Best Music Creation Apps for iPhone and Mac

You may not be a professional musician, but you’ve always wanted to play with home recording and see what you can come up with. There are plenty of cheap and even free music creation apps for iPhone and Mac that can help you realize your secret dream.

Updated May 16,2017 | by Shannon

Maybe you've played guitar for fun since you were a kid, or you start your day by singing in the shower. You may not be a professional musician, in fact, you might not even pass for decent–but you've always wanted to play with home recording and see what you can come up with.

The price tags on professional digital audio workstations like Apple's Logic Pro are prohibitive for the hobbyist, to say the least, but there are plenty of cheap and even free apps for the Mac that can help you realize your secret dream.

GarageBand

The obvious place to start is with the app that comes with your Mac. New Macs come with the latest version of Apple’s GarageBand, and subsequent versions require you to either purchase the upgrade or purchase a new Mac. Needless to say, it's cheaper to purchase new copy of GarageBand.

GarageBand is based on Apple's professional audio offering, Logic Pro, and when new version of Logic come out GarageBand is frequently t beneficiary, for instance, with the introduction of the Flex Time feature in GarageBand, a Logic feature that helps you fix timing issues in you songs.

For the price and feature set, there's really no better value for the amateur than GarageBand Some professionals have even recorded com albums using no other software, and if it’s going enough for them, it's probably going to be go enough for you.

Audacity

Audacity is an cross-platform open source audacity editor that works on the Mac, as well as Windows and Linux. As an audio editor it's most often for simple one-track editing jobs, though it do have multi-track capabilities.

That's more than enough functionality for you put together the most complex of podcasts, be using Audacity for full-blown song production may be pushing your masochistic side. Use GarageBand as your workbench, and Audacity your Swiss army knife for making quick edits fixes. It’s still an essential in any amateur musician's software kit.

Guitar Tuner

For the longest time after I broke my physical guitar tuner, I would load up Logic Pro and use the tuner plug-in to tune my guitar rather than out and buy a new tuner. Much like GarageBand Logic Pro can be a slow loader and if you just want to play rather than record loading up a whole DAW is a real pain.

Get a simple tuning app to save some money real tuners and avoid the loading times of big apps. Gtuner is free and easy-to-use, with an interface very similar to the hardware tuners you’ve used to.

Better still, when Gtuner is running you don't need to tab into the app to tune your guitar, it provides you with the information you need to tuned up right in the Dock.

Mixxx

If you've always dreamed about becoming a the free app Mixxx is for you. It hooks right in your iTunes library so you can perform live DJ mixes on the music you like most. Mixxx feat automatic BPM matching to take away some the guesswork, and everything you need to rebroadcast live as the song is playing.

For the exhibitionist amateur DJ, Mixxx has integrated Shoutcast and Icecast broadcasting you can run your own show online.

Related readings:

Best Music Streaming Services For iPhone

How to Put Music on iPhone with or without iTunes

Websites to Download Free Music to iPhone/iPod/iPad 2017