From tomorrow the Retronyms integrated universe emerges

You may well be aware that Retronyms are about to announce their next app, Hook, tomorrow. They’ve been talking about it for a few weeks now, and have been posting weekly videos about it, starting with this one:

Which was a nice little intro if a bit lite on the details of the app. They made up for that with their next video:

Which started to show the functionality of the app in a bit more detail, and then progressed to their latest video showing iTunes and Spotify workflow:

All of this gets delivered to us tomorrow along with their hardware product Wej. The 21st will be a big day for the Retronyms, and I’ll be watching.

But as I’ve watched the videos, read the press releases and also played with the app itself something started to dawn on me, and if you’ve already spotted it then please forgive me for being kind of slow on the uptake.

From tomorrow Retronyms will have their own iOS, content, and hardware ecosystem all in place, all integrated and all available. It’s quite impressive in many ways, or at least I think so. Here’s what they will have achieved as of tomorrow:

Content:

It can be easy to forget that Retronyms are responsible for AudioCopy, something that lots of apps use, and that lots of us rely on. But AudioCopy isn’t just a handy utility for moving stuff about, no, it’s a content store too. Whether you use it or not, it’s there and it has a lot of content available from some pretty decent names too.

Tools:

As of tomorrow Retronyms will have Hook on the store, their new mashup / remix tool for iOS. I’ll reserve judgement on that until tomorrow I think. But let’s not forget that they also have Tabletop, their own sort of modular music making environment. Also integrated with AudioCopy.

What remains to be seen is how (or indeed, if) Hook will integrate with Tabletop? I think it might be a missed trick if it didn’t, but let’s see what they do from tomorrow.

Hardware:

Last but not least Retronyms have their Wej hardware. A device which is tightly integrated with Hook and goes on general sale as of tomorrow.

And one (or possibly more) last thing(s) …

Let’s not forget that Retronyms also arrange some pretty cool mobile music meet ups and events and have a few other (possibly slightly unloved) apps in their repertoire, such as Phase84, iMPC Pro, Stryke, and my personal favourite DopplerPad which was original released in 2009! Personally I think DopplerPad would be amazing if it got updated, but I’ve probably said that one time too many.

Tomorrow will be interesting, but I’ll be really keen to see how this whole integrated Retronyms universe develops further. For now, one step at a time.

Hook and Wej tomorrow, good luck Retronyms.