Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Like I’ve said before, I’m aware that being an early adopter is a sucker’s game and that the iPad is far from a perfect device (I still have a hard time believing it doesn’t have USB ports). But the minute someone makes an iPad app that does something like what the Hobnox Audiotool does as a Web-based Flash program, I am positive that my present resolve not to give Apple several hundred more dollars of my money will shatter like a plate glass window hit with an 808-emulating brick. The Audiotool provides a surprisingly flexible and fast-responding workspace well stocked with modules: three emulate the vintage Roland machines that house, hip-hop, and techno were built with (the TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and the TB-303 monophonic synthesizer), and the others include a “tone matrix” similar to a Tenori-On, a series of effects units (cutely rendered to look like Boss pedals), and a few different kinds of mixing tool. All of them are manipulated in a way that’s remarkably similar to how they work in real life. The Audiotool even provides the option of recording and exporting your songs to play back outside the program.
