Now, GarageBand is , and it's a whopper: The app has gone universal, with a brand-new iPhone and iPod touch interface, and has added a bunch of new features, including custom chords for Smart Instruments, an Arpeggiator, new velocity settings, transposition, new time signatures, quantization options, and support for AAC and AIFF export.

I spent the morning playing around with GarageBand on both my iPad 2 and iPhone 4; here are some initial impressions on the update.

When I first got a chance to play with GarageBand on the iPad back in March, I had little expectation for an iPhone port. At the time, iMovie had just , which made sense enough. You're capturing video on your iPhone; surely you might want to edit it on the device. But while the iPhone's portable size makes it ideal for recording vocal snippets and guitar parts on the go, I was skeptical about the viability of GarageBand's full feature-set on such a small device. I'd owned guitar and piano iPhone apps before, but found them severely lacking in actual usability, thanks to small screen space and poorly-done interfaces.

As of Tuesday, I am very happy to be completely, utterly wrong. Not only does GarageBand's iPhone and iPod touch version make music creation, editing, and exporting a snap, but the folks on the development team have somehow managed to implement almost from GarageBand for iPad into the device, and without compromising on design or user experience, at that. (The only missing feature I could find was support for multiple keyboards on one screen--something that makes little to no sense on a device as small as an iPhone or iPod touch.)