a digital 4-track the size of a nintendo ds

[ken]

Why doesn't apple have a version of Garageband for the iphone yet?

Ken

[Jim of Seattle]

There are a bunch of terrific 3rd party apps that do great music stuff on the iPhone, but so far there isn't really a Garage Band-like synth/sequencer that does it all. I have a synth which is all techy and lets me create my own patches, but no built in instruments of much use, and I have a really wonderful FL Studio-like beat creation tool, and a rudimentary 4-track audio recording app, and then a handful of actual musical instruments, but nothing that puts it all together.

[ken]

http://pro-audio.musiciansfriend.com/pr ... sku=250011

This looks good too. Very old school 4track like digital 4track!

[jb]

I have BeatMaker for my iPhone, which might be the FL Studio-like thing Jim mentioned. It's gotten a lot better recently. One thing it seems to do better than at least a couple other apps is there is very little lag between when I hit a pad and the sound plays. That wasn't the case when I first got the app, but playing with it over the last couple days, it seems to be a lot better. Not sure if they updated it or if it's just how my iPhone's behaving today. Hopefully the former, because the latter would indicate that performance of the app isn't reliable. :-/

You can record your own sounds and load kits and such in BeatMaker, but if you try to record a sound while a loop is playing, the playback stops while you record. That's a bit of a downer.

But low-latency is so key! This other app I have, called ZoozBeat, doesn't do as well on the lag, unfortunately.

I'm going to get one of the four-track apps and see how that does.

[Jim of Seattle]

BeatMaker is indeed the FL-Studio thing I was talking about. The 1.3 upgrade is much better. I'm on a business trip this week and decided I'd spend some quality hours with BeatMaker to see if it can really be used to make music with without going completely insane. Yes and no is the answer. It's pretty full-featured as far as what it does, but the navigatioin is still pretty difficult. I spent 3 hours and ended up with basically 1:30 of percussion i'm happy with. I haven't had any latency issues with it at all.

ZooZBeat also recently updated, and its newest version is a lot better, though it's essentially a toy, good for letting people play with the iPhone, but probably not up to really making songs with.

Ocarina is by far my favorite iPhone music app.

[Spud]

Come on Jim, you're already insane. Don't worry about it.

[Jim of Seattle]

Huh. Yeah, that would explain a lot.