Apple today announced that GarageBand, its breakthrough music creation app, is now available for iPhone® and iPod touch users. Introduced earlier this year on iPad, GarageBand uses Apple’s revolutionary Multi-Touch interface to make it easy for anyone to create and record their own songs, even if they’ve never played an instrument before.
“GarageBand on iPad has been a big hit and we think customers will love using it on their iPhone or iPod touch,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in the press release. “The innovative Multi-Touch interface combined with Smart Instruments makes it easy to create great sounding music, even if you’ve never studied music or played an instrument before.”
GarageBand features a collection of fun Touch Instruments that sound great and make it easy for beginners or experienced musicians to play and record keyboards, guitars, drums and basses in a wide variety of styles. Smart Instruments now allow you to choose from an extensive new library of custom chords so you can play and strum along with your favorite songs.
You can plug your electric guitar into iPad, iPhone or iPod touch to play and record through classic amps and stompbox effects, or record your voice or any acoustic sound using the built-in microphone. GarageBand allows you to record and mix up to eight tracks and then share your finished song with friends or send it to your Mac® to keep working on it in GarageBand or Logic® Pro.
GarageBand 1.1 for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch is available on the App Store for US$4.99 to new users, or as a free update for existing GarageBand for iPad customers. GarageBand is a universal app that runs on iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPod touch (3rd & 4th generation).
Source: Apple Inc.
A multi-track recording studio on a phone! From one perspective, this is just mind-boggling. The power of the studio vastly surpasses most of the equipment Beatles had during their days (and they were using cutting-edge stuff).
But from another angle, what took so long??? Multi-track audio recording (the DAW concept — Digital Audio Workstation) has existed in the form of an inexpensive desktop application — for Mac and Windows — since mid to late 90s. At the time, desktop computers had 64MB of RAM, and were running 200 MHz PowerPC processors (604). Our little pocket wonders have almost ten times as much RAM and five times as many processing cycles (plus multiple processing cores, plus richer instruction sets). Our desktops from the late 90s had no problem running up to 24 concurrent audio tracks. Nothing prevents developers from creating applications of similar power.
Woz had this great engineering philosophy of constantly striving to eliminate as many chips from the circuit design and as many lines of code from the software as humanly possible. This goal made his creations significantly more efficient (i.e. faster) than others. Too bad this type of engineering philosophy is completely lost on today’s generations of developers.
Actually, there have been several really good DAW multi-track recording/mixing apps for the iPhone for a while now. Garage Band is just more well known as it is Apple’s app.
Just saying, nothing against you Predrag.
Hey predrag, didn’t you notice that this app is only 501MB? It would say that ONLY the engineering philosophy of Apple can pull off such an achievement like Garageband using ONLY 501 MB of space. Have you even downloaded it yet to see all that they crammed into such an amazing app? If you download it and still think that it’s bloated, I’ll give you your measly $5.00 back that this app costs. Everyone else is selling their app for at least 4 times that amount.