The Story of the Quiztones App

Posted on May 17th, 2011. Written by Dan Comerchero.

(Update 5/2/11: Quiztones 1.7 for iOS is available now as well as Quiztones for Mac.]

This is the story leading up to today’s release of the Quiztones frequency training app for iOS. Quiztones is a frequency ear training app which uses tones, noise & musical loops to sharpen your ears.

Quiztones

I created Quiztones a year ago to give engineers & musicians a fun, educational and interactive way to train their ears.

The Beginning

The idea started at McNally Smith College of Music when my teacher Joe Mabbott quizzed us on different frequencies using a tone generator. At the time, I was already working with flash developers building Staffnotes printable staff paper. I thought it’d be easy enough to just have them code a web-based flash app that would quiz you on different frequencies.

As most of my projects start, I just dove in without hesitating. Quiztones has evolved into a whole new beast, but I couldn’t be happier with where it’s headed.

Originally Quiztones was just sine waves and pink noise. I soon began adding more musical quizzes like frequency-altered guitar, bass and vocal loops. After getting a positive response, I decided to pursue the Quiztones iPhone app.

Audiofile Engineering

In early April, towards the “end” of developing the app, an incredible opportunity came along. At the time, I was working with an overseas programmer. He wasn’t an audio engineer or a musician, and the app’s quality wasn’t where I needed it to be.

Later that same month, I interviewed for an internship at Audiofile Engineering through school. I knew it was a perfect fit. Audiofile Engineering builds great software for iPhone and Mac OS X, and I wanted to learn more about that process.

Halfway through our interview, Matthew Foust, co-owner of Audiofile Engineering said “what if we develop & distribute the Quiztones app?” The rest is history. Within a month we became partners, and submitted the Quiztones app to the App Store.

The Future

The technical innovation that Audiofile Engineering brings to Quiztones is incredible. Besides integrating iZotope Signal Processing into their own acclaimed FiRE 2 – Field Recorder App, they’ve actually now authored their own proprietary DSP for iOS. We plan on integrating their EQ & dynamics processor into future versions of the Quiztones app.

This would mean features like:

• Quizzes out of songs from your iPhone’s iPod library & SoundCloud
• A “match the sound” trainer where you attempt to match a processed audio loop with on-board controls.
• In-depth quiz difficulty adjustment and scoring
• Tons of new audio content

This partnership has opened up many doors. I love working with Audiofile Engineering. Not only are they more experienced and smarter than me, but they believe in my ideas and respect my vision for Quiztones. Besides being entrepreneurs, they’re also talented, accomplished musicians and audio engineers who code at an elite level.

Quiztones is in its infancy, and we have tons of new and exciting features planned for its future.

If you enjoy the Pro Audio Files, please support us by purchasing Quiztones today.