Thread April 5, 2014 editorial: comments

One of the news stories we covered this week was the release of Audiobus 2, a major update to the iOS app that allows you to chain multiple audio apps together. The new version provides much more flexibility and power for its users. It got me thinking about how far mobile music capabilities have come in the last five years.

Back in 2009, in the early days of iOS, I was working for a music technology magazine, and writing a story on iOS music apps. While researching it, I got to try out tons of such apps. The whole category was so new that everyone, myself included, was wowed by what would now be considered pretty basic apps. Singing robots, onscreen keyboards with cheesy piano sounds, crude samplers, and simple drum machine emulations were enough to elicit a “That’s cool!” from the same musicians (myself included) who would have had a much more jaded reaction to even-more-complex features and capabilities in Mac/PC music software.

But iOS music production has come a long way. Audiobus and Apple’s Inter-App Audio allow for easy routing between apps; and there are feature-laden DAW apps, high-quality synths and samplers, awesome loopers, amp modelers, sophisticated instrument controllers, and instruments that utilize the touchscreen interface of iOS to facilitate new types of music creation. What’s more there are plentiful input devices including guitar and instrument interfaces, microphones and even mic preamps. And unlike five years ago, iOS now supports 24-bit audio and stereo recording.

What’s also really cool about music apps is that they’re way cheaper than Mac/PC music software. It’s not unusual to find high-quality music apps for between $19.99 and $29.99 (and many for less), a fraction of what equivalent software would cost for your computer. So if you haven’t, definitely check out the world of iOS music. 

Although iOS is clearly the leader as a mobile music platform, Android, which has been hampered by latency issues (especially problematic for instrument apps), is seeing more and better music apps available for it all the time.

I’ve heard many experts predict that mobile and computer-based operating systems are eventually going to merge, so making music on a touchscreen mobile device may be a precursor to the way we produce in the future.

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Mike Levine