PRODUCT REVIEW
Product: gbTouch from Delora available at the App Store
Rating: ***** (Editor's Pick)
Price: $9.99
Pros: Easy to use, inexpensive, replaces hardware costing 10x-100x more.
Cons: Marginal downside to this app.
Wants: Would be nice to have vertical faders exactly like Garageband doesn't.
Requirements: iPad 4.3+, Intel Mac 10.5.8, Garageband '11.

This is the first column in a new series on advertising applications for the iPad. Every month I'll be reviewing a new application specifically useful for the advertising professional, and it's likely I'll have a lot to write about. The iPad is the most innovative advertising technology to come along since desktop publishing and the Internet.

As with the iPod, it will take years before the iPad's promise is fully sounded, but the iPad is already proving to be an amazingly useful business tool. Add-on gadgets and applications for the iPad let you scan and process credit card payments, add stereo recording capability for live video recording, display a sales presentation directly from the home office or create a 3D scan of an object, and the list goes on. The iPad is a cross between a Swiss army knife and a kids transformer toy. It can become all kinds of business tools with the right apps and add-ons.

One of the latest killer app categories for the iPad is the recording console emulator. These apps could quite literally be an industry killer because they make it possible to use the iPad's touch screen to completely replace conventional physical mixing consoles. The iPad literally makes a desk full of audio equipment obsolete.

There are iPad console applications for Pro Tools and Logic Studio, as well as many of the other major digital recording products. The reason I chose to review gbTouch is because every Mac ships with Garageband, so anyone with a reasonably current Mac and iPad only needs to add a $10 app and a mike to have a quite capable, and easy to use, recording system. Also, gbTouch solves a longstanding problem Garageband users have faced, lack of any external mixing console.

To fully understand just how well the iPad replaces the conventional mixing console takes a certain amount of explanation. As anyone trying to do audio production on a computer quickly notices, using a mouse to control the faders, pots and switches on screen is slow and clumsy compared to using the controls on a conventional audio mixer.

The solution to date has been to use an external mixing console designed to control the digital audio signal. A digital mixer is almost identical to an analog mixer except that no analog audio runs through the controls. Instead, a digital control signal is used allowing much cheaper components to be used without any loss of audio quality.

The digital mixing console was a real hit with the market because it could easily out-perform analog mixers in both audio quality and in flexibility. In addition, it was incredibly compact and cost effective. Most of the current digital mixers on the market only have volume faders and other controls for eight channels, but they manage to handle many times that number by dividing the total number of tracks needed into sets, or banks, of eight channels each. Bank one would control channels 1-8, bank two 9-16, and bank three channels 16 to 24. You can't control more than 8 tracks at once, but that usually doesn't prove to be a problem.

However, there's a catch to digital consoles that makes it expensive to do it right. The problem is that the industry standard volume control is a linear slider, and unless the controls are motorized, they will not update when the user switches between banks. Consider this hypothetical example. You set tracks 1-8 to a volume control setting of 7. Then you switch to bank two and set each track to a level of 4. Now, when you switch back to bank 1, the volume controls will all incorrectly show level 4, unless they are motorized controls.

To overcome this issue, the better grade digital mixing consoles use motorized faders to automatically adjust the volume levels when you switch between banks. The price goes up accordingly. A console with motorized controls like the Mackie can run around $1000. Digital mixing consoles without motorized faders can go for under $300. With the iPad's revolutionary touch screen, the whole issue is moot. The iPad just redraws the controls in the right position when banks are changed.

Also moot is the option of using any of the currently available digital mixing consoles with Garageband. Instead of using the standard Midi control language, Garageband uses an Apple proprietary control language called iControl. When Garageband was originally released M-Audio marketed a mixing console specifically designed to work with it. Unfortunately, it failed to sell, and currently no digital mixing console hardware is marketed for Garageband today. Fortunately, Apple kept the control language feature in place in Garageband, and once the iPad came along, it was easy the make an iPad application that worked with it, and was easy to set up and use.

The whole gbTouch setup process can take less than five minutes. You install a small server app on the desktop Mac and log in to it with the iPad. Once the connection is made, launch gbTouch on the iPad. You'll see the same Garageband volume, pan and other controls as running on the Mac, with two differences. The controls are reformatted somewhat differently (they're bigger and easier to see), and the controls on the iPad respond to your touch much like the controls on a real mixer do. You'll quickly find that running Garageband has never been easier.

Final Judgment

This iPad application solves the biggest problem keeping Garageband from being the ideal low budget digital recording software for radio commercials and podcast production, it provides an external mixer long missing from Garageband options.

The effect of gbTouch on productivity is remarkable. Not only is the mixing process faster, but things become possible that could never be done with a mouse, like adjusting more than one channel's volume at once. (With a little practice I was able to adjust 8 channels at once in real time.)

If you have a recent Mac and iPad, and you ever need to make commercials or podcasts with Garageband gbTouch is a must have product. At $9.99 gbTouch more than a bargain, it's a wonder


Glen Emerson Morris was a senior QA Consultant for SAP working on a new product to help automate compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley law, an attempt to make large corporations at least somewhat accountable to stockholders and the law. He has worked as a technology consultant for Yahoo!, Ariba, WebMD, Inktomi, Adobe, Apple and Radius.