ReBirth faithfully emulates dance music's three backbone devices: The Roland TB-303 Bass synth and the Roland TR-808 and 909 drum machines. Combine these with FX units, fully featured pattern sequencers and a quick-acting, scalable iPhone interface and you'll soon be making techno on the train, trance on the tram or beats on the bus.

Rebirth is one of the reasons that made me switch to macs, more than ten years ago. It was an incredibly user-friendly piece of software with which you could easily create all sorts of electronic tunes, from the most acid-sounding techno lines to drum and base tracks. It was still the age of OS-9, iMacs and the colorful iBooks.. then with the advent of osX Rebirth wasn't supported anymore, and it turned into a museum.

So now seeing it reborn into an iPhone app is just amazing. It's available on the Apple Store for 3.99 pounds (link). I bought it and had a go: the sound is as great as the original, but unfortunately controlling the interface is not as much fun. The iPhone is just too small in my opinion... but I guess that if you could run it on the iPad that would change everything (I don't have one, but I suppose it just should scale up as needed).

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A couple of related audio&iPhone links:

- GravSynth: an analog synthesizer, fun to use.

- MobileSynth: a google project providing foundational open source iPhone code for building synthesizers.