iDrum's Pattern View shows your beat in color-coded glory.
iZotope knows how to bring new people into the drum-machine world: pretty, flashing colors! Yet this beat creator is not just another time-wasting trifle; it's a powerful tool for new and experienced users alike.
iDrum captures the spirit of Apple’s form + function credo perfectly. It includes impressive sounds by professional music producers and sound designers, as well as a slick interface that lets drum-machine veterans quickly create beats, stringing up to 16 patterns together as a song. Its smart design features color-coded sounds; a logical, geometric layout; and good use of multi-touch, flicking, and shaking gestures. And novices can dive in and play around until it makes sense. Built-in help and a PDF guide handle any needed instruction.
Down with Crickets! Kit View strings 16 patterns into a song.
Two iDrum editions, Hip-Hop and Club (with more editions on the way), each come with more than 140 sounds, as well as hundreds of pre-programmed patterns in drum kits named by genre. You’re free to alter these patterns and kits, or create and save your own, with control over the volume and panning of each sound.
To alter or create patterns, the Part View gives you a four-by-four grid representing one measure of a beat. Touching one of the squares turns the sound on or off for that location in the beat, and shaking the iPhone or iPod clears the whole pattern. At any time you can change the sound to any other iDrum sound from the menu at the top. When finished, you can swipe to the next sound, or go to the Pattern View, where you see the pattern for all 16 sounds in each drum kit.
In the Kit View, you can string 16 full pattern squares into a song. Touch and drag the patterns to copy and move them, or drag them to the bottom to delete them.
This system of three main screen views with grids of 16 squares each is unorthodox for a drum machine. But it's easy to learn, fun to use and takes perfect advantage of available screen space, touch sensitivity, and gestures.
iZotope’s free iDrum Ringtone Sync software (for OS X or Windows) saves iDrum songs over Wi-Fi to the computer as iPhone ringtones. You can then sync those ringtones to the iPhone through iTunes. We love that feature, but if you want to save your iDrum beats as audio files you can play anywhere, you need the full iDrum desktop software ($64.99, OS X or Windows). That saves patterns from the iPhone to the computer, as well as importing new sounds from the computer to the phone to use in iDrum beats.
With great sounds, smart design, ringtone creation, and computer integration, this simple drum machine just about has it all.
iDrum
COMPANY: iZotope
CONTACT: www.izotope.com
PRICE: $4.99 each edition
REQUIREMENTS: iPhone or iPod touch with 2.0 software update.
Pro-quality sounds. Brilliant design intelligently incorporates multi-touch and iPhone gestures. Easy and fun to use. Creates ringtones. Integrates with the full desktop version of iDrum.
Ringtone process is somewhat convoluted. Saving to standard audio files requires the full desktop iDrum software.
