Good sound, buggy app

Let me get the bad news out of the way first: when run on the iPhone, this app is fatally buggy. It uses a clever chord-sequencing scheme--just strum and periodically hit the down arrow to go to the next chord--but programming in the chords is impossible. Among other problems, chords dragged to the timeline pile up on top of each other so you cant even read their labels, or they dont "stick" when dragged there, and before long the app simply freezes and must be force-quit. If youre thinking of running this on your iPhone, forget it. Its unusable. (Tested on iPhone 5/64 GB.) The rest of this review applies to the iPad version, which is marginally usable.

Ive tried several ukulele apps on my iPad and so far, Futulele is the best of the lot. Thats not saying much, though, because the others Ive seen are pretty lame. The pros: Futulele has an attractive main screen and produces good sound. Its able to record your performance and export both .wav (digitized audio) and .mid (MIDI) files, which can be imported into GarageBand and combined with other tracks to produce professional-sounding songs.

The cons: once you get beyond the main screen into settings, chords and so on, things get ugly fast. The controls are overlaid on the main screen in a semi-translucent fashion, making for a visually distracting mess. The font used is hard to read, and--a particularly serious flaw in a musical instrument--"C" is almost indistinguishable from "G".

The recording function works for two takes and then fails--after that, the "Record" button cannot even be actuated. The only cure is to force-quit and relaunch the app. The exported .wav files are fine, but the .mid files, at least in GarageBand, dont sound remotely like what you played, no matter what instrument you assign them to. And as others have pointed out, buttons on the main screen get "stuck" and in some cases replaced by white squares.

Futulele is an ambitious effort, and I give the developers credit for what theyve accomplished. Unfortunately, they failed to finish the job. This app needs some serious debugging effort, as well as a redesign of the various settings screens. Until then, I can only categorize it as "the best of a bad lot"--still worth buying if you care about the ukulele, but frustrating in use. (Tested on iPad 3/64 GB and iPad Mini/32 GB.)

Andy Baird about Futulele - Digital Ukulele with FX and chords