SoundBow vs soundfruuze
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
SoundBow
Create music by drawing curves and gestural movements on a clean interface. Record your own sounds, build melodies, and export compositions as audio files. This app offers a unique, interactive approach to music production.
- Drawing-based music creation
- Gesture-based sound manipulation
- Record and use own sounds
- Export compositions as audio
- Rescale instrument elements
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SoundBow is a drawing based music instrument with a clean and simple visual interface. You can create music by drawing curves over the screen with lines and gestural movements. Apart from drawing, you can rescale your instrument by moving graphical elements around. Record your own sounds through the microphone and start creating melodies, soundscapes with your own voice. If you wish, you can also export your composition as an audio file. "Touch-based mobile devices allowed interactive, gesture-based music production to hit the masses. So far, this type of musical creation hasn't exactly taken the world by storm. But SoundBow, a drawing-based musical instrument app, should shake things up a little bit with its clean, minimal visual interface and mesmerizing potential for complex, loop-based music production." - The Creators Project "Binaura bring their beautiful SoundBow app to iOS at last. It is a gorgeous instrument with huge possibilities for expression and creativity. I think that in many ways these are the kinds of apps that iOS was made for." - Palm Sounds SoundBow is made with free and open source tools. The interface is built with OpenFrameworks. The sound engine is made with SodaLib, a free Data Sonification Library built on top of libPd (Pure Data).
soundfruuze
This app records and manipulates the last 10 seconds of live audio. It offers five lanes, each with unique sound manipulation effects like granular synthesis, looping, and FFT processing. Customize sound by touching lanes, controlling parameters like speed, pitch, and effects.
- Live audio recording and manipulation
- Five customizable effect lanes
- Granular synthesis and scrubbing
- FFT-based freezing and looping
- Frequency shifter, ring modulation, reverb
- Looper with adjustable speed and pitch
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'soundfruuze' is an exprerimental live sampler / looper / granular and FFT scrub effect It records live the recent 10 seconds of audio and allows you to manipulate it with special controls. The interface is divided into five “lanes”, sound is produced by touching the lanes. Each lane can be set up to use different effect and has various control parameters mapped to the touch position: Scratch Most basic lane type. You can control the volume of the resulting sound and smoothness of the position interpolation. Lesser smooth value produces the sound with more high frequencies. Speed Another basic playback type. Starts playing from the position in the sound that you selected with touch. Vertical position controls playback speed, horizontal parameter is assignable. Granular Freeze Allows you to select the sound at some position and use both horizontal and vertical coordinates of touch as 2 independent parameters. You can control volume, playback speed (pitch) and the grain size. Granular Scrub This type of lane is very similar to granular freeze but it allows to change the position of the grain after its start. Granular Stream This lane type enables granular playback with random parameters. You can randomise grain position in the selected range, speed, grain size and pan. There is special control for that type lane. The 2-dimensional slider is assignable so you can change 2 parameters for each touch independently. FFT Freeze and FFT Scrub In both FFT types of lanes another algorithm is used to process sound. In both FFT Freeze and Scrub sound is analyzed with the FFT transform and divided into frames. FFT Freeze allows you to select the frame at the desired sample position and to play it making the sound “freeze” at this point. Looper This lane type allows you to make loops / repeat large grains of sound. When you touch a looper lane, a new looper control is created and is kept there until you turn it off with the red ‘close’ button. You can change loop speed, volume, size and position for each loop individually or for all loops on one lane together using additional controls FFT Looper This type works the same way as basic Looper but allows to change playback speed while keeping the pitch. It uses FFT algorithm for playback allowing constant pitch for any playback speed and the same FFT effects (gate and phase randomisation) Each lane has also five effects: - Frequency shifter - Ring modulation - Sample-and-hold (" lo-fi") - HP/LP filter - Reverb
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: SoundBow at $1.99 against soundfruuze's $6.99. SoundBow also leads on device support (3 vs 1) and iOS requirement (11.0 vs 15.6). soundfruuze's advantage is update cadence (fortnightly vs every 2 months) and review sentiment (79% vs 63%). On rating, ratings volume, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
SoundBow costs $1.99 and soundfruuze $6.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.7 for SoundBow against 4.8 for soundfruuze. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 13 and 12 respectively. Written reviews are what separate them: 63% of SoundBow's written reviews are positive against 79% of soundfruuze's.
SoundBow ships an update every 2 months, soundfruuze fortnightly. The most recent releases landed on October 21, 2026 and October 14, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | SoundBow | soundfruuze |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $1.99 — better | $6.99 |
| Rating | 4.7 (13 ratings) | 4.8 (12 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 63.3% of reviews | 78.6% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 13 — better | 12 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Fortnightly — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPad |
| Requires iOS | 11.0 — better | 15.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 13 MB | 7 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Agoston Nagy | Alexey Nadzharov |
Customer experience
SoundBow
soundfruuze
In-app purchases
SoundBow
No in-app purchases
soundfruuze
No in-app purchases









