Four years after it launched in 2016, Apple’s Music Memos app is going to the great recording session in the sky. Or, in other words, It’s being cancelled by Apple.
The Music Memos app for iOS was designed to give musicians and songwriters a dedicated mobile app for recording song ideas and manipulating uncompressed audio on their iPhones or iPads. It was a neat concept, but it’s one that, for whatever reason, never really took off with users.
No More Updates for Music Memos
This week, Music Memos got one last update, after which it will no longer receive any further attention from Apple. It’s a bit like a musician whose final, contractually obligated album gets released by the record label prior to their contract expiring. In the release notes, Apple makes it clear that Music Memos has reached the end of the road.
As 9to5Mac pointed out, Apple notes the following:
The Music Memos app won’t be updated after Music Memos version 1.0.7, and you won’t be able to download it after March 1, 2021. If you have an iPhone with iOS 14 or an iPad with iPadOS 14, you can continue to use Music Memos. And if you’ve previously downloaded the app, you can still access it from your App Store purchase history. But you should export your Music Memos recordings to your Voice Memos library to make sure you keep all of your recordings.
The app’s final update adds the ability to export Music Memos recordings to the Voice Memos library.
Catering to the Music Community
Apple has long catered to the creative community with its music making apps for iOS. Tools like GarageBand have proven immensely popular with musicians, offering a great, accessible music-making experience. Apple Music, the HomePod, AirPods and (the still just about hanging on in there) iPod also make Apple synonymous with all things musical.
Unfortunately, it seems that Apple’s idea for Music Memos as a bridge between Voice Memos and GarageBand was simply a solution to a problem not enough users thought existed. Fortunately, there are still plenty of great free music production tools for beginners.
The demise of Music Memos shouldn’t be a massive surprise for even its biggest cheerleaders. Since launching, it only received seven updates in total. Of these, the first three (plus the initial launch) took place in 2016. After that, the app received only one update each year. Each of these contained only minor stability improvements and bug fixes. Which suggests that Apple all but threw in the towel long before this week’s official notice of termination.
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