iNudge: An easy online music creation widget

Here’s an impressive tool that’s also a great way to creatively while away a few hours. iNudge is a recently launched Flash-based widget for creating music.

Using a selection of instruments you create music by adding dots to the screen. It’s quick easy and the results are surprisingly good.

There’s little concession to ‘Pro’ musicians here – this is all about fun. That said, with basic volume and pan controls for each instrument you do get the opportunity to be at least a little imaginative with your mix.

The killer feature here is the ability to share your creation by email, by sending it to destinations such as Myspace or iGoogle, or by embedding it directly into a web page (as I’ve done below). Even better, others can then edit your creation themselves creating all sorts of opportunities for collaborative music creation.

For the future, I’d like to see iNudge introduce tools for composing longer pieces of music. At the moment you’re limited to a single bar. The challenge to the developers will be expanding the service without sacrificing its simplicity.

iNudge recalls a number of iPhone apps such as iDrum that offer similar functionality. A more advanced browser-based experience can be found in Myna, which offers a Garage Band-esque interface but is a much more in-depth service.

For a casual user who just wants to play around with music creation and share their ideas with friends, iNudge is ideal.

Here’s what I created in five minutes using iNudge. It’s hardly a work of genius, but it shows that iNudge is definitely worth a try.