[Harp-L] ¿ Backing track APPs ?

[Chris Hofstader]

> 
> iRealPro is very useful for backing tracks of many genres. If you know the chord chart you can create your own backing track quickly.
> 
cdh: Does this app come with a cost? My only reason for asking is that we blind people need to use apps that are compatible with the iOS accessibility API and a lot of music related software does this either very poorly or not at all, rendering these apps impossible for me to use. I don’t want to buy anything even for $1 that proves either very difficult or impossible for me.

A few years back, I wrote a blog article called “The Irony Of Inaccessible Music Technologies <http://chrishofstader.com/the-irony-of-inaccessible-music-technologies/>” about how much more difficult it is for blind people to work in music and audio production these days. It’s an annoying stereotype that all blind people are musicians (quickly, off the top of your head think of five blind people who are not Helen Keller or me and I’ll bet you a sandwich that most of them are musicians) but, entirely due to the intransigence of software publishers to include compatibility with the accessibility API, we can’t get the jobs we once could in radio, music production, audio production and all of the things people with such skills could as recently as five or six years ago. And we amateur/hobbyist people who play music for fun can’t use a real lot of the software that we might find useful.

cdh: It isn’t all grim. A pretty expensive software/hardware combination that sells for around $800 or more the name of which escapes me at the moment has made all of its software, including plug-ins through a really clear hack but spending almost a grand on a keyboard based system designed for composers is pretty hard to stomach for an amateur harp player. The guys who make Reaper have been cooperating with a group in Australia and have made it really accessible. Apple did a great job with Garageband and Logic but, as far as I know, this is the extent of the accessible music technology landscape at this point in history.

Happy Hacking,
cdh


Happy Hacking,
cdh