📦 Muser Studio v1.0.27:
GPU accelerated video looper app with 2.5x faster rendering

Release Notes

Features:

• Up to 2.5x faster rendering with new GPU accelerated video pipeline.

Bug fixes:

• Renaming projects could cause crashes in some circumstances.  This should be fixed now.

🏎️ Faster rendering, less waiting

Ooof it’s been a while getting this release out the door.  The majority of my app development time on this release has been focused on one thing: speed.  Ironic, given how long it took me.

The result of the hard work: 2.5x faster rendering time, based on my test cases.

What does it even mean to have a GPU accelerated video looper app?

Muser Studio is for rhythmically looping video, in the spirit of how you would use a guitarists looper pedal.  In realtime you get to hear the audio loops build.  Then, when you’re finished, the Muser Studio creates a video of your session with looping video clips as well as the audio you heard and playing.  This video generation process is called “rendering”.  This is the bit that has been accelerated in this version.

Rather than pushing these calculations through the general purpose processing power on your phone, it’s now going through circuitry called the GPU, designed for graphics and video.  That’s why it’s faster.

Why didn’t you do this before?

Fair question, especially as it’s a pretty obvious choice to put video rendering through the GPU rather than the CPU.  Unfortunately it’s also more fiddly.  I kept bumping into edge cases where the renderer would silently fail and never actually finish rendering.  Or silly things like text rendering upside down, or videos with the wrong orientation. *Note if you ever see any things weird please let me know through the support portal,  or in the comments so I can fix the bugs quickly.

So ultimately it was the pitfalls and complexity that caused me put this feature off for a while.  I needed to have enough time, and honestly enough skill to handle it and create something stable as a result.

Fast forward to now when I can finally share a version with a better use of hardware and a smoother experience.

Btw, you do not need to change anything. It should just be faster.

👷Stability fix

I also noticed a bug with renaming projects has been addressed. If you ran into odd behaviour around renaming before, this should now be resolved.

Thanks again for using and supporting Muser Studio. The goal stays the same: a looping video camera for musicians and the rhythmically inclined, on your phone, in real time, with less friction.

v1.0.27 is available now for iOS

Photo credit: Mateus Durães dos Santos - A Close-Up Of A Computer

Photo credit: Maxime Rossignol - Computer Motherboard Near Graphics Card

Photo credit: Keanu K - Black Apple Logo With White Light