Arturia iMini review

Arturia's line-up of virtual synths seems like such a perfect fit for the iPad that we're amazed they haven't "done an IK" and started porting them over long before now. At last, though, the veteran French developer has boarded the App Store bandwagon with iMini, an emulation of one of the greatest analogue synths of all time: the Minimoog. Developed in conjunction with Retronyms, installing it also makes it available in the latter's (free) Tabletop software studio, which is a sweet bonus.

So, what we have here is a consistent take on Moog's 70s classic: three oscillators, a resonant filter (capable of self-oscillation, impressively), filter and amp envelopes and a white/pink noise generator. Two Keyboard Control switches enable variable filter keytracking, and a hidden settings panel enables scrolling and zooming of the keyboard, as well as scale selection (including a sizeable array of modes and non- Western scales), pitchbend Range, and On/Off switches for Decay (which activates a release envelope stage), Legato and Glide.

Unlike the original, of course, iMini is polyphonic (except when running in Tabletop, where it's monophonic, disappointingly). A library of around 500 presets is onboard, and communication with the outside world can be achieved using MIDI and WIST.

There are also delay and chorus effects built in, plus a pair of X/Y touchpads for assignable performance control of up to four parameters at once, and an arpeggiator.

The lack of Audiobus support and internal recording of any sort make iMini rather more self-contained than it should be in this day and age, but we wouldn't be surprised to see such functionality added in a future update. Were iMini better equipped in terms of capturing its output, we'd give it 4.5 stars. As it currently stands, though...