GuitarJack puts studio in your pocket

GuitarJack looks to be one of the highest-quality solutions for recording instruments with your iPhone or iPod Touch.

(Credit: Sonoma Wire Works)

Recording with your iPhone's built-in microphone is a quick and easy way for musicians to sketch out song ideas. But if you're really bent on transforming your iPhone or iPod Touch into a mobile, multitrack recording studio, you'll need to drop some money on a quality recording app, and some kind of adapter for connecting instruments or mixers.

Fortunately, the folks at Sonoma Wire Works are working on one of the best solutions we've seen yet. The GuitarJack ($199) is due out this fall, and offers a 1/4-inch instrument input, stereo line input, and headphone output, all in an adapter that fits in you palm. More importantly, the line and instrument inputs offer selectable gain pads, 60dB of continuous analog level control, and can be separately assigned for simultaneous dual-mono recording.Professional, affordable apps such as FourTrack and FiRe recorder solve the first half of the equation, but shrinking a professional audio interface down to a pocketable iPhone adapter is a tall order.