4/21/09

Music Apps For The iPhone

I've been meaning to write for a while about 3 very cool-looking iPhone applications which I cannot use because I don't have an iPhone. But if you do, these look worth checking out:

  • Bloom is a creation of Brian Eno which lets you compose music (within certain constraints) on your phone. The constraints ensure that anything you create will be both consonant and ambient, kind of like an autoharp. You can't create anything too ugly, and you can't create anything that's not all that relaxing, but it still looks like a lot of fun:



  • Deadmau5's Remixable Album is an application from the electronic artist Deadmau5 (of whom I had never heard before) which lets you remix his latest album entirely on your iPhone. The list of features looks pretty comprehensive and yet the app looks pretty simple to use as a whole. Without having used it, it kind of reminds me of some video games where you can get by with a lot of button-mashing, or you can really kick ass if you know what you're doing. But either way you can have a lot of fun.

  • FourTrack is an app from Sonoma Wireworks which is, basically, a 4-track recording device on your iPhone. For those of you who have never used a real live analog 4-track before, the idea that one exists on a phone is pretty damn amazing. Again, I haven't used this app since I don't have an iPhone [Editor's note: please contact me if you'd like to buy me one] but this certainly looks like it beats my current method of capturing song ideas when I'm out and about, which more or less consists of either calling my own voicemail and humming into the phone.
Have you used any of these? Do you have any cool music apps for the iPhone or (gasp!) another mobile device? Let me know in the comments.

5 comments:

Newmanium Reveler said...

I can vouch for the Bloom!

Newmanium Reveler said...

ps. I've heard good things about RJDJ (http://kottke.org/08/10/rjdj-maybe-the-best-iphone-app-out-there) but haven't sprung for it yet.

kate said...

I love Bloom!

Anonymous said...

The music app I have other than ipod is pandora - which works great.

Two apps I keep meaning to add:
http://www.lala.com/ - streams music from the cloud.

http://cultofmac.com/fstream-makes-radio-streaming-easy/8230 - fstream streams radio stations

Molly Malone said...

i can only speak to Bloom, which is a lot of fun. it's very relaxing, but still tickles my brain cells.

also, not sure if this is an app you'd be interested in - less about the user creating, than discovering - but i also like Shazam. it records whatever music you're hearing over the radio, in a commercial clip, in a department store (fill in the blank) and then identifies it for you. usually, the artist, album and version, if there are several versions. i don't use it often, but i've only once questioned its accuracy.