John Gruber’s excited about GarageBand for iPad:

GarageBand for iPad—impressive doesn’t even begin to describe it. There are a bunch of musical instrument apps for the iPhone and iPad, and they’ve been used to great effect by many musicians. […] GarageBand for iPad is of a different scope. This is Apple taking the idea of the iPad as a musical instrument and tackling that idea with the full strength of its collective creativity. It is the most iPad-ish iPad app I’ve ever seen. Good iPad apps can make the iPad feel not like a device running an app, but like an object that is the app. GarageBand isn’t a musical app running on an iPad. It turns an iPad into a musical instrument. The  interfaces for each GarageBand instrument are exquisitely skeuomorphic. Every control—every button, every switch, every slider—is custom designed. The keyboard’s use of the accelerometer to detect how hard you hit the keys seems impossibly accurate for a device that doesn’t have a pressure-sensitive display.

I’m also excited about this app. I use GarageBand for Mac very regularly, and I’ve written loads of articles and large chunks of bookazines about the app, shoe-horning in the entire song-writing process into tutorial spaces in reality designed for far less.

However, I think Gruber does a disservice to apps that already exist for iOS. I’ve no doubt GarageBand for iPad will be polished and look great; it will likely be at least reasonably accessible to newcomers, but offer enough power for amateurs and perhaps even semi-pros to get down song sketches (although the eight-track restriction will stop many in their tracks). If compatibility with the Mac version works, that will also be fantastic (although, having worked with iWork apps for Mac and iOS, I’m not holding my breath on that front). But other apps already do the things GarageBand for iPad is being lauded for (bar accelerometer-based intensity when you strike a key at different speeds). Korg has a number of instruments with custom-designed interfaces, such as iMS-20. NanoStudio—probably my favourite iOS app—offers a highly editable synth, pads, MIDI editing and sampling. In some areas, it’s not as glossy as GarageBand, but a four-by-four drumkit grid is more usable than Apple’s picture of a drumkit to smack.

What I hope is that there’s enough room left for the pioneers in this space, and that Apple won’t just steamroller the lot of them—unless GarageBand actually proves to be far better than the competition and the competition then doesn’t make an effort to catch up. NanoStudio in particular looks to have a real fight on its hands. It’s one thing to be Korg, with many years of branding behind you, but when you’re an indie who’s effectively created GarageBand for iOS and priced it at £8.99, it’s not going to be a fun time when Apple steams on in with GarageBand proper for a third of the price.