FontStack vs PracticeBell

FontStack is a 'fontastic' new AUv3 plugin for iOS which can be loaded into your favourite DAW allowing you to utilise all those wonderful and nostalgic SF2 SoundFonts you've collected over the years. The SoundFont standard was created back in the early 90s, and made famous by the SoundBlaster series of sound cards. With the introduction of the Amiga, it spawned a host of musical creation tools called Trackers, which allowed the Amiga to load these SoundFonts and create sophisticated musical scores of 4 or 8 tracks. These days we don't use this standard so much, but there is a wealth of free SF2 files available on the internet just waiting to be loaded into FontStack. A SoundFont comprises a file with an .sf2 file extension. This file contains a set of samples, instruments, and presets. FontStack enables you to load one or more SoundFonts into its 4 layers, and use them in lots of creative ways. You can stack layers to create a rich combination of multiple tones, or assign each layer its own key range on the keyboard to create virtual splits, or a mixture of the two. Each layer can also be assigned its own MIDI channel for true OMNI mode. One great feature of FontStack is its ability to cache all your SoundFonts and the instruments they contain. This allows quick searching for specific instrument types without the need to physically search through SoundFonts to find them. Another great feature is the ability to optionally link to a remote folder containing a global set of SoundFonts, so that they can be shared between apps. Both internal and external SoundFonts and their instruments will be cached and searching is just as easy as it is using internal SoundFonts. FontStack features: ○ 4 SoundFont Layers which can be stacked, layered or played on different channels. ○ 6 Scenes per Layer containing different SoundFont instruments and settings. ○ Keyboard Splits can be created spreading multiple SoundFonts over a single keyboard. ○ SoundFont Stacks can be created, stacking multiple SoundFonts to produce a bigger, thicker sound. ○ Disk Streaming allows you to stream a SoundFont directly from disk saving physical memory. ○ File Manager allowing local and remote file management. ○ Symbolic Link allows you to specify a remote/external folder from which to access your SoundFonts. ○ Instrument Search allows you to search the content of local and remote SoundFonts folders. ○ Drag and Drop your sound fonts directly into the SoundFont Manager. ○ Reverb, Delay & Chorus effects can be applied to each instrument layer. ○ Haas and Stereo Width can be used to simulate virtual STEREO on SoundFonts with MONO samples. ○ Allows direct control of the SoundFonts Amp Envelope and Filter settings.

The five bars in the Bach invention had been fighting back all week. This morning she opened PracticeBell, tapped the Invention No. 8 checkpoint, and played the passage once at ninety-two beats per minute. It came out ragged, so she graded the take Uneven, named Pulse as the cause, and wrote one line: the right hand rushed the turn. Two clean runs later the checkpoint advanced her four beats and spelled out what to rehearse next. She warmed up against the metronome, pushed the tempo ramp until her scales held, tuned one shaky arrival against the drone, then logged the session to the piece. A handful of honest records, and tomorrow knew where to begin. PracticeBell is built around that loop: name a real problem, gather honest evidence, and let the counts decide when tempo is allowed to rise. - Passage Bench turns a bar range into a checkpoint with a tempo floor, a target, an advance step, and a clean-run gate - Grade every take as Clean, Uneven, or Breakdown, tag its musical cause, and read a deterministic next-session instruction - Metronome with time signatures, subdivisions, accent patterns, tap tempo, and selectable click voices - Tempo Ramp and Gap Trainer for gradual speed work and internal-time recovery - Records live in a private local store; PracticeBell adds no advertising or analytics SDKs and asks for no sign-in, and the microphone feeds only the live tuner - Chromatic tuner and sustained drone for intonation, with scale, interval, and tempo-term references - Piece library holding composer, key, signature, BPM target, status, and per-piece history - Plan Lab, routines, tempo programs, goals, streaks, and CSV or PDF export of your own sessions