iPhone 3Gs Musings and Two More App Reviews
I’m sure you’ve already heard plenty about the new Apple iPhone 3Gs models that are scheduled to be available this Friday. They promise to be faster and even more fully featured than the current 3G models (which will be dropped in price to $99). For a good summary of the features and pricing, check out this story from PC World.
Current iPhone owners who don’t want to shell out the bucks for an iPhone 3Gs can still get some cool improvements with the free 3.0 operating system ($10 for iPod touch users), which will also be available on June 19th. That promises a lot of improvements including cut, copy, and paste; a landscape keyboard in the Mail app (a boon for typing emails, and a big improvement over the portrait-oriented keyboard in the current OS), turn-by-turn directions for the GPS (you’ll have to purchase a third-party app to access this feature), and, built-in voice-memo recording.
What the new iPhone models and operating system will mean for music apps on the platform remains to be seen. But in the meantime, new ones keep popping up. Here are a couple I’ve tried lately. (Read more about iPhone music apps in the EM feature story, “iPhoning it In“.)
Scale Wizard 1.01 ($1.99): 
Planet WavesGuitarists looking for fingerings for virtually any scale at any fret will love this app. You can see the fingering for, and listen to (either ascending, descending, or by individual note) virtually any scale, mode, or arpeggio in any key. It’s simple to use and a boon for any guitarist.
FiRe 1.0.0 ($5.99, Audiofile Engineering). Designed as a field recorder for your iPhone/iPod Touch, this app is well-designed and very useful. Large Play and Record buttons greet you when you open the app. It defaults to mono, but if you plug in a stereo mic (I tried it with the Blue Mikey, which it only supports on the iPhone 3G not the iPod touch 2G), and restart the app, it supports stereo recording. You can easily drop in markers, add Broadcast WAVE metadata, and record in a variety of quality levels topping out at 16-bit, 44.1 kHz. Like BIAS’s iPro Recorder app (reviewed in “iPhoning it In“) the display will rotate when you turn your iPhone or iPod touch around, which is handy because mics plug into the dock port which is on the bottom of the unit. 
The rotating display lets you view the app right side up when recording with an external mic. One feature that’s a bit puzzling is Overdub. You’re able to record on top of a previous recording, but you can’t hear your original while doing so. I’m not sure of the utility of this, but perhaps I’m missing something. You also get a bunch of different export options including FTP. I was able to easily download files through the browser based transfer method. I’d love to see an editing feature added, and monitoring while overdubbing, but overall, this is a very slick app.
