Reel vs PO

Most recording apps feel like software. Reel feels like hardware. Reel is a multitrack tape-style field recorder in your pocket. Record your hardware jams, capture ideas in the rehearsal room, a live gig, collect sounds out in the field, digitise your vinyl or catch the moment inspiration hits. Connect your interface, hit record and capture it before it's gone. The disc spins. The transport clicks. Rewind ramps up the way tape actually does. Every interaction is physical, immediate, satisfying. Less time looking, more time listening. THE DISC. The large central reel is the heart of the app. Drag to scrub. Flick it and it spins with real momentum. Scratch it and it sounds like tape pulled across a head, wind and all. Nothing else on the App Store feels like this. RECORDING. This is what Reel is for. Record one track or all four at once. Punch in a fix, overdub on top, record in reverse or let a take wait and start at your first sound. Count in with the click or roll free with no grid. QUICK RECORD. Inspiration doesn't wait. Press the Action Button, tap the Control Center button or ask Siri and Reel opens already rolling. FOUR TRACKS. REAL WORKFLOW. Reel works like tape, not a DAW. Capture your whole setup in one take, up to four tracks at once from a multichannel interface. Then work the tape one track at a time: punch in a fix or overdub a new part without touching the rest. When all four are full, bounce down to one and keep layering. Reel is tape the way it works, not tape the way it sounds: the source lands clean and professional grade, ready for your DAW, sampler or a real tape machine. THE LOOPER. Set a length in bars and the take ends itself on the bar and loops. Hit record mid-loop and the next take waits for the top, records one pass and drops in. Build a song one layer at a time. TEMPO AND BARS. A metronome with any time signature, count-in, a visual beat and a bars timeline. The click follows the tape, even when you scrub. CUE POINTS. Drop a marker anywhere and jump back instantly. Name, reorder and preview them or play them from pads on your controller. THE MIXER. The mixer slides up over the reel. Per-track meters, level, pan, mute, solo, monitoring and input gain for record levels. Real fader feel, with haptics. Mixes save per project and print on export. PITCH AND SPEED. Speed and pitch move together, like tape. Lock the disc anywhere from quarter speed to four times or snap to real semitones. Record over a sped-up take, bring it back down and your new part plays deep and slow. It plays backwards too. MASTER RECORD. Print your performance as you play it. Arm it and it starts at the first sound: every stop, scrub and pitch move goes down live to its own recording. Resample the master straight onto a track and keep building. MIDI AND ABLETON LINK. Start, stop and record in sync with drum machines, samplers and grooveboxes. Map any MIDI controller to Reel's controls over USB or Bluetooth. With Ableton Link, Reel shares tempo and downbeat with Live and every Link app on your network. WORKS WITH YOUR GEAR. Plug in an OP-1 Field and it maps itself: 8 channels across 4 tracks. Plug in a Focusrite, Zoom, or MOTU and record at native quality up to 96kHz and 32-bit. Each track can flow out its own stereo pair, 10 channels into a real mixer. No drivers, no setup, no laptop. No interface? No problem. The built-in mic handles voice, acoustic instruments, and room recordings, with Studio Vocal Mode to clean up imperfect spaces. DJ MODE. Flip the disc into a turntable. It slows under your touch, and pitch bends like a deck instead of a tape machine. Your recordings become the record. YOUR FILES. NO LOCK-IN. FULL PRIVACY. Export WAV, AIFF or M4A to your DAW, AirDrop, social apps or to the cloud. Import audio to any track, even from a video. Shares carry your pitch, loop, and mix, so what you hear is what you send. Organize with color-coded tags. Your sessions stay on your device or iCloud. No account required.

PO-PatchStudio designs drum sounds, kits and patterns for Teenage Engineering's PO-32 Tonic, then sends them to your Pocket Operator over sound. Free, with no ads and no account. The PO-32 has no USB data connection. It loads new sounds the way an old modem does, by listening through its microphone. So this app does the fiddly part on a proper screen: build a kit, hold your phone next to the PO-32 and press play. WHAT YOU CAN DO - Shape all 16 sounds with the full set of 21 synth parameters, plus both ends of the morph - Program 16-step patterns on the pads, with accents, and hear them before you send - Send a whole kit, a single sound or a pattern to the PO-32 over audio - Back up your PO-32: record its data dump through the microphone and the app decodes it into a kit you can edit - Import Microtonic .mtdrum and .mtpreset patches, including files from older versions of Microtonic, and export your sounds back out - Keep kits, sounds and patterns in a local library with tags and favourites WORKS WITH - PO-32 Tonic - Also sends drum sounds to the PO-35 Speak's built-in Tonic channel HOW TRANSFER WORKS Put the PO-32 in receive mode (press acc + sound), turn your phone's volume up and play the transfer into the PO-32's mic. To back up, start recording in the app, then hold write and press sound on the PO-32. Previews come from an open-source recreation of the PO-32's synth, so they sound close to the hardware but not identical. Once a sound is on the PO-32, it plays through the device's own engine. A NOTE FROM ME I'm a solo developer and a PO-32 owner. PO-PatchStudio stands on the open-source libpo32 library by Eric Lewis and years of reverse-engineering by the Pocket Operator community, which is why it's free. If something is missing or broken, tell me. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Teenage Engineering AB or NuEdge Development AB. Pocket Operator, PO-32 and Tonic are trademarks of Teenage Engineering AB. Microtonic is a trademark of NuEdge Development AB.