I was already familiar with how to make music with DAWs when I downloaded this, but it was still bewildering at first, even after reading the manual. And re-reading it. Some of the interface elements are/were unintuitive: tap once on a selected track to delete it?? Hey whered my work go?? This seems to have disappeared with updates but I still feel wary of tapping anything before knowing precisely what it will do.
The samples that come with the app are kinda eh, it is true. Beatmaker is most useful for editing and then sending MIDI to other synth apps. I have tried to use it as a recorder at the end of an Audiobus chain, but it crashes every time I try to capture audio coming in that way. Nanostudio is more reliable in that regard.
The sample editor may be the most compelling feature in the app. Again, the interface is obscure and the process complicated, but time stretching and pitch-shifting can still be done independently of each other, which is not possible in any other iOS app that I have yet found. But it is circuitous and frustrating to get what I want out of it.
If so much of the app were not the same way, I would use it more often than I do. As it is, Beatmaker is a useful tool in a small collection of iOS apps, but not something I would try to use alone to produce a finished piece.