Apple Releases Music Memos, A Recorder App For Musicians

Voice Memos has long been a sort of catchall for iPhone users that want to record anything that makes sound. For musicians the stock iPhone app has been a useful tool, but perhaps no more useful than any other basic recorder for capturing music creation.

In conjunction with today’s GarageBand release, Apple is giving musicians and songwriters a new way to brainstorm music on-the-go. The new Music Memos app allows artists to record jam sessions or freestyles in an uncompressed format, and also gives them some cool new music creation features that they can quickly access.

When you open the app it seems simple enough, it’s a giant record button. Start playing some chords on a guitar or start playing a piano and the underlying undeniably cool tech becomes much more evident. The app can do neat things like help you tune your instrument, but it can also do wilder things like analyze the rhythm of your track and add in a backing band with drums and a funky bass line.

The app takes organization seriously, because when it comes to creatives like songwriters, chances are there are going to be quite a few sessions stored in their library. Users can tag songs by sound, location or a rating that they assign the track and can use the tags to easily search out the potential hit they recorded at 3 a.m. the night before.

The app boasts deep integration (as expected) with GarageBand and Logic so you can open a Music Memo track in one of the programs and start turning it into a song immediately thanks to iCloud. Artists can also share directly from the app to Apple Music’s Connect if they want to share a killer freestyle they recorded.

The app is available now as a free download to iOS users in the App Store.