Day 23: Oval Synth - The sad Synth-App-Story

Today, dear ones, I would like to draw your attention to a very tragic case in the synth app / hardware story that makes me very sad to this day, as the idea behind it is phenomenal. Til today.

It's about the Oval Synth from OVAL Sound. I became aware of the project in 2016. A small Spanish company was looking for supporters for a MIDI (Bluetooth) handpan via Kickstarter. I couldn't make up my mind to pay 500 EUR for the part at the time, so I let it go.

You can find the Kickstarter campaign here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...​

The app that went with it was available for free in the App Store and what can I say: This app is still the best HandPan app in the App Store even though it shouldn't be there anymore, because Oval Synth went bankrupt in 2017 and until then only had almost half of the paid oval synths are delivered. Nobody knows what happened to the rest of the almost 350,000 euros, and my research was unsuccessful. I really wanted to find the programmer of the app and ask him to open the Bluetooth, which apparently only reacts with the Oval Synth, and to enable it for other devices, in my case the ZOOM ARQ AR-96.

Unfortunately, I couldn't achieve anything through the programmer and so this remains a sad legend in music history over the past few years.

Nevertheless, and I would like to emphasize again, this app is amazing and I use it very often to simply switch off. The sounds are fantastic, the effects useful and then there are the unbelievable number of scales in the different keys, more than half of which I don't even know.

So, if you have an iPad, get the app while it's still available and just try it out yourself.