.
Bongos: Four nice bongo sounds plus two finger roll samples. (UPDATED to 1.0)
Congas: (ADDED) A set of conga drums to accompany your bongos. Calypso!
Harmonica: The classic mouth organ. I couldn’t get this to work, unfortunately.
MPC500: A Band version of this classic Akai drum machine. Samples here are kinda harsh.
TB303: Roland’s legendary acid generator. Obviously no filter/envelope support, and the samples are short, but it’s still the 303.

Screenshots and download links can be found beyond the article break. Remember to put these in /private/var/mobile/Media/MooCowMusic/Band/Instruments

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Download:
Musicbox (349K RAR archive)
MooMoog (661K RAR archive)
Timpani (1MB RAR archive)
Bongos (960K ZIP archive)
Congas (370K ZIP archive)
Cello (1.2MB ZIP archive)
Electric Piano (1MB ZIP archive)
Harmonica (995K ZIP archive)
MPC500 (427K ZIP archive)
TB303 (1MB ZIP archive)
Pizzicato Strings (668K ZIP archive)

Thanks for the updates, Ben!

(Source: MooCowMusic)

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