SAMPLER! (Early Access) vs Strum
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
SAMPLER! (Early Access)
Record sounds from your environment or use a curated library to create music. This app allows you to experiment with recorded audio by pressing keys to manipulate the sounds.
- Record everyday sounds
- Use curated sound library
- Manipulate sounds with keys
- Create music from recordings
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Say hello to SAMPLER! Record sounds from everyday things or choose from a selection curated by record producer DLM! Press the keys to go crazy with it. Designed and developed by me, Dilim "DLM!" Ogakwu.
Strum
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Strum is a clean, focused tablature editor for ukulele, guitar, and electric guitar. Write a song, drop in chords, set a strum pattern, and hear it back on a real recorded instrument, all on one screen, laid out the way fretted-instrument players think about a song. » Tab-first editing › Choose what you see: standard staff, tablature, beat counters, chord boxes, chord names, strum directions, and lyrics. › Tap a beat to add a chord or frets, then step on to the next without closing. Copy a measure and paste it anywhere, or duplicate whole sections. › Section labels, repeat barlines, and per-section time signatures: a 5/4 bridge inside a 4/4 song is a two-tap change. » Capo, written the way songbooks write it › Set a capo on any song and playback moves to the real sounding pitch, while the tab keeps showing the frets you actually hold. › Chord names do not change (a C shape is still "C"), and a "Capo 3" badge sits on the song and on exported PDFs. › Standard notation follows the capo, because notation shows what you hear. › The tuner knows too: tune the open strings, then check the capoed pitches. » Real instruments, not a synth › In Instrument mode nothing you hear is synthesised. The ukulele was recorded note by note for this app, so chords ring and fade like the real thing, body taps and chucks included. › Guitar and electric guitar are sampled from real instruments too. If you would rather have the lighter built-in synth, it is one switch in Settings, set per device. » Pay once, play forever › No subscriptions, no accounts, no ads. Buy Strum once, and it's yours. » Every tuning, and a tuner that knows them › Ukulele: high-G, low-G, Baritone. Guitar and electric guitar: Standard, E-flat Standard, Drop D, Drop C, each with its own full chord library. › Build a custom tuning at any open-string pitch, or hide the ones you never use. Copy a song into another tuning with the same chord shapes. › The built-in tuner handles all of them, custom ones included, and can set a custom tuning by ear from a plucked string. › An adaptive noise gate learns your room's background noise, so the needle stays steady. › Concert pitch from 415 Hz to 446 Hz: an ensemble at 442 or a baroque group at 415 is one tap away. » Practice › Follow tab highlights the current beat and chord as it plays, auto-scrolling your tab hands-free. › The in-song metronome locks to your sheet music's time signature and subdivision, so it never drifts out of phase. › Rhythm Training builds speed with automated tempo ramps and a live progress dashboard. › Drop-Out Training mutes the click after a few measures, to test whether you drift. » Chords and strum patterns › A library of common ukulele and guitar shapes ready to drop into a beat, plus your own built in the multi-fret finger editor. › Change a fingering globally, or long-press a chord in the beat editor to override it for one song. › Build strum patterns from up and down strokes, arpeggios, fingerstyle, chucks, mutes, and rests. Save them, browse the built-in library by time signature, or set per-song and per-section overrides. » iPhone, iPad, and Mac › Strum scales from a quick lookup on your phone to a full editing surface on iPad or Mac. Your library syncs through your private iCloud account, so a song you wrote on the couch is waiting on your iPad at practice. › Sort each folder by title, artist or last edit, or drag songs into your own order, such as a setlist. » PDF export and sharing › Export any song as a clean PDF or image to print and share, or send the native .strum file to other players. It opens straight from Mail, Messages, AirDrop or Files. » Private by default › Songs, folders, sections, custom chords, tunings, patterns, and preferences sync through your private Apple CloudKit database. › The microphone is used only for tuning. Audio is processed on-device and never recorded or sent anywhere. › No analytics, no third-party servers. Your songs never leave Apple's infrastructure.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: SAMPLER! (Early Access) at Free against Strum's $3.99. SAMPLER! (Early Access) also leads on iOS requirement (12.0 vs 26.0). On ads, in-app purchases and device support 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
SAMPLER! (Early Access) is free to download; Strum costs $3.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
| Parameter | SAMPLER! (Early Access) | Strum |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $3.99 |
| Rating | 3.0 (2 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 2 — better | — |
| Update frequency | — | Every 5 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 78 MB | 56 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Chukwudilim Ogakwu | Mateusz Dabrowski |
In-app purchases
SAMPLER! (Early Access)
No in-app purchases
Strum
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is SAMPLER! (Early Access) free?
Is Strum free?
Do SAMPLER! (Early Access) or Strum have ads?
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