Duncan Wilcox tweets:

I get that GarageBand has the best UI of any iPad app ever built. Laid back music? Sure. It’d just never be music creation device of choice.

I disagree with this, not because there will suddenly be loads of bands using iPad GarageBand to create a new album (there will be one or two, purely for the gimmick, hoping to propel themselves into the day’s news), but because your ‘device of choice’ depends on your circumstances and way of working.

I’ve been writing and recording music since the 1990s, using the Project Noise moniker for well over a decade. I have a new, comically delayed album in the works, for which I’ve mostly used GarageBand to record and produce. (Despite what some people might think, GarageBand is a powerful piece of software, akin to Logic Express Lite, and it’s great if you avoid loops and concentrate on recorded audio and MIDI.) However, GarageBand is on my work Mac, which is inevitably used for work purposes. Distractions are many, and while I’ve spent something like two years tinkering with my new album, I haven’t written much new material on the Mac in that time.

Enter NanoStudio. Blip Interactive’s mini recording studio for the iPhone was a revelation. I’ve always been the person who got the idea for a song while walking along a street or watching TV, not while sitting in front of the Mac. Hundreds of songs have been lost to poor memory over the years, and scribbling down a beat or trying to sing a tune into a dictaphone really isn’t optimal. NanoStudio, on the other hand, enables you, through its fantastic interface, to rapidly get a song sketch down. You can overlay drums, bass, samples and synth lines, using live playing and pattern writing, and the entire lot can later be spat out in various formats. I’ve noticed that even when I’m at home, the iPhone (with NanoStudio) has become my ‘creation device of choice’, because I’m more relaxed and creative when lying on the sofa, noodling around with a focused app, than I am sitting bolt upright in front of my office Mac.

This is where I see GarageBand for iPad fitting into my musical creativity. NanoStudio already works brilliantly in 2x mode on the iPad, and GarageBand offers an additional means of getting ideas down. To that end, I’ll be shocked if the iPad doesn’t become my ‘creation device of choice’ for music. It will be where I work on and evolve riffs, creating song stubs that can then be developed and fully produced back on the Mac. To that end, I’m echoing Steve Jobs’s thoughts, in that the Mac becomes the workhorse—the ‘truck’ of music creation, primarily for weighty tasks and production. But the iPad is where the creative spark will happen, and this will increasingly be the case across all kinds of artistic and expressive fields, not just music.

The Guardian reports that Spotify has now convinced a million customers to pay for the service, a figure that represents about 15 per cent of active users. This is pretty important for the company, since it’s a loss-maker at present, which has also found it tough to attract advertisers. (It’s also not exactly hugely popular among musicians either, since the per-play payments they receive from Spotify are extremely low.)

But what still surprises me about the service is its price-points. The company has simplified things of late and removed options, in order to encourage you to pay. Gone is the 24-hour ‘for a party’ option and the unlimited ad-free version—Spotify Open now restricts you to five hours of listening per week (unless you signed up before the restriction came into force). However, there are still two options for those willing to pay: Unlimited and Premium. The former is the free service minus the aforementioned restrictions, for £4.99 per month. The latter is the same, but with the addition of mobile-app support and an offline mode for playlists, but for £9.99 per month.

It’s well known that people are often reluctant to part with cash if they’re afraid of making an error. Sometimes choice can be a bad thing. In the case of Spotify, I wonder whether more people would sign up if the company just provided two options: ‘limited and free’ or ‘unlimited and not free’. Most people I know who are keen on Spotify but haven’t signed up consider a fiver the sweet spot, but they’d want the mobile service too. They’re just not prepared to pay an extra fiver to get it, and so they don’t pay anything at all.

Whose Line Is It Anyway? remains one of my all-time favourite TV shows. If you’ve never seen it, the show starred four comedians proficient in the art of improvisation. Host Clive Anderson would have the comedians perform in various games, with loose themes and behaviours, often based around suggestions from the studio audience.

Although initially a little pedestrian, the show found its stride during the second and third series, and although it was heavily biased towards American performers by the time the run ended in 1998, it never lost its edge (even if some of the regular performers showboated for laughs a little too often).

The show was reworked for the US in 1998, lasting for around a decade, but the format surprisingly never returned to British screens (although many Whose Line performers appear live as the Comedy Store Players in London). That hasn’t stopped various producers trying to shoe-horn in the concept elsewhere though. Thank God You’re Here made its way over from Australia to ITV in 2007, but lasted only six episodes. Perhaps this was down to the overly regimented structure, based around lengthy scenes and a single game (performer enters unknown scene and has to improv their way through). Whose Line creator and producer Dan Patterson also clearly tried to bring some of the show’s magic to news panel show Mock the Week. Quickfire rounds like Scenes we’d like to see (where performers are given a basic scenario and have to reel off one-liners) are almost direct lifts from Whose Line, but the overly scripted nature of Mock the Week (the performers are stand-ups who typically cut-and-paste most of their responses from their stand-up routines) makes the show a fun enough watch (at least if you don’t actually go to any of the performers’ gigs and realise you’ve heard all the material before) but unsatisfying in terms of a comparison to Whose Line.

