i-o Dock update

My Grades 8, 9, & 10 fine arts music classes concluded the final term with a composition assignment. Students had to collaborate to compose, perform, and record their music. An array of recording equipment was available, including personal lap tops, Zoom H2 portable recorders, and Alesis i-o Dock equipped with the iPad & Garage Band. The iPad set up had the steepest learning curve; however, the simultaneous multi track capability offered a feature that was not available on the other portable devices. Having said that, the iPad version of GB is limited to eight tracks, which is not too restrictive, given that George Martin achieved all of those great Beatles recordings on a 4 track! Moreover, the "smart" instruments in GB enabled non guitarists, pianists, drummers, etc., to include these sounds in their recordings if they elected to do so. In short, the iPad set up was in high demand.

As for the connectivity of the i-o Dock, I personally feel is restrictive; however, I am fortunate to also have the Yamaha O1-X and the MOTU 828mk3 units, connected to Cubase. So, for small, quick, portable projects, the i-o Dock gets my thumbs up, and the students love the friendly operation.

In a previous post I wrote that I got a card reader to swap data in and out quickly; well, the cheap reader that I bought on ebay for $3.49 didn't work; however, I was disappointed to discover that the card reader is (if it works) great for transferring pictures onto the iPad, but nowhere did I read of any evidence that it was much good for anything else, like transferring off the iPad, extra memory, etc. Not to worry, I got a refund!

One more note about Garage Band songs on the iPad, while I think of it: the device won't let you export your songs to anything but YouTube, soundcloud, facebook and iTunes. That's a setback, but perhaps I've just not got that part figured out properly yet. To get around that, I just connected it to the line in of one of the H2 recorders and recorded the finished projects that way. I am not particularly interested in a cloud or social media for everything.

In the days ahead, I hope to find new and better ways to operate this equipment and software.