As I mentioned I was lucky enough to receive an iPad for my birthday this year, and obviously my first reaction was, how can I make music with this? There are many, many apps out there and sorting through them can be a bit hit and miss, so I thought I’d try to add a little to the mix by giving you my personal opinion on the ones I’ve tried out so far starting with the Alesis IO Dock that I bought to turn the ipad into more of a serious music making bit of kit..
Basically the IO dock is a big slab of plastic that you slot your iPad (v2 with an adaptor) into that gives balanced i/o (and headphones), phantom power and usb & traditional midi ports. It should be great but currently has a couple of not insignificant issues. Firstly the IO dock itself is experiencing some teething problems with both midi and audio input. I’ve experienced infrequent audio recording problems, the signal has occasionally been strangely distorted – and not because I’ve been overcooking the input! More frequent (in my experience) are hanging midi notes and phantom high midi notes, that get recorded in to the midi sequencer I’ve been using. Alesis are aware of these issues and are promising a firmware update. If they rectify the problem it will turn the dock into a cracking bit of kit, but not one I’d like to use live at the moment.
The second issue isn’t really Alesis’s fault – some apps don’t support the IO dock for midi and audio (amplitude is a major irritant at the moment). The newer apps seem to be planning updates to enable them to work correctly, but the older apps probably won’t get one – I’m particularly disappointed with the tongue drum app, which I would dearly love to use on a recording but don’t think miking the ipad speaker will do the trick! It’s a free app tho, so I guess you get what you pay for!
At a future date I'll look at some of the music apps that I can't get enough of (and some that I can...).
