iPhoning It In

Jun 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           
 

MUSIC APPS ARE PLENTIFUL FOR THE IPHONE AND IPOD TOUCH—BUT WHICH ONES ARE WORTH BUYING?

FIG. 2: Sonoma Wire Works’ FourTrack gives you multitrack recording capabilities.

A low-priced newcomer to the multitrack space is GigBaby! (V. 1.3, ioMetics LLC; $0.99), which has a surprisingly robust feature set considering its price. You get four tracks of recording (no punch-in, though) and a metronome that can be used with the recorder or as a stand-alone, and also features some nice graphical indicators. A small library of drum loops is provided, which could be useful for songwriting inspiration, and a setlist manager for gigs is also included.

Instrumental to Success

There's no shortage of instrument apps for the iPhone/iPod touch. However, many suffer from fairly substantial latency delay between when you hit the touchscreen with your finger and when a note actually sounds. Instrument apps with high levels of latency can be very frustrating to use if you're trying to play in time with a beat. One way to lessen latency is to restart your iPhone or iPod touch before launching an app. Restarting your device is a good first step if your app is giving you problems of any type. Some apps prompt you to restart, but many don't.

Some of the most responsive instrument emulations come from Moo Cow Music, whose entries include Bassist (V. 1, $2.99), which lets you trigger electric-bass sounds from a virtual fretboard with a variety of articulations; and Guitarist ($3.99), which offers several different ways to play a virtual electric guitar, and includes delay, wah, and fuzz effects. The company also makes piano, organ, and full-band emulations. On the percussion side, I really liked Frontier Design Group's percussion app Cowbell Plus (V. 1.2, $1.99) and DigiDrummer (V. 2.7, Magnus Larsson; $1.99), which gives you eight drum pads and a range of kit sounds.

FIG. 3: One of the many edit screens in Amidio’s Noise.io.

On the synth side, perhaps the most fully featured app is Noise.io (V. 1.2.2, Amidio Inc.; $9.99; see Fig. 3), which is both a synthesizer and a sequencer. It has a cool “kaos”-style controller in addition to a virtual keyboard (which is small and limited). It allows you to record and overdub parts (it has three types of sequencers), and has a snap-to-grid feature. Noise.io sounds quite good, and its synthesis and editing capabilities are surprisingly deep. It has three tone generators, three LFOs, six effects, and WAV export. Its biggest drawback is a cryptic and complex user interface. That said, if you're willing to spend the time to learn it, you'll be impressed.

Get With the Programming

Apps that allow you to program instrument parts, rather than play them, are more successful because latency isn't an issue. There are many such apps, but here are my favorites.

FIG. 4: The Pad screen and a pad’s volume control from Intua’s BeatMaker.

BeatMaker (V. 1.3.2, Intua; $19.99; see Fig. 4) gets my vote as the most comprehensive music-production app on this platform. It turns your iPhone or iPod touch into a full-featured, loop-based, trigger pad-equipped production environment. It even works as a sampler and lets you edit the start and end points and place your samples — or imported WAV files — onto trigger pads. (File import/export is supported through the free BeatPack software for Mac and Windows.) It has two effects buses, a pattern-based sequencer and step sequencer, and a passel of included content kits from such artists as Richard Devine. It too requires some time to learn its UI, but it's surprisingly intuitive and powerful (see Web Clip 1).

A fresh approach to step sequencing is offered in the cube-like interface of iDrum (V. 1.0.2, iZotope; $4.99). It comes in several editions, which offer genre-specific sample sets for rock, hip-hop, house, and more. You can edit its existing song collections or program your own beats. In addition to drum sounds, you get one-shot bass, guitar, synth, and effects samples. When you're finished, you can send your creations to your computer, but only as M4a-format ringtone files. However, if you own iZotope's iDrum app for Mac or PC, you can export your patterns directly into that. If not, you could, as a workaround, export your pattern as a ringtone, open it in a waveform editor on your computer, and convert it to a WAV or AIFF for use in your DAW.

The next five apps sound good and offer a variety of programming options. The one thing they don't offer, though, is a way to transfer files to your computer, other than patching a cable from your device's headphone output into a line input of your computer audio interface.