Especially useful musical iPhone apps?

[kreig-kitts]

Now that I own an iPhone, are there any especially useful or fun music-related applications? For a person who plays guitar (not I, alas), there’s one to look up chords and show them in tablature. Any others?

[barbara-brundage]

There are tuners, metronomes, multi-track recorders. I like Karajan, an ear training program (there’s a free version).

[louise-vickerman]

The best metronome app is Tempo (by Frozen Ape) for 99 cents it is a bargain!

[barbara-brundage]

Louise, I’m curious. I notice that a lot of the reviews of Tempo say it’s as good as Dr. Beat, but can you set patterns like 2 against 3, the way you can with most of the Dr. Beat metronomes?

[helen-rudd]

I use a body beat metronome because I have a terrible time listening to a beat and following it, the body beat actually pulses. Since phones can vibrate does anyone know if there is a metronome ap for phones that pulses physically as well as audibly (or instead of). THAT I would get!
Helen

[tony-morosco]

Never seen that. Two things that would need to be looked at to see if it would work.

One is can you program the vibration for a specific duration? If you can’t precisely control the duration of the vibration then it really can’t be used for a metronome. Also how fast can you get the phone to vibrate in succession. I have never seen an instance where the phone vibrates short but fast bursts in a row which it would need to do in order to accommodate different time signatures and tempi.

The other is the effect on battery life. Making a phone vibrate actually takes a bit of energy, more than just making it make a sound. If the app causes the battery to drain too fast that would make it impractical.

Depending on these two factors I don’t why the metronome apps can’t be reconfigured to vibrate as well as sound.

[barbara-low]

Peterson has made their StroboSoft tuner available for iPhones and iTouch.

http://www.petersontuners.com/isoftgwlp

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