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RIP Music Memos – Apple kills off its songwriting app

Apple’s songwriting app, Music Memos, was intended as an easy place to jot down audio ideas. It had more musical chops than a straight voice note, without all the bells and whistles of GarageBand. Cleverly, it wasn’t just for recording audio – it could even provide automatic backing tracks and chord transcriptions from your scrappy recordings.

But it is no more. Music Memos is gone, and probably forgotten.

Despite the app being relatively smart, it had an admittedly niche appeal and wasn’t installed on devices by default. Meaning it didn’t really make waves in the way many of Apple’s other apps did. Add to that the fact that the Voice Memos app has come on leaps and bounds in the last couple of years and you can see why Apple didn’t want to keep them both around.

So if you were one of the people who did use Music Memos, where does that leave you?

While the app is no longer available to download from the App Store (since March 1), if you already had it installed you can keep using it for now. (And if you had it once, but not anymore, you can still find it in your Purchase History and download it again). Apple says it will continue to support the app in iOS 14, but makes no promises when iOS 15 rolls around this September.

In the meantime, if you have recordings that you don’t want to lose, make sure to export them to Voice Memos. You’ll be prompted to do this when opening the app – simply hit the Export button after the “Recording is moving to Voice Memos” message appears.

Though Voice Memos doesn’t have all the same musical features as Music Memos, it remains a decent place to record ideas. If you’ve not used it much, check out our guide to the app or pick a different app from our list of the best voice note apps.