Hello again! I’m back from a wonderful vacation and ready to share some more experience of Android programming. Today I’m presenting a simple drum machine app that I made for fun. If you saw the video above, then you probably got the idea how a drum machine works. The design was inspired by one of the greatest drum machines ever – the AKAI MPC. You can have a look at how the original device looked like for example here. Our app is, of course, greatly simplified compared to AKAI MPC, but you can have some fun with it too.
Here’s a screenshot for a better idea of how the UI looks (clickable):
Some interesting features of this app:
- The UI is done using bitmaps and custom controls to imitate the original device
- The latency is low enough not to be annoying (at least on my Droid)
- You can press multiple buttons at once which is very good for long samples such as the bass drum
- The LCD screen control uses a 9-patch bitmap background, and switches between flashing, static and ticker text
- The LCD screen uses a custom TrueType font that is included within the app
Now let’s see how the most interesting features of this app were implemented (as usual, the source is available at the bottom of the article).
