Apple today introduced Music Memos, a free app for iOS that lets you quickly capture, organize and develop musical ideas on your iPhone or iPad.
Musicians and songwriters around the world have used the Voice Memos app on their iPhone to record ideas. The new Music Memos app is inspired by Voice Memos and takes the functionality even further, by adding musician-friendly features designed specifically for songwriting and developing musical ideas.
With Music Memos, you can record any musical instrument through the iPhone’s built-in microphone in a high-quality, uncompressed format, then name, tag and rate it to start building a library of your ideas.
The app can analyze rhythm and chords of acoustic guitar and piano recordings, and instantly add drums and a bass line to provide a virtual, customizable backing band that plays along to match the feel of your song. Music Memos can even provide basic notation that displays the chords that were played.
With iCloud, Music Memos are automatically available across all your Apple devices so you can open them in GarageBand or Logic Pro X to further develop your songs.
“Sometimes ideas come faster than I can get them into my notebook so I’ve used Voice Memos and Notes to quickly capture songs before they’re lost. Music Memos is like if those two apps came together to form some kind of superpower for songs,” said producer & songrwiter Ryan Adams. “It quite literally blew my mind how Music Memos could transform a single guitar idea into a whole composition with a virtual drummer loose enough that it felt like you were having your mind read by some A.I. musician and a choice of stand-up or electric bass accompaniments.”
Pricing & Availability
Music Memos is available for free on the App Store and is compatible with iPhone 4s and later, and iPad 2 and later.
With the hundreds of Voice Memos that I have created over the years, this is welcome! Great idea.
Exactly right. In fact, here’s a track that includes a beat I recorded while on the road:
https://soundcloud.com/k-tronix-1/the-auctioneer
Voice Memo helped me recreate this track years later, at least partially as I had intended. Unfortunately, there were several explanations I recorded along with the beat box that did not capture the inspiration all that time later. This new app would immediately help achieve polyphony (because I don’t have Beardyman-level skills).
great day for apps and updates to apple apps. Whooo hooooo!
a typical apple product of today: replacing a small tool that did the job with an oversized 122MB app that includes around the world and back functionality.
‘extreme complication is contrary to art’ said claude debussy. he was a wise man.
Except that Apple isn’t taking Voice Memos – which I have used for this purpose and been utterly disappointed with the sound quality of – away.
its free
its optional
and a seperate app.
yet somehow theres a way to complain about it. and oh yeah throw apples name in. “typical”
Then Apple steals all of the ideas and writes songs of its own with them. They claim that since you recorded it on an Apple product they own it. Pretty soon Apple is the only artist on iTunes. They have no albums, but a huge playlist of singles.
I’ve never had an issue with the voice memo app’s sound quality. I used it to record rough narration for a thing and was actually quite surprised how well it turned out.
iOS 9.1 or higher :/
Not losing my jailbreak for it. It would be great to have though.
I’ve been wishing for this since thed Sh I got my iPhone, my songs are now scattered between Apple apps they discontinued, or independent apps that were poorly written.
And I now have ones on different Apple devices, some of them somehow end up in my music playlist which is NOT desirable…..
This app better be good, better allow import from other apps, and allow sync across devices.
This thing blew my mind…. It detects chords and puts it on a tablature for you. And its free. I would have easily paid $10 for it…. easy.
Wow. Great time to be alive and write music.
I don’t understand you haters and demanders. Just don’t use it. Jesus.
I think it’s awesome and perfect for how I work. I tried it with my unamplified electric and it blew me away. Walked over to my Mac and opened it right up in Logic. Thanks Cloud!
Logic X and Garage Band are usefully improved. My forced Mac upgrade was sweetened by UA Apollo, which has been a game changer. I want this. I think apple wants to sell me an iPhone7. If they had fixed my 3 or 4s…. I sure wish Apple were as responsive to customers as Moog is. They are certainly capable of making enduring works of art. Meanwhile, for the price of this App, I can get new tapes for my 1983 Panasonic Slimline Cassette machine, one of my most used gifts. Note to self: buy cassettes tomorrow.