# Orbeat: Drum Machine — Beat maker & sequencer > Circular drum machine and sequencer for intuitive beat making. (iPhone/iPad app by Chih Han Lin.) - Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/orbeat-drum-machine/id6783843640 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`) - Developer: [Chih Han Lin](https://appshunter.io/developer/1800248325) - Category: Music, Entertainment - Price: Free with in-app purchases - Rating: 5.00/5 from 3 App Store ratings · 1 written reviews indexed - Age rating: 4+ - Requires: iOS 16.0 · 4 MB - Languages: American English - Released: 2026-06-27 - Data updated: 2026-08-11 - Monetization: free with in-app purchases - User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/orbeat-drum-machine/id6783843640/reviews.md ## What is Orbeat? Orbeat is a drum machine in the round. Instead of a grid, your rhythm lives on a glowing mandala — concentric lanes of light that orbit a single play button. Tap the rings, watch the playhead sweep, and feel the groove move. Built to be played, not programmed. Open it and you're already making beats. A CIRCULAR SEQUENCER — UP TO TWELVE LANES Six lanes wrap the screen as rings, and the circle can grow to twelve: the mandala opens a second page of rings in its own electric color set, so every lane keeps its full size. Tap to place hits, lock a lane you love, mute and solo as you build the groove layer by layer. The whole pattern turns as it plays. FOUR DRUM KITS Classic, Acoustic, Glitch, and 8-bit — one tap reskins every voice while your pattern stays put. From clean and punchy to broken and chiptune. BRING YOUR OWN SOUNDS Build a custom kit and drop your own audio into any lane — WAV, AIFF or mp3, up to ten seconds, played at its original pitch and in stereo. Imported samples run clean to the output, while the lanes you leave alone keep their synth voice, so a hi-hat you recorded yourself sits right next to Orbeat's own drums. Your first custom kit is free. GENERATORS THAT SURPRISE YOU Roll the dice for an instant pattern, or use Euclidean rhythms to spread hits evenly around a ring. Like what you hear? Tap the ring to write it in and edit by hand. MAKE IT BREATHE, MAKE IT DRIFT Add swing to push the feel off the grid, draw velocity per step for accents that live, and pan each lane across the stereo field. With Probability, hits fire by chance; with polymeter, each lane gets its own length so the phases drift in and out of sync. TAKE IT ANYWHERE Bounce any loop to a stereo WAV — named with the beat, its length and its tempo, so it still makes sense in your DAW next month — or run Orbeat as an AUv3 instrument with MIDI in & out — sequence other instruments, or play Orbeat's lanes from your host's piano roll inside GarageBand, AUM, Logic, and other AUv3 hosts. Standalone, play the pads live from any MIDI controller and sync the whole groove to external MIDI clock. PLAY IN SYNC WITH THE ROOM Ableton Link keeps Orbeat in time with every Link-enabled app and device on your network — Ableton Live, AUM, Loopy, a friend's iPad across the table. Tempo follows the session, start and stop are shared, and everyone stays in phase. No cables, no setup. PLAY FREE. UNLOCK ONCE. The full instrument is free forever — every kit, the six-lane circle, Euclidean generators, swing, velocity, pan, your first custom kit with your own samples, MIDI in & out, and Ableton Link. Orbeat Pro is a single one-time purchase (no subscription, ever) that unlocks room to grow the circle to twelve lanes, plus Probability, polymeter, WAV export, unlimited saved beats, and extra custom kits. Made for iPhone and iPad. No account, no ads, no tracking — your beats never leave your device unless you share them. Tap the rings. Make it move. ## Key features - Circular sequencer interface - Four unique drum kits - Generative rhythm patterns - Swing and velocity controls - Probability and polymeter - AUv3 plugin support - WAV export ## Pricing and in-app purchases Base price: Free. **One-time purchases** | Purchase | Price | Type | | --- | --- | --- | | Orbeat Pro | $5.99 | one-time | ## Recent user reviews (1 of 1) All indexed reviews: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/orbeat-drum-machine/id6783843640/reviews.md ### 5/5 — Please consider this request 🙏🏼🙏🏼 *2026-07-07* Really nice sequencer! I’m very much enjoying my time with it. Unfortunately for me, I have lots of sequencers already and whilst I am tempted to buy this one through the in-app purchase, I’m a bit annoyed by what - I find to be - a weird but most likely arbitrary limitation: only six lanes? Hopefully you can consider adding a system which allows us to “instantiate lanes” — I’d be ok with being able to have from 1 to 16 lanes — I understand if more is a bit annoying… but at least being able to have up to 16 lanes (and the ability to “select how many you want”) would be amazing and would