ePipes Drones vs StrandOrgan
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
ePipes Drones
This app provides tunable, authentic-sounding drones for Scottish Highland, Border, and Smallpipes. It's designed for musicians learning bagpipes, offering high-fidelity studio recordings for practice. Adjust volume, pitch, tuning, and reverb to enhance your playing experience.
- Authentic drone sounds
- Tunable pitch and tuning
- Adjustable volume and reverb
- Multiple pipe types (Highland, Border, Smallpipes)
- MIDI chanter testing
- Settings saved on exit
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ePipes Drones is a tunable, authentic sounding set of Scottish Highland, Border Pipes, and Smallpipes drones. This app is for musicians who are learning to play the Scottish bagpipes and want high-quality sets of tunable drones to play along with on their practice chanters. The sounds are provided by ePipes.co.uk in Glasgow, Scotland, from extremely high-fidelity studio recordings of three very fine instruments. Touch the ePipes logo to switch the drones on and off. Select the drone type using the drone selector. Available drone types are Great Highland, Border, and Smallpipes. Set the volume using the Drone Volume slider. The pitch may be transposed in semitone increments +/- one octave in using the Tranpose slider. Additionally, the Tuning slider may be used to fine-tune the drone +/- 50 cents in one-cent increments The Reverb slider sets how much reverb effect is added to the sound. All settings are saved when the app exits and restored the next time it is run. MIDI Chanter Test Features: Test your MIDI Chanter by setting the MIDI channels for the chanter and drones channels. Any MIDI Note-On message note numbers received on those channels will be displayed at the bottom of the screen. This value can be used to determine the MIDI offset value from 67 for the chanter in my other MIDI-enabled apps that default to the Fagerstrom Technopipes standard of the bottom note being MIDI note 67 (G3) as a zero offset.
StrandOrgan
Experience the rich sounds of the Strand pipe organ and Carillon from your MIDI keyboard on iOS or macOS. This app provides high-quality samples for musical exploration and performance.
- Strand pipe organ samples
- Carillon sounds
- MIDI keyboard support
- iOS and macOS compatibility
- Creative Commons licensed samples
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StrandOrgan lets you play Lars Palo's sample set of the Strand pipe organ of the church in Kalvträsk, Sweden, on a MIDI keyboard attached to your iOS or macOS device. The Kalvträsk Church sampleset is provided by Lars Palo under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. If you would like to use the sampleset with other software, you can get it at http://www.familjenpalo.se/vpo/download. Starting with version 10.0, the app also offers Carillon sounds. These are derived from the Lurie Carillon recordings that are freely available at https://gobluebells.wordpress.com/2016/09/21/lurie-carillon-samples/ . For more information, please consult the app support page http://polaron.de/StrandOrgan/ , the Napo documentation at http://polaron.de/Napo/ and in particular the Napo user manual at http://polaron.de/Napo/manual . For hearing sound examples of the app, please visit the support page http://polaron.de/StrandOrgan/ .
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: StrandOrgan at 4.6 against ePipes Drones's 2.0. StrandOrgan also leads on review sentiment (88% vs 63%) and ratings volume (33 vs 4). ePipes Drones's advantage is iOS requirement (10.0 vs 12.5.6). On price, update cadence, 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
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
StrandOrgan holds the better App Store score, 4.6 against 2.0. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: StrandOrgan has 33 ratings behind it against 4, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews point the same way: 63% of ePipes Drones's written reviews are positive against 88% of StrandOrgan's.
Both ship on a similar rhythm, roughly every 4 months. Both last shipped on November 1, 2026.
| Parameter | ePipes Drones | StrandOrgan |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 2.0 (4 ratings) | 4.6 (33 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 62.5% of reviews | 87.7% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 4 | 33 — better |
| Update frequency | Every 4 months | Every 4 months |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 10.0 — better | 12.5.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 5 MB | 860 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Michael Eskin | Markus Sigg |
Customer experience
ePipes Drones
StrandOrgan
Bugs and requests
ePipes Drones
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
StrandOrgan
Reported bugs
6 issues- Trumpet sounds out of tune (resolved by settings)
- Image of a horn popping up
- Demo tunes not working
- Stops make a noise when selecting them
- Login screen freezes
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- No sound
Requested features
10 requests- Add more stops
- Add pedals
- Add organ song Gigue Fugue by Johann S Bach
- AUv3 Version for Logic Pro
- Plugin for Cubasis
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- Add MIDI input channel specification
- More organs to sample
- More different organs
- MIDI out for sound
- Time-limited fully functional demo
In-app purchases
ePipes Drones
No in-app purchases
StrandOrgan
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is ePipes Drones free?
Is StrandOrgan free?
Which has better reviews, ePipes Drones or StrandOrgan?
Do ePipes Drones or StrandOrgan have ads?
Which is updated more often, ePipes Drones or StrandOrgan?
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