THE 100 GREATEST MOBILE MUSIC APPS
Mobile music making is big business, with iOS and Android devices easily capable of producing as pro-sounding tunes as desktop counterparts. Over the following pages we round up 100 essential apps for all aspects of music production…
When it first became apparent that music production would be a happy side effect of the smartphone and the mobile tech explosion, both traditional music equipment firms and startup developers were quick to jump on the bandwagon. Almost in an instant, the NAMM show in California – the start-of-year-extravaganza of all new gear releases – became a mobile phone convention. The promise of both music making by touch and ability to do it on often pocket-sized devices drew us all in. But it wasn’t all plain sailing from there, and we didn’t all jump ship.
One of the initial problems was compatibility between all of the apps – DAW apps working with synth or instrument apps, for example. Another was that the touch experience didn’t always match the promise; it wasn’t always as tactile as using a MIDI controller with a laptop, for example. Then of course there was the power… or lack of it. Early mobile phones and tablets just didn’t have the oomph to run much of the number crunching required for sophisticated music processing. Early apps were therefore restricted in audio processing, track counts and effect usage.
Happily, many of these initial teething problems have now been overcome. We have standards like Audio Units3 and Inter App Audio – see p18 for more – where apps effectively run within other apps and you can, if you put your mind to it, almost mirror your desktop studio in your mobile device. And perhaps this ability to imitate your desktop setup is what excites us most here at Computer Music. We still don’t think that mobile music making offers all the flexibility of a decent, hardware and software hybrid studio based around a powerful computer, but mobile apps, DAWs, instruments and accessories have come on in leaps and bounds to provide a great extension of your studio; a fantastic reason to get out in the fresh air and enjoy this most wondrous of music production pastimes. And these apps and their hosts do allow you to touch those notes in ways that most desktop machines and DAWs still rarely succeed in (Bitwig and other touch DAW fans, yes we know!).
To celebrate the, if you like, coming of age of the mobile studio, over the next 18 pages we’ll look at several aspects of iOS and Android music-making and reveal the jewels within them, from synths to drum machiness, full DAWs to frankly out-there apps. So come with us and enter a world that might just get you out there too, making grooves on the move.