definitely have me buying this immediately. Given that, and sorry if I’m being overwhelming, but as a programmer myself, I think the suggested idea shouldn’t be very hard to implement, I hope you will consider it; it would really make this sequencer a super versatile and beautiful tool. PS: thanks for the amazing, iPhone friendly layout — the UI design in this is crazy good. PS2: I did have a bug where when first trying this out, I couldn’t add notes on the sequencer under the “sequence lane as bars” view. I think in order to fix this, I had to add a note manually under the “circular sequence” view, after that all worked just fine. Great app! Please consider adding more lanes as an option 🙏🏼🙏🏼 **Developer response:** Thank you for this review — it's a big part of why 1.2.0 exists. The update is in App Review now and should land within a few days: tap + to add lanes (or remove them), up to twelve, with the circle opening a second page of rings so every lane keeps its full size. We stopped at twelve rather than sixteen to keep the mandala readable and playable on a phone, but it's exactly the "pick how many lanes you want" system you described. The first six stay free; growing the circle is part of the one-time Pro unlock. The bars-view bug you hit — notes not registering until one existed in the circular view — was fixed back in 1.1.1. Thanks for the kind words about the layout, and if twelve still isn't enough, tell me what you're building: zhiii0x@gmail.com! ## Frequently asked questions about Orbeat ### What makes Orbeat's sequencer different? Orbeat features a unique circular sequencer where rhythms are placed on concentric rings that orbit a central play button, offering a visually distinct approach to beat creation compared to traditional grid-based sequencers. ### Does Orbeat have ads? No, Orbeat is ad-free and does not track user data, ensuring an uninterrupted creative experience. ### What are the different drum kits available in Orbeat? Orbeat includes four distinct drum kits: Classic, Acoustic, Glitch, and 8-bit, allowing users to easily reskin their beats with different sonic textures. ### How can I unlock Orbeat's full features? The full instrument is free forever. Orbeat Pro, which unlocks Probability, polymeter, WAV export, and unlimited saved beats, is available as a single one-time purchase. ### Can Orbeat be used with other music apps? Yes, Orbeat can run as an AUv3 instrument with MIDI in & out, allowing it to sequence other instruments or be played from hosts like GarageBand, AUM, and Logic. ### What platforms does Orbeat support? Orbeat is made for iPhone and iPad, offering a seamless experience across both devices. ### How often is Orbeat updated? The latest version, 1.1.0, was released on July 3, 2026, indicating active development and regular updates for the application. ### What is the age rating for Orbeat? Orbeat has an age rating of 4+, making it suitable for a wide range of users interested in music creation. ## Version history (last 5 releases) ### 1.3.1 — 2026-08-04 You asked for these. EXPORT AS MIDI Bounce the pattern out as a MIDI file and drop it straight into your DAW. Every lane lands on its General MIDI drum note, so it hits the right pad in whatever you open it with — and your swing, probability rolls and polymeter phases all come across exactly as you hear them here. Sitting on a polymeter groove where the lanes only line up every fifteen bars? Pick Full and the export runs one complete cycle, so the loop actually loops. TUNE ANY LANE A new Sound tab gives every lane a tune control, four octaves wide. Pitch a kick down until it's a sub, tighten a hi-hat, or take a sample you imported and play it high and short. Your own one-shots resample properly, so a vocal chop or a found sound becomes an instrument you can play across the circle. Free for everyone. EXPORTS THAT SAY WHAT THEY ARE Every bounce used to land as orbeat-4bar.wav — the same name every time, so the third loop you saved turned into "orbeat-4bar 3.wav" and you were left opening files to work out which was which. An export now carries the beat's name, its length and its tempo: orbeat-Midnight-Drive-4bar-124bpm.wav A WAV file has nowhere to keep a tempo, so the filename is the thing that tells your DAW — and you, three months from now — how fast the loop runs. START FROM THE TOP A new button beside the tempo sends the pattern back to the first beat, so you can audition a change from the downbeat instead of wherever the circle happened to be. Thanks for playing. Tell us what you'd love to see next: zhiii0x@gmail.com ### 1.3.0 — 2026-07-28 Orbeat now plays in time with everything else in the room. ABLETON LINK Switch Sync to Link and Orbeat locks to every Link-enabled app and device on your network — Ableton Live, AUM, Loopy, a friend's iPad across the table. Tempo follows the session, start and stop