Living up to their slogan Musician’s First, IK Multimedia unleashed their new GrooveMaker app for the iPhone last week. While I have to admit that I’ve got no DJ aspirations in me whatsoever, after playing around with GrooveMaker for the past couple of days, I’m impressed with what this nifty little app allows me to do.

The free GrooveMaker pack only comes with 1 song, but it does, however, feature 125 loops that you can use when mixing your own beats. The version I used for this review was the GrooveMaker House pack ($9.99/€7.99). You do get more with the paid version as this ones comes with 4 songs and 315 loops. Registering will nab you an additional free song regardless of which GrooveMaker pack you download.

More after the break.

The interface can be quite overwhelming at first glance, but once you get the hang of things, it’s actually pretty easy to use. First, you’ll need select and load a song. The first time you pick a song, it will be unpacked which roughly takes around 3 minutes or so to complete, but do note, though, that this only happens during the first launch. After that, everything is pretty snappy. Once you’ve done this, you got 4 pre-arranged mixes to choose from at the right side (A-D). Touch to select, and this will, in turn, be the foundation for your personal GrooveMaker track.

There are a total of 8 track slots available for each mix, but only 6 are used in the pre-arranged selection by default. This gives you 3 vacant slots to load your preferred loops to the mix, or you can also opt to change the pre-selected 6 tracks. Touch the track slot you wish to change, and the Track button to view the options available.

To change the loop of the selected track, tap the Loops button and the massive collection of loops will appear at the right side.

Once you’re done and want to save your work, tap on the Groove Snap button to add it to your sequence. You can save it as it is or continue to work on a new track and mix it up with your previous track. You can then sequence it all together by tapping the Sequence button at the left. Sequencing is as easy as dragging the desired track into the groove pad.

To finally save your new tunes, tap on the Mix Browser button and select Save. Unfortunately, it only gets saved for use in GrooveMaker. You won’t have access to it outside the particular GrooveMaker pack you used to create it and the song you chose as the basis for it.

If you want to play your saved mix using your iPhone/iPod Touch, you’ll have to Export it (WiFi required). Exporting it will save it as a WAV file, and you will then be provided a URL where you can find and download it to your PC/Mac.

Over-all, it’s quite an empowering app that provides you with necessary tools to unleash the inner DJ within you. It’s pretty great, but not perfect, by any means. Due to the current restrictions imposed by Apple, there’s no inter-app compatibility, and while we wished you can simply load any song into GrooveMaker, that feature isn’t supported as well. Nonetheless, despite these shortcomings, it’s really a full-featured, speedy and fun app to use. The gains, needless to say, outweigh its drawbacks. Try out the free version first if you’re still a bit skeptical about it, but I’m pretty sure, if you’re an aspiring DJ or someone who just loves to mix their own beats, you’ll love what GrooveMaker has to offer.