The audio tools at your disposal have broadened in this version, which is a relief. It’s now possible to view audio waveforms for video and audio clips, making it easier to determine edit points.

iMovie for iOS now offers multiple audio tracks: One for the video track, one background music track, and three foreground audio tracks; a limited library of sound effects are also available. It’s now possible to include multiple background songs, versus having to choose just one, by turning off the Loop Background Music option in the Project Settings.

However, as welcome as these features are, I’m still left longing for more control. When you trim an audio clip, there’s no way to fade out the edit point, leaving an abrupt ending if you trimmed mid-sound. You can adjust only the overall volume of a clip. The background music track is also automatically ducked (made softer) when there’s audio in a video clip, but no control is available to enable, disable, or adjust the level of ducking.

Also, iMovie makes an assumption that any audio track under one minute in length should be foreground audio, not a background music track. That can be a problem if you want to open a video with a short piece of music from your iTunes music library, and then follow with a longer piece. iMovie places the short piece as a sound effect (a blue track beneath the video); when you add the next song, it appears as a background track, which locks to the beginning of the movie. Unlike the behavior in the desktop version of iMovie, you can’t pin a background track arbitrarily.