
You can plug in microphones, guitars, instruments, record players or anything you want to record. It’s got great LED monitoring so you always know what the levels are doing. It’s a 4-input and 2-output professional grade recording interface and mixer. The iRig Pro Quattro is the largest of the interfaces and it can do everything. The bigger ones are battery powered and the smaller can be powered from your iPad making them the easiest interfaces to use in a mobile situation.

IK Multimedia make a range of “iRig” iPad-friendly audio interfaces that are particularly good because they come with the right cables to connect via either USB-C or Lightning. Let’s kick off with something that’s going to do the job and then some. Here come the best audio interfaces for iPad:įor a quick list of where to buy these interfaces please check out my companion page here. It might not sound very straightforward, but with our recommendations, you’ll have your iPad studio up and running in no time. Some interfaces will pass power through to the iPad to keep them charged during your session, but some will not. An audio interface needs to run amplifiers, LED meters and phantom power for microphones and so they will usually need their own power supply. iPads run on very little power and so don’t usually have enough spare to fire up an audio interface. If you have an older iPad with the Lightning connector, then you’ll need the “USB Camera Kit” adapter to plug the USB cable in. The latest iPads use USB-C as the connection interface and for you’ll just need a USB-C cable that don’t always come with the interface. You may also need an adapter for the USB cable. For iPad, it has to be able to plug in and work this is called being “Class Compliant”, and not all interfaces support this. Most interfaces are designed for desktop computers that often require the installation of drivers and bits of software to run. So which is the best one? Well, first you have to work out which interfaces will be compatible. It’s the box that turns your iPad into a real live studio. You can plug in your guitar, your microphone and your synths and record yourself at very high quality directly into your iPad. They often have gain controls, LED metering and a bit fat volume knob. That’s where the audio interface comes in.Īn audio interface is a box that contains the proper connections for microphones, instruments and speakers or headphones.

However, as a recording device it’s hampered by the lack of decent, studio-quality, inputs and outputs. You can install DAWs, virtual instruments, loops and effects and mix whole tracks of music. IPads can be extraordinary slabs of music production technology. But how on earth do you plug-in a guitar, or a decent microphone? That is where the audio interface comes in. There are recording studio apps and synthesizer apps, beat making and loop triggering apps. The Apple iPad harbors an enormous amount of creative power.
