Apple has spent a long time marketing the iPad as a content creation device (spurring the competition to make and sell tons of content consumption devices for a fraction of the cost) and there’s certainly a great deal of merit to those claims. Particularly when you look at apps like Symphony Pro, a musical composition program which is so amazing that it’s positively daunting when you first look at it.
Fortunately the manual is detailed and well-written, and it doesn’t take too long before you can start to plug away at composing some music. This is not a toy, really, but a complicated and robust assistant for composers to lean on as they work. It does a great deal indeed, and as such it’s a compelling app.
Unfortunately, with great complexity and power comes a whole lot of chances to run afoul of bugs and (yes) even crashes. The customer support for the program is top shelf, but the fact that you need to reach out to them during the course of using the software to do what it’s supposed to is a shame. For many people this is a four or five star app, but if you run into the bugs it becomes very frustrating rapidly, and some of them aren’t too difficult to find.
MacReview.com Verdict:
The program’s concept is fabulous and the feature set and usability are amazing, but there are just too many kinks in the system that are so close to the surface to really give it a wholehearted recommendation.
