PulsePilot Live

On stage and in rehearsal, many musicians play to a click track: a metronome programmed song by song that sets the tempo for the whole band. Preparing these click tracks usually means using studio software on a computer, which is hardly practical when it is time to go on stage.

The main constraint is precision. A click that drifts by a few milliseconds over the course of a song makes an app unusable live. The standard timers available to a mobile app are not regular enough, so the solution had to rely directly on the device's audio clock, and behave identically on iPhone and Android.

BarkelTech built PulsePilot Live from a single codebase for iOS and Android. At its core is a native audio engine written in C++ and shared by both platforms: it schedules every beat on the hardware audio clock, with no JavaScript timers involved. The Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android, via Oboe) layers only handle what is specific to each system, such as the audio session and output stream.

Precision is checked by automated tests on the engine, including a drift test over thirty minutes of continuous playback. Around this engine, the app offers a metronome, a click track editor and a stage view that stays easy to read during a gig. Songs are stored locally on the phone in an SQLite database, so they remain available without a connection. The interface follows one simple rule: anything to do with tempo must be reachable without a second thought, even under the pressure of a live show.