are shared, and everyone stays in phase without a single cable or a moment of setup. You'll find it in Settings under Sync, with a panel showing how many peers are in the jam. YOUR IMPORTED SAMPLES, PLAYED FAITHFULLY If you loaded your own audio into a custom kit and it came back distorted — that was us, and it's fixed. Your samples were being pushed through the drum kit's character processing: the saturation and bit-crush that give Glitch and 8-bit their bite. Wonderful on our synthesised drums. Ruinous on a hi-hat you recorded yourself. Samples now take a clean path straight to the output, while the synth lanes keep every bit of their kit's personality. Nothing to re-import — your existing kits will simply start sounding right. CUSTOM KITS STAY PUT A custom kit's synth lanes used to borrow their tone from whichever built-in kit you'd touched last, so the same kit could sound different from one session to the next. Each custom kit now carries its own voicing and sounds the same every time you open it. EXPORT MATCHES WHAT YOU HEAR Bouncing a beat built on a custom kit quietly swapped your sounds back to the built-in ones — samples missing, lanes you'd silenced suddenly audible. Exports now render exactly what's playing. Thanks to the player who wrote in about the distorted imports: that one report is half this update. Keep them coming — zhiii0x@gmail.com ### 1.2.0 — 2026-07-14 The circle grows — Orbeat now goes up to twelve lanes. TWICE THE CIRCLE You asked for more voices, so here they are. Tap + to grow your kit past six: the mandala opens a second page of rings so every lane keeps its full size, and you flip between pages with the corner chevrons. Page two glows in its own electric color set, and the new voices land ready to play — Noise, plus a second Kick, Snare, Hat, Tom, and Clap. Works standalone and as the AUv3 in your host, with existing automation untouched. The first six lanes stay free; growing the circle is part of Orbeat Pro. A CLEANER COCKPIT ON IPHONE Your drum kit moved up beside the tempo — a small chip that names the active kit and opens the full picker in one tap. Below the circle, editing is now a single tidy card: two clear tabs (Velocity and Generator), a taller velocity panel with real room to draw, and a lane strip that follows the circle's page — the lane you're on expands, the rest tuck in tight. Twelve lanes, way less scrolling. Thanks for playing — this one shipped because you asked. Tell us what you'd love to see next: zhiii0x@gmail.com ### 1.1.0 — 2026-07-03 Orbeat now listens: this update is all about MIDI. PLAY IT LIVE Hit the 8 lanes from any MIDI controller or app — GM drum notes with full velocity, standalone and inside your AUv3 host. Other apps can play Orbeat directly through its new virtual "Orbeat" MIDI port. Note input is always on; pick a channel (or Omni) in Settings, under MIDI. SYNC TO YOUR RIG Set Sync to External MIDI Clock and Orbeat follows the master: START, STOP and CONTINUE, tempo changes, even song-position jumps land on the right bar. The tempo display mirrors the clock with an EXT badge — and tells you the moment the clock disappears. THE LITTLE FACE JOINS THE BAND The play button's face now dresses for your kit — blissed-out for Acoustic, glitchy for Glitch, pixel-perfect for 8-bit. It pops its mouth on every kick and breathes with how loud you play. AND THE GUIDE TO GO WITH IT New MIDI guide on the website — note map, channel setup, and a clock-sync walkthrough: nono-today.github.io/orbeat/midi.html Thanks for playing. Tell us what you'd love to see next: zhiii0x@gmail.com ### 1.0.1 — 2026-06-29 Welcome to Orbeat 1.0 — a drum machine in the round. • A circular, six-lane sequencer you play like a mandala • Four drum kits: Classic, Acoustic, Glitch, and 8-bit • Euclidean and Probability generators, plus a one-tap dice roll • Swing, per-step velocity, and polymeter • WAV export and an AUv3 instrument with MIDI out Thanks for playing. Tell us what you'd love to see next: zhiii0x@gmail.com ## More apps by Chih Han Lin - [GoodPill - Medicine Reminder](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/goodpill-medicine-reminder/id6759840986) - [KpopLike - Find Your K-Twin](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/kpoplike-find-your-k-twin/id6760238854) - [GranSample - Granular Sampler](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/gransample-granular-sampler/id6760527944) - [Pocketext Scan](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/pocketext-scan/id6761661447) - [SoundMess Lab: SPL Meter](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/soundmess-lab-spl-meter/id6762592034) - [SpellSynth: Retro Vocal Synth](https://appshunter.io/ios/app/spellsynth-retro-vocal-synth/id6762822700) All apps by Chih Han Lin: https://appshunter.io/developer/1800248325 --- *Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-11.*