Wotja: Live Generative Music

Wotja is a veritable "Swiss Army Knife" of generative, ambient, midi and audio tools. I have been updating Wotja ever since it was called Koan Pro over 30 years ago. You should enjoy Wotja if you like in Brian Eno's ambient works, midi composition or creating ambient/relaxation music. I suffer with stress. Wotja has been a great comfort though these challenging times. A very big thank you to Tim and Pete of Intermorphic.

I'm so happy I found Wotja! It's a generative music system that's easy to use, yet incredibly powerful. I'm new to music, but Wotja is empowering me to create my own unique soundscapes and melodies. I'm particularly excited about the potential to export Wotja creations to Logic Pro X and empower my existing set of libraries. I think the people behind Wotja are geniuses, and they clearly know inside out the science of sound. If you're interested in creating music, I highly recommend Wotja. It's a must-have tool for any musician, regardless of experience level. I'm not trying to promote Wotja in this review. I just wanted to share my experience with others, because I'm so grateful for this app. It is starting to help me to express my creativity in a way that I never thought I would be in conditions to make it possible.

I've been following Tim and Pete's work for many years, starting with Koan and right up to the latest version oif Wotja. Wotja is great and I've found the latest version to be a real step up in terms of results, Users can dive deep into the parameters and options for ambient dound design or simply hit random mix to produce a complete ambient/cinematic/soundtrack album. Love it! Thanks again Tim and Pete.

I’m a fan of generative apps (Eno) but this is baffling and unusable. Downloaded, tried for 10 minutes then deleted. Sorry, but not for me.

As with any decent piece of software (or tool of any kind), Wotja gives pleasing instant results but also rewards exploration and experimentation with the different aspects that make it so deep. Over the last year I’ve been using Wotja for sound design and audio tracks for performance and art installations. This has used techniques based on the core app, used the ability to drive plugins and also trigger samplers and apps thro AUM in IOS. This new version brings Wotja its own sampler, new filters and a huge new reverb. I really have still only scratched the surface but am constantly delighted by what it produces.

Wotja can produce streams of relaxing and engaging output, with minimal effort from the user. It deserves to be much more popular than it apparently is, which is a pity given the love that its creators clearly give it. Dont feel you have to read anymore of this review, get it, upgrade to pro for a week when you have a bit of time to experiment and immerse yourself in what it has to offer. I am no expert, I have probably played with Wotja for about 20 hours now, so am reviewing from ignorance not expertise. It is much more accessible at a simplistic level than its grandma Koan (which I had on a PC in about 1998). and really nice things fall out very easily. As an example, hours went by allowing Wotja to generatively interact with a couple of really basic sequences from my Keystep Pro. It would get five stars (and more) if I could find a way to understand its intricacies better. I would love to be able to pin Wotja within a more structured environment, so I could alter the root note of the whole engine in line with other pre-determined tracks in my DAW or via a midi keyboard. This seems possible from a script, but those are a bit intimidating to me. A couple of videos describing the rules hierachies along with the conceptual structure would be great sometime in 2023 too. I know this is covered in the guides, but Wotja is so different to almost any other musical software that I have ever encountered that it cries out for a patient video from one of its creators that explains the generative engine (including rhythms, harmony and the word to music melodic generator )conceptually. At least then dunderheads like me would have a structure to land our further learning and experimentation on. Even without this, it is still wondrous and exceptionally good value.

For some crazy reason you can’t shut off a sound generator (the engine just replaces it with a horrible sounding cheap plonking piano tone). Imagine a synth where you shut off an oscillator and the sound gets replaced with a cheap piano sound instead …. Refund requested.

What I want is a music generator that will produce an ambient track at the click of a button. I don't want to explore it, or record it, or edit it, or produce it, or adjust it, or anything else. I just want it to work. The free version of Wotja does just that, for half an hour, and then you have to click the button again. At least, it does 9 times out of 10. The tenth time, it starts running but no sound comes out. All you can do is quit and reload. Worse, sometimes it hangs and you have to force it to quit. I wonder if the paid version would give me these problems too. I wouldn't mind paying if I knew it wouldn't.

Picture the scene: it's Sunday morning chez Less de la Clue, Monsieur Huh-What is 'tinkering' again, bless him. There is an iPad looking nervously at him, trying to look busy and all the gear in the world hoping they look busier. Wotja hasn't experienced the delights of the Huh-What 'workflow' and therefore fully believes that it can bring to life the brain cell waiting for it. The fool. But wait! What is this? You might even ask, Huh-What is this? There seems to be... melodic sounds emanating from the monitors! A cautious smile creeps across the face of our protagonist. Can it be? Could this be real? Is he, finally, after a millenia of midi-based turmoil, could he actually be MAKING MUSIC! Yes folks, this app needs just a single brain cell to work. I know because even I have wrangled a toot, a peep and a toodle out of it. Thanks to our developers, I have now changed my name to Huh-Wotja.

I have used Wotcha now for a number of years. It grows from strength to strength. If you like to generate musical ideas this is the app for you. It has quite a steep learning curve but don’t let this put you off as you will be rewarded for your efforts. The new spoken voices are great however I still fell I need a little more control here. Maybe some control over their delay and repeats would be good.