I’ve got even more nitpicks with GarageBand for iPad. Where’s the frickin’ cowbell? ( Update: There’s a cowbell in one of the “smart drum” sets, but not in the actual kits that you can play manually.) Guitarists will have to hold out for the Apogee Jam, a $99 adapter that runs through the iPad’s 30-pin connector. Unless I’m missing something, you can’t play audio through the iPad speakers while using the headphone jack for input. GarageBand accepts guitar input through the iPad’s headphone jack - you just need an 1/8-inch cable and a 1/4-inch adapter for the guitar output - but it’s a worthless feature for now, because you can’t hear what’s going on. To make matters worse, you can’t turn the accelerometer off or change the velocity of individual notes after you’ve recorded them. No matter how hard I tapped, or what surface the iPad was on, I couldn’t consistently hit the snare at maximum volume. For the virtual piano, it feels natural, almost like the real thing. One of GarageBand’s neatest tricks is its ability to detect how hard you’re hitting a note based on the iPad’s accelerometer. The accelerometer works, except when it doesn’t I can’t imagine buying another multi-track recording app or virtual instrument now. Even if these apps offer more features than GarageBand, they’ve been undercut by a $5 app that does all the important stuff. I feel sorry for the makers of StudioTrack, Virtuoso Piano, Music Studio and countless other apps with similar functionality to GarageBand. When the $5 app launched in the iOS App Store today, I grabbed it immediately. So for me, GarageBand was the highlight of Apple’s iPad 2 event. As a lapsed musician, I’ve been cobbling together iPad music apps since last year, but I could never find the one that did it all - recording, sampling, looping, synthesizing - at least in an affordable package. Don’t tell Apple, but I might’ve upgraded to an iPad 2 if GarageBand didn’t work on the original.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |