The iOS ecosystem has tons of music composition apps and many prominent musicians like Jordan Rudess have been known to use iOS devices on stage. With apps like Garageband and Djay, iOS devices prove to be brilliant music composition devices as well. There has been a dearth of really great music learning tools on the App Store until recently when apps like Guitar Pro, which is probably the most famous guitar tablature tool out there, have made their way to iOS devices. Most music apps on iOS that are for the pros end up costing a lot as well. Robick is an insanely great and elegant audio player app by Japanese developer Mitsuhiro Sugimori at birnimal.
Robick presents you with a nice vinyl record spin wheel interface with the waveform represented in it. The song will start playing when you tap the big play button in the middle of the record. You can slide your finger over it to adjust the necessary parameter. Tapping outside the disc will switch the parameter shown on the disc. The app has a slightly difficult learning curve but when you spend a few minutes with it, you will see why it is a must buy for any musician aiming to learn sections of a song. The bottom left corner shows you the parameters that you can change with their colour codes. There is a mode changer button next to this that lets you change the type of parameter with a nice sliding away animation. The app has a demo track and it imports songs from your library. You can import a song you need to learn and dissect it section by section with pitch,key and tempo controls that help you learn it faster. The app is not overblown with gradients like other music apps and has an interface that is like Figure meets Djay. The track information is on the top of the screen. The app has some nice features that are essential to music apps as well like disabling autolock for the display.
Overall Robick has made it to my essential apps for music enthusiasts. It is an absolute joy to use after you spend some time with it. I hope more features like backward playback and snippet exporting are added soon. Do yourself a favour and start dissecting your music in the best way possible with Robick. It is available on the App Store for $2.99.