AU Studio vs Beat Kitchen Harmony Wheel

AU Studio is a focused Audio Unit host, not a DAW. Open the plug-ins you already own, hear them in seconds, and see exactly what they expose. Made for musicians, sound designers, and Audio Unit developers who need a fast, honest test bench. No session to build, no tracks to arm. Pick a unit from your catalog and its interface opens in a panel of its own, named and sized to the plug-in, with your host controls in a bar above it. Key features: - Scan the instruments, effects, music effects, generators, and MIDI processors already installed on your device: AUv3 on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro, plus AUv2 on Mac. - Filter by developer, type, or search text, and hide Apple built-ins to focus on third-party gear. - Open a plug-in's own interface when it ships one, and fall back to a metadata view when it doesn't, with the full inspector always one tap away. - Inspect identity, four-character codes, version, sandbox and cached validation status, MIDI support, busses, parameters, presets, latency, and tail time. - Step through factory presets, then save your own working state without leaving the interface. - Play instruments from the floating MIDI keyboard: notes, pitch bend, mod wheel, auto, mono or poly voicing, a shiftable range, and one-tap panic for stuck notes. Your hardware controller lights up the on-screen keys as you play. - Run a guitar, a microphone, or any channel of your interface through a loaded effect. Pick the device, pick mono or stereo, pick the channels. - Load a track into the floating media player, scrub the waveform, loop a section, and play along with your live input at the same time. - Check a signal path in seconds with the built-in test tone. - Route external CoreMIDI sources in, and send generated MIDI back out to a CoreMIDI destination. - Test MIDI 2 units with automatic, MIDI 1, or MIDI 2 protocol selection: high-resolution notes, registered and per-note controllers, per-note pitch bend, discovered MIDI-CI Profiles, and a monitor showing raw or decoded MIDI going in and coming out. - Choose your output device on Mac, and set sample rate, buffer size, and which MIDI sources are enabled. - Keep host-process CPU and memory in view while you work. - Open unfamiliar plug-ins with less risk. AU Studio asks first when the system does not mark a unit sandbox-safe, and a peak limiter sits across the host output. - Read the built-in manual, fully searchable: discovery, routing, presets, hardware input, floating tools, troubleshooting, and developer notes. What AU Studio is: A focused host for discovering, opening, auditioning, and inspecting the Audio Units already on your device. It answers the practical questions: Is the unit visible? Does it load? Does it have an interface? What busses, parameters, presets, and MIDI capabilities does it expose? Does MIDI reach it? Does audio pass through it? What AU Studio is not: It is not a DAW. No multitrack recording, clip launching, timeline arrangement, piano-roll sequencing, MIDI learn, automation lanes, song export, or mastering tools. AU Studio ships no Audio Unit of its own — no instrument, no effect, no DSP engine. It hosts the units other apps provide and wraps them in host-owned routing, auditioning, and inspection. Discovery uses the system Audio Unit registry. If a provider app is not installed, not enabled, or not visible to the platform, AU Studio cannot invent it. Interface behavior, presets, parameter meaning, MIDI mapping, and DSP results belong to each Audio Unit.

The Beat Kitchen Harmony Wheel is a musician and producer toolkit — a tuner for chords and a measurement device for the vitals of the music in front of you. Point it at your mic or play it over MIDI, and it reads the harmony as it happens — the chord, the key, and the job that chord is doing. Works on piano, guitar, or recorded music with clear harmonic movement. It identifies each chord's role, not just its name, using the Beat Kitchen Ten Chord Toolkit (explained in the guidebook built into the app): the tonic (I) you keep coming back to, the IV that opens things up, the V that wants to resolve, a V/vi setting up a detour, a bVII pulled from the parallel minor. The matching wedge lights up as you play. What it does Hears chords from your mic in real time, right on your device — nothing leaves your phone Labels the wheel by function, not just by chord name: I, ii, IV, V, V/vi, bVII, and the rest Records what you played so you can study the path a progression took Tap any wedge to hear the chord Takes MIDI in, wired or over Bluetooth, with a built-in synth Locks to your key so the wheel orients to the music you're in A Learn tab that walks through what you're looking at If you've reached for a circle of fifths or a key finder before, you're in the same neighborhood — except this one works in real time, while the music is still playing. Producer Tools A tuner and a metronome, built for the studio. Check your tuning. Tap a tempo or let the mic detect it for you, then read it in BPM and in milliseconds for every subdivision — with your own click sound on each one. Watch the beat pulse from across the room and feel it in your pocket with haptics (iPhone). And because the wheel already reads your key in real time, it doubles as a key detector for DJs lining up harmonic transitions. Who it's for Producers, DJs, songwriters, students, and anyone who can tell a progression is doing something to them but can't always say what. You don't need to read music. You need to be curious about why a few chords in a row can move you. It's theory you can hear before you can spell it. Beat Kitchen is a school that teaches harmony by ear and by function first. Harmony Wheel puts that same way of listening on your phone.