MTP on iOS: We Got the OP-1 Field, OP-XY and TP-7 Talking to an iPhone

Yes, an iPhone can talk to an OP-1 Field over MTP. Put the Field into MTP mode, connect a cable and the tapes show up in Reel. A whole tape transfers as four separate tracks, any single track can go into any song and your mixdowns come across too. Anything you take off can be sent back.

The OP-XY connects the same way, with one extra trick. The project that made a performance gets kept alongside the recording, samples included, so you can send it back months later to pick up exactly where you left off.

The TP-7 does it too, which took us longest of the three. We call the whole thing tape swaps: two tape machines that can finally hand each other tapes.

It is coming to Reel. Not in the App Store version yet.

Ask how to get a tape off an OP-1 Field using only your phone. You will get the same answer everywhere. You cannot. MTP on iOS is a closed door, go and find a laptop. That has been the settled wisdom for years. Every developer answer we have read says the same.

The door was never locked.

We first got tapes moving off an OP-1 Field and back onto it from an iPhone in June, both directions, which as far as we know no other app has done. The OP-XY followed. The TP-7 took until now. Everything since has gone on the harder half: making it reliable, making it safe and making sure it can never leave you worse off than when you started. How we did it stays with us, for reasons we hope are obvious. What it does for you is the rest of this.

You know the one. Eight slots full, three of them half-finished things you are not ready to give up, the idea in your head needing somewhere to go right now, so something has to lose.

It is a strange gap in a machine that is otherwise a joy to use. The Field was built to be carried away from a desk. Everything you make on it then stays there until you go back to one.

Put the Field into MTP mode, run a cable to the phone and Reel picks it up on its own, listing the tapes for you with no file browser, no import screen and nothing to go hunting through.

Looking touches nothing on the device. Browse all day.

Pick one and it arrives intact, four tracks on the Field becoming four tracks in Reel, still separate. Nothing folded down to stereo. Nothing played back in real time so it can be caught again.

After that it is a reel like any other. Scrub it with the disc, set a loop and live in it for a while. Rebalance the parts, overdub the thing that never fit in the first place, take it somewhere strange with the pitch and print it. The sketch you made on a walk turns into something you can actually finish.

You do not have to take all of it either. The four tracks arrive separately, so any one of them can drop into any single track of any reel you like.

That bassline from a tape you finished with a year ago, sitting under the song you started on Tuesday. A vocal you always liked but never used, now track three of something else. A drum pass recorded on a train, ending up somewhere it was never meant to be.

Eight sealed boxes become a parts bin.

A backup you cannot undo is not much of a backup, so it travels the other way too. A tape sitting on your phone can go back onto the Field.

Which is the whole thing, really. A tape lives between the two machines rather than on one of them. Bring it over to work on and send it back to play out on the Field where it belongs. Park the two you are not touching this month, free the slots, chase the new idea and pull the old ones back whenever you want them.

No more deciding what to lose.

The finished sides come across as well, mixed, done, which means they are somewhere you can use them rather than somewhere they are stuck. Play them back, keep them safe off the device, tidy the ends and send one to a friend from the bus.

The OP-XY gets a different idea. It is the one we like most.

You record a performance into Reel the way you would today. What is new is what sits next to it. The project that made that performance gets kept with the recording.

The point of it shows up months later, when you play the take back to find that the hats are too loud. Or the second half wants a different bassline. Or you have simply got better since. Normally that is where it ends, because the OP-XY moved on long ago. All you have left is a stereo file you can admire but not touch.

With the project sitting alongside, you send it back. Samples travel with it, so one transfer puts the whole thing back exactly as you left it rather than leaving you to hunt down the sounds it used. Move what you want to move. Play it again.

Which also means an evening spent dialling in a patch is not living on one device only. The sounds ride along with the project that used them.

Since the day Reel launched, the most requested thing from TP-7 owners has been the same sentence. Get my recordings off this device without a computer. For the past few months it has been our main obsession behind the scenes.

The problem is that in MTP mode the TP-7 does not talk to iPhones the way other devices do. Every transfer until now has meant a laptop in the middle. The accepted wisdom was that it flat out could not be done on iOS. No app has managed it. We heard the same thing from every direction, then we found a way in.

Plug a TP-7 straight into the phone, open Reel, browse its recordings on the reel display and copy a track across. No computer. No export dance. The file just moves. As far as we know that is a first on iPhone.

Here is what tape swaps do with it:

• Pull any TP-7 recording straight into Reel
• Multitrack takes land as multitrack reels, every track in its place, ready to play and overdub. Six-track takes included
• Work on it in Reel, then send it back to the TP-7 as a native take
• Back up every recording on the device to your phone
• Build a multitrack in Reel and send it to your TP-7 for further work

Honestly, because you kept asking. Every email, every feature request, every "any chance Reel could read my TP-7?" pushed it up the list until it was the only thing we were working on.

It is still in testing on our own devices. It works. More soon.

One promise, built in from the start. Reel will never remove anything from your Field to make space for something else.

If all eight slots are full it says so, then stops, leaving you to decide what happens next. It will not quietly clear one for you. It will not write over a tape halfway through to leave you with neither, which is the failure that actually costs people work.

A whole tape takes a while. That is the Field's own pace rather than the phone's, with no getting round it. Start it, leave the screen awake with Reel in front and put the kettle on.

Single tracks, patches and projects are quick.

This is not in the App Store version of Reel yet. It works on our own devices, where we are building out the rest of it now, so if you are reading this hoping to do it tonight, you cannot. We would rather say so than have you buy the app to go looking for something that is not in it.

We will have more to say about when it lands closer to the time. Founders on the beta see it first.