Comparison

Tongue Drum Digital vs BeatMapper

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side β€” with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Tongue Drum Digital

Features
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Transform your device into a resonant, deeply relaxing musical instrument. Tongue Drum Studio brings the authentic, ethereal sound of a steel tongue drum directly to your fingertips, combining a pristine digital interface with powerful studio utilities. Whether you are looking to practice mindfulness, compose ambient soundscapes, or experiment with unique percussion, our app offers a highly responsive playing experience with studio-grade tools. ### Key Features: Authentic Steel Soundscapes: Every note is sampled in high-fidelity from physical tongue drums, capturing the rich, warm overtones and long sustain of real steel. Intuitive Record & Playback: Capture your musical ideas instantly. Record your sessions with a single tap, then play them back to listen to your flow. Loop & Layering: Build complex, mesmerizing ambient tracks by looping your recordings and layering new melodies over them in real-time. Minimalist, Premium Interface: Designed for distraction-free playing, featuring a clean, responsive layout that mimics the layout of physical percussion drums. Perfect for Mindfulness: Ideal for meditation tracking, yoga background audio, sound therapy, or simply unwinding after a long day. No prior musical training requiredβ€”just tap to play, listen, and create. Download Tongue Drum Studio today and carry a pocketful of zen wherever you go.

About

BeatMapper

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BeatMapper turns your iPhone into a grid of coloured pads. Tap a pad to play its sound. Turn on Loop and the sound keeps repeating, so you can stack pad on pad and build a pattern while it runs. Tap a looping pad again to stop it. Seventeen sound sets are built in: drum kit, percussion, music box, bass, sine tones, chiptune, everyday sounds, cartoon effects, sci-fi effects, interface sounds, phonemes, greetings from around the world, the English alphabet, English numbers, Japanese words, French words, and the system sounds. Nearly four hundred sounds in all. Every pad shows what it is doing. A white square shrinks inside the pad as the sound plays, so you can see at a glance where each loop is in its cycle and how the parts line up against each other. Five buttons run along the bottom. Playing Length decides how long a sound plays. Loop makes it repeat until you stop it. Drag Action sets what happens to the pads your finger sweeps over. Randomize plays a handful of pads at once, and All Stop clears everything. The caption above each button names the item currently chosen, so nothing hides behind a symbol. The pads fill the screen. The grid is worked out from how many sounds the set has, always at least four across, so the pads stay large enough to hit with a finger. Randomize shuffles the layout, keeping each sound with its own colour, and Reset puts them back in order. Playing Length decides how long each sound runs: how long you press, the sound itself, the longest sound in the set, or that length with a little drift. Press Length turns the pad into a key you hold. Aligning to the longest sound makes every pad repeat on the same beat, and the drift spreads them so the phases pull apart and the pattern keeps changing. Auto Play taps the pads and buttons on its own, at a pace you set, and the gaps are random rather than even. Leave it running and the app plays by itself. Pro unlocks two more things: importing your own sounds from any folder on the device or in iCloud Drive, and recording what you hear as a 48 kHz / 24-bit WAV file in the Files app. Other things you can set: what appears on the pads, polyphonic playback on or off, background playback so the sounds keep going when you leave the app, and whether the status bar and home bar are shown. A Quick Guide inside Settings explains every control. No account, no setup, no menus to learn. Open it and play.

Screenshots

Tongue Drum Digital4 screens
BeatMapper4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is ads: Tongue Drum Digital at none against BeatMapper's shown. Tongue Drum Digital also leads on iOS requirement (13.0 vs 17.6). On price, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price Β· Rating Β· Positive reviews Β· Number of ratings Β· Update frequency Β· Ads Β· In-app purchases Β· Monetization Β· Best chart rank Β· Devices Β· Requires iOS

CostPrice Β· In-app purchases Β· Ads Β· Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

Scorecard2 real differences Β· 4 level
Tongue Drum Digital versus BeatMapper: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterTongue Drum DigitalBeatMapper
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyβ€”Fortnightly
AdsNo β€” betterYes
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod β€” betteriPhone, iPad
Requires iOS13.0 β€” better17.6
Further details β€” not scored
Size28 MB42 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperAjith AjiMasayuki Akamatsu

In-app purchases

None

Tongue Drum Digital

No in-app purchases

None

BeatMapper

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Tongue Drum Digital free?
Tongue Drum Digital is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is BeatMapper free?
BeatMapper is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Tongue Drum Digital or BeatMapper have ads?
BeatMapper shows ads; Tongue Drum Digital does not.

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