Jamulator vs Retales Sampler

Using player-piano-like grids, finger paint drums, then choose from over 100 other instruments to create musical arrangements in just minutes. You can zoom in to arrange your notes with precision, or just swipe and see what sounds come out. Quantization makes most of your casual swipes sound interesting and musical. Once you have something you like, you can forward it to friends so they can add parts to the jam session. When you think it's finished, you can publish it for all app users to listen to. There is also a sampler that lets you record audio, and then play notes of different pitch using the same player-piano-like grid. You can make your voice sound like a chipmunk, or like Darth Vader. A very high quality musical instrument using general MIDI 2 standard voices. New in 2.1.0: Live realtime jamming. There is still a little lag, but because of the metronome it feels like you are actually jamming. You are certainly interacting musically in close to realtime.

Retales is a drum machine made of scraps of sound. Eight pads, a step grid and little else: everything is on one screen, and you understand it by looking at it. It comes with 320 kits ready to play, but the point is making your own: you tap out a few hits on the table, the app finds them, assigns them to the pads, and you have a kit nobody else has. EIGHT PADS Each pad has volume, tune, pan, character, attack and length. The filter is a single knob, low-pass one way and high-pass the other, with resonance. There are also delay and reverb sends, choke groups and reverse. SEQUENCER, PATTERNS AND SONG 16 or 32 steps. Each step has its own velocity, probability, tune and repeat. Eight patterns, A to H, that you chain into a song. Export the pattern or the song as WAV. RECORD AND SLICE Up to 20 seconds from the microphone, or an audio file. Retales finds the hits and assigns them to the pads. Clean up removes background noise from the recording and evens out the hits, without touching the original. What you make is saved in the Mine bank, with a cover photo, and you can export the project. MIDI AND AUDIO UNIT Notes 36 to 43 for the pads, Program Change and Bank Select to change kits, and MIDI LEARN, endless knobs included. As an Audio Unit instrument (AUv3), Retales opens in apps that load Audio Units v3, with the host's tempo and transport and settings you can automate. MAC, IPAD AND IPHONE It is the same app on all three. Held upright, the iPhone is for playing: the eight pads fill the screen. Turned sideways, it is the editor. In eight languages. TEN BANKS, 320 KITS, 2560 SOUNDS Every sound is synthesized for Retales. The app is free, with every feature and the Materia bank, 32 kits, unlocked. "Full Retales", a one-time in-app purchase, unlocks the other nine banks, 288 more kits, and covers the Mac, the iPad, the iPhone and the AUv3. No accounts, no ads. It collects no data.