Roland Zenbeats 4+

So close…

I am a desktop daw based musician with about 20 years of making music (I’m 30 now). Primarily I play guitar and write music where guitar is the focus such as modern Prog or Metal based genres.

In my switch to iOS music making, which has so much potential btw, I’ve been painstakingly searching for the daw that is going to meet my needs. Things like audio editing and flexible bus routing for mixing are things that are important to me, in addition to the intuitive midi sequencing capabilities and a smooth stable workflow.

In my search I’ve pretty much tried them all, from Auria pro, Cubasis, nano-studio 2, bm3, and the list goes on… then comes along this app and to my surprise, this one is so far the closest to what I am after! I have been thoroughly impressed with how smooth this app behaves relative to others. Bm3 was the previous king for me, but this one edges it out…. Because this app has what all the others don’t: a fast and intuitive way to slice and edit the timing of my guitar DI tracks (it even has a poor man’s “slip edit” feature using the green play head thing). With ONE MAJOR CAVEAT…

Audio cross-fades. Seriously. I for the life of me do not understand how such basic audio editing features are neglected across SO MANY of these mobile DAWs. I guess everybody only makes music with MIDI these days but yeesh has this been frustrating. Anyways I digress.

Roland, PLEASE give us cross-fades, and this daw will be the king for years to come.

Cheers

This thing is amazing now. The amount of improvement is staggering!

Let me start out by saying Ive been checking in on this app off and on for maybe 6-8 months (just a best guess). My first impression was “ah, this is awesome - real potential here”. But then the bugs and crashes and freezes got me.

I’ve checked back maybe every 45 days or something since then and it’s just been rock solid, steady improvement after steady improvement after steady improvement. I think I own just about every music production app worth owning on iOS these days (and scores of apps not worth owning!) and I have to say, never before have I ever seen an app improve consistently like this. Ever. No where even close that I can think of. This thing has just gotten better and better and better. Now it’s super stable, reliable, powerful and for my money, the best tool for top to bottom on iOS at the moment. I said it. I believe it.

I’m all about Roland these days, extremely refreshing, extremely impressive. This brand has earned my respect and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.

Developer Response ,

Hi Codowlsky,

Thanks for taking the time to review. We'd love to hear more about your frustration points. Contact us at https://www.roland.com/backstage/#/zenbeats-support and we'll be here to listen.

Great, but crashes a lot when trying to do more.

Started using this app as a fast way to create some simple beats and work on song structure. Sounds great, lots of options and a fairly intuitive, pleasing interface.

I quickly found out after playing with the app for twenty minutes that even a simple 1 bar beat loop with 4 preloaded sounds (no effects, or automations) is about all this app can handle. As soon as you go to add an effect to a sound the app just crashes, no way to restore what you were working on or anything. SAVE OFTEN!

A ton of potential, but with as much time and effort I have lost to this app’s unexpected crashing it’s not worth spending time with in its present state.

If you want a simple 4 sound loop with no enhancements, effects, or processing it’s fine. If you want something to flesh out ideas, be able to modify the sounds, and be able to save your work when you get things to where you want them without the app crashing look elsewhere for now.

iOS 13.4.1 on 2019 iPad Pro 11” 256.

May 18th update: Several of the guided tutorials in the app are broken. When it asks you to click the bottom left arrow to expand the left side-panel you cannot progress through the tutorial, the only button in the dialogue window is ‘back’ and not next. The tutorial does not register whether you have pressed the arrow to expand the left side-panel, even repeatedly.

Developer Response ,

Hi there!

Sorry you had an issue and thank you for the report! We'll look at the lesson issue. Please note there is much more than simple 4 loop sounds. I recommend signing up for one of our free live tutorial classes or create a support ticket at https://www.roland.com/backstage/#/zenbeats-support We are here to help!