GarageBand was recently released for iPad. It costs three quid in the UK (five dollars in the US), and brings some of the desktop recording studio to Apple’s tablet. In typical Apple style, it ramps up the shiny shiny and it makes creativity (of sorts) very easy, thereby blinding various publications into giving it their highest rating.

Or does it?

OR DOES IT? (Etc.)

I’m a bit of a GarageBand for Mac fan-boy, and I’ve been writing and recording songs since I was in my teens, which means for over a few years now (if ‘a few’ means ‘about 20’, which IT OBVIOUSLY DOES NOT AND MY HAIR ISN’T GOING GREY). I think it’s a great application that too many people dismiss as a toy. While on the surface, GarageBand is a case of dragging loops to make a ‘song’ and either 1) playing around and having fun or; 2) deluding yourself into thinking you’re going to get a number-one hit single with Loopy Looping Loops, GarageBand has depth. You can record guitars and vocals, and you can capture live performances through software instruments, and then edit them to your heart’s content. I’m not going to pretend that GarageBand is Logic, nor even Logic Express, but it’s a perfectly good Logic Express Express, and I know several bands who’ve used the application for everything but mastering, so it’s clearly capable.

This absolutely isn’t the case with GarageBand for iPad, which is, in its current incarnation, too often a toy. Now, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with this, and I’ve a feeling it’s going to go down extremely well with many people. The app looks great, mostly (although not always) works very nicely, and enables you to make a nice noise without much effort, just like the Mac version. The problem for me is that GarageBand for iPad then slams on the brakes and screeches to a halt. Surprised musicians in the passenger seat are left there with whiplash, saying “hang on a bit—can’t we go any further?”, but Apple merely opens the door and tells them to bugger off, leaving them stranded at a sign pointing to NanoStudioville and BeatMaker Town. What’s interesting, though, is that it would take relatively little effort to turn the application into a tool with enough depth to appeal to and be useful for a much wider audience.

In interface and usability terms (at least for relative newcomers), GarageBand gets almost everything right. On creating a new song, you then get to choose between a number of instrument types: keyboard, drums, live guitar and microphone. There’s also a sampler (record a sound and play it using the keyboard) and four ‘smart’ instruments (drums, bass, guitar, keyboard), which are effectively a means of creating your own auto-accompanyment, by dragging drums to a grid or prodding chord markers to make guitars strum. (If you’ve ever seen the now comically overpriced Band for iPhone, the smart instruments are similar to its ‘funky drummer’ and ’12 bar blues’ sections, but much nicer and far more flexible.)

The smart instruments are undoubtedly where most users will first head, and in combination with Apple’s (slightly small) selection of built-in loops, it’s pretty easy to create an eight-bar mini-song. It’s very unlikely you’ll feel ripped off, since the product is a lot of fun, and it’s also an app that showcases precisely why Apple believes the ten-inch screen is optimal for a tablet—many of GarageBand’s elements would be fiddly at best on the likes of a Galaxy Tab.

It’s when you start wanting to create something a bit more customised, a bit more you, that GarageBand for iPad’s limitations become clearer. One of the most evident is the amount of time it takes to audition instruments, and this can’t be done live while a song plays (unlike in NanoStudio), meaning it takes a while to work your way through instruments. Most of the other shortcomings centre around editing. Fire up a software instrument and you can play a virtual keyboard to enter song data into the iPad. Usefully, you can overdub, in order to get more complex tunes down with less effort, or to work up drum patterns. What you then can’t do is make any changes to your performance. At most, you can crop and copy audio regions and correct dodgy timing by assigning quantising to a track. But you can’t double-tap on an audio region and then edit the underlying MIDI data—for that, you must export your track to GarageBand for Mac, although you cannot then transfer it back to the iPad. The lack of pattern and note editing also makes it impossible to ‘rescue’ manual drum tracks. Apple has made a lot of the iPad’s accelerometer being used to define instrument expression—in other words, hit a virtual instrument harder and it plays louder. In practice, this feature simply isn’t accurate nor consistent—at least on an iPad 1—meaning it’s best disabled. Cleverly, Apple doesn’t enable you to disable the accelerometer when working with drum instruments, meaning you end up with drum tracks that are all over the place and you don’t have any way of correcting them later. Bizarrely, it’s also not possible to delete or rearrange tracks in the track viewer—at most, you can assign a new instrument to a track. (@daveinthecloud notes on Twitter you tap a selected track’s instrument icon to access Delete and can tag-drag to rearrange. I therefore suggest that this isn’t optimal and that Apple should state these controls are available when you tap the (?) icon.)

Slamming my own brakes on, it’s worth remembering that this is GarageBand for iPad 1.0. This is not a mature app, but Apple’s next attempt to figure out what it’s tablet’s good for. As Marco Arment says in Moving on from iPad ‘office productivity’ apps, the tablet’s proven sub-optimal for office-oriented productivity, and so GarageBand and iMovie could be the company testing the water, to see how its device fares for casual media creation. Certainly, while a lot of thought’s (rightly) gone into the virtual instrument interfaces, the track interface feels half-baked, like Apple simply didn’t have time to think things through. And given that both NanoStudio and BeatMaker offer superior editing to GarageBand—and on the smaller screen of the iPhone—I remain hopeful that GarageBand will follow suit. Even then, I think it’s unlikely I’d use it for full songs, but it would be an obvious choice to kick things off with, due to its compatibility with the desktop version. It’s also worth noting that if you’re a guitarist, GarageBand for iPad’s toolset will cause you fewer problems, since it’s fine for recording live audio and making basic crops and copies. (The set of amps and stomp-boxes is also excellent, especially for a product that’s so inexpensive.) You’ll likely have to make do with loops or smart drums for drumbeats, but otherwise you may find this the best app you’ve ever bought.

For others, though, GarageBand for iPad is in the main what many people inaccurately call its desktop cousin: a toy. Make no mistake: it’s a great toy, one that is highly recommended and that is most definitely worth its low price-tag. What GarageBand for iPad currently struggles at is in being a tool for musicians (bar guitarists), but given that the app is currently selling like hot cakes, I can’t imagine things staying this way for long.

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.

Issue three of the rather spiffy Tap! magazine hits UK newsstands today. It’s another chunky 132-page tome, packed full of reviews, tips and features about the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Yours for a fiver, guv.

This issue, in my role as Contributing Editor, Games, I lead the games section with the excellent World of Goo HD, and we also cover another 30 titles, including Helsing’s Fire HD, Dead Space and Real Racing 2.

Elsewhere in the mag, there are the usual helpings of Matt Gemmell, Ian Betteridge and Caitlin Moran, an in-depth feature on using your iOS devices to watch tele, an interview with an indie company using iOS devices and social media to compete with global brands, and more app and kit reviews than you can shake a stick at.

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.

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.