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TUAW Best of 2011: Vote for the best iPhone music app
The nominations are in, and the poll is ready to go! The TUAW Best of 2011 awards are all about you -- the readers -- and what you think is the cream of the crop of Apple or third-party products and software. To vote, select one entry from the top nominations made by readers. We'll be announcing the winner in just a few days. Vote early and often! TUAW is asking for your votes for the best iPhone music app of 2011. There are six nominees in this category. The first, while technically a game, has you dress up pugs in hats to make music (I am not making this up). Pugs Luv Beats (US$2.99) was a surprisingly popular nominee, followed closely by the much more musically-oriented Hexaphone ($2.99). Hexaphone uses simplified musical scales, drum loops, a motion filter, and recording tools for real-time performance and improvisation. For those who want to wirelessly control music and video between iPhones, iPads and iPod touches, Tango Remote Control Media Player ($4.99) is a powerful tool that captured the imagination of many TUAW readers. Smule's free Magic Piano was a big hit with readers as well, especially for gamers and those who just dabble in music. Musicians appreciated Nano Studio ($14.99) enough to launch it into the final voting for the TUAW Best of 2011 award for an iPhone music app, while Spotify (free) captured the final spot in our voting. And now, let the voting begin! The results will be announced on December 28, 2011. %Poll-72288%
App Review: Hexaphone
I'm not the most musically inclined person, but I do tend to try out a bunch of different music generating apps on both my iPhone and iPad. Sometimes the end result is more or less successful, while other times I may as well have been sitting in front of a Baby Grand with just my index fingers and the sheet music for Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor in front of me. The newly released Hexaphone from Impresario Digital, thankfully, fits the former quite well. Hexaphone uses samples generated from an expensive Nord Lead 3 synthesizer to provide you with five different sound patches and eight different scales to use, as well as 17 percussion beats to accompany your music. You can lay down a drum beat, then record a bass line and play it back while you lay down another track, and then more upon that if you want. What's most interesting and different about this music app is how the keys are laid out, making it much easier to hit the intended notes on a smaller iPhone screen. The app works quite well on the iPad, though one optimized for the larger iPad screen would be most welcome. See the video on the next page. My only gripe with the app so far is not being able to easily export recordings, though the developer says that's coming in a future release. The developer's website has lots of instructional videos for musical newbs like me, and they do a good job of showing you the capabilities of the app, before or after you buy. You can grab Hexaphone in the app store now for $2.99 (25% off).