The latest attempt at the genre is Fast and Loose, a BBC Two show helmed by Hugh Dennis, devised by Dan Patterson, and with a set-up quite similar to Whose Line. Having heard promising noises about the show, I’d had most of the series sitting on the PVR for weeks, but was thinking it’d suffer by comparison to Whose Line. And it does, but this is the best shot yet at a spiritual successor to Patterson’s original improv show. Its plus-points are many: the performers have a lot more freedom than in similar shows, there are more games and there’s clearly more actual improvisation. There’s also some innovation, not least in a game called Sideways Scene, where the performers improvise on a set flipped ninety degrees by the magic of television—in other words, they’re lying down, but it appears to the audience like they’re in a basic room. The set-up provides plenty of potential for turning basic routines into something surreal and funny.

It’s not all good news though. In an attempt to not rip off Whose Line wholesale, there have been some odd additions. Every other game has host Hugh Dennis ‘finding out more about the performers’ by asking them questions—time that would be better spent on actual games. And of the games themselves, there aren’t enough of them. There’s also a bit too much scripting evident, and some of the performers forget themes when they switch genre, instead moving directly into basic parody of a movie or TV show (rather than integrating ideas from said shows into the improv). This would be fine if the same genres and shows didn’t crop up regularly throughout the show.

Still, it’s early days yet, and the show’s had a mere eight episodes to make its mark. In those eight episodes, it’s managed to beat the first series of Whose Line in terms of laugh-out-loud moments, if not in terms of balance. It’s the first time it’s felt like Whose Line was alive again and I’d certainly like to see more (especially with extra games and fewer scripted moments), although I remain wondering why no-one’s bothered to resurrect Patterson’s original show, since it’s clearly a concept that still has legs.

So you’ve got new iPad killer coming out, and it, for reasons known only to slightly crazy people, dual-boots into Windows 7 and Android 1.6 (two operating systems clearly leagues ahead of iOS when it comes to optimal tablet experiences—again, if you’re stark staring mad). What better way to advertise it than using a badly cropped grab of a Microsoft Office app running in Mac OS X?

In case of deletion, here’s a bit of it:

Nice. The close-up of exciting touch-based workflow in action is also, I’m sure you’ll agree, brilliant and doesn’t look at all like it was faked by a bored unpaid intern:

Hat tip: Daring Fireball.

This afternoon’s slice of MAKE CRAIG ANGRY comes courtesy of Wired, whose article In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next) should probably have been called Fap Fap Fap Rovioooooohhhh.

There’s something of a cult that’s built up around the Finnish developer’s massive iOS hit (since ported to practically every other platform in existence—I hear there’s a VIC-20 version on the way), and more than a little bullshit.

Before a million Angry Birds fans descend, I’m not suggesting the game is rubbish, nor am I saying Rovio doesn’t deserve some of its success. Angry Birds is a fairly good iOS game, and it’s immediate, usable, polished and cute. The perfect game? Not in a million years—it’s too random (requiring quickfire grind play rather than strategising) and has an irksome linear level structure (which was ‘fixed’ via a 59p in-app purchase rather than enabling users to skip levels they couldn’t solve). But it’s not bad.

What is bad is the reporting that continually goes on about Rovio’s magic formula. Ultimately, Rovio got lucky. They put out a game that users could feel they were good at very quickly (even if they weren’t) and with little effort, and built it around a level and reward structure that worked nicely with the quickfire nature of mobile gaming. Rovio then did some cunning marketing, driving word-of-mouth in smaller territories, before partnering with publisher Chillingo in larger countries. But there’s little innovation in the game (it’s a variant on Crush the Castle, a genre that can be traced all the way back to Artillery on the Apple II) and Rovio ‘Mighty Eagle’ Peter Vesterbacka’s saying the company’s “building an integrated entertainment franchise where merchandising, games, movies, TV, cartoons and comics all come together, like Disney 2.0.” is a pretty bold and odd comparison, for one key reason: Rovio is currently a one-hit wonder, with Angry Birds as its sole hit.

There’s no doubting Angry Birds is phenomenally popular. There’s no doubting many people like the game. But right now Rovio is doing little more than milking the brand until it screams: a tie-in with Rio, a self-published ‘seasons’ version to double-up iOS sales and avoid cutting in Chillingo as much as possible, soft toys, possible board games and animations… The list is growing by the month. What’s not on the list though is Rovio’s Next Big Game and The One After That, the products that would prove it has a magic formula for success. At least Wired recognises this in its article:

Rovio needs to evolve from a studio with strong intellectual property (IP), to being a publisher that isn’t over-reliant on a single hit game. There’s the rub: it took Rovio 52 games to get its first hit. To create a fully fledged entertainment empire, it will need more.

Show me another half-dozen megahits and I’ll file Rovio alongside early-1980s Atari and admit that, yes, these guys do have some kind of formula. For now, though, there are dozens of iOS devs out there offering superior and more varied gaming experiences, and that have to balls to do something different every six months or so. Here’s hoping iOS consumers start seeking them out, rather than assuming gaming ends once they’ve three-starred the latest set of levels in Rovio’s game.