spool. vs Rithmatic

Make a whole song on your phone. Spool is a pocket music studio inspired by the joy of hardware grooveboxes — play, sample, sequence, and record to tape, all in one playful instrument. Fourteen sound engines. From punchy FM and fat subtractive Pulse to shimmering Cluster, plucked String, granular Cloud, the TALK vocoder, the WIDE stereo engine, THUMP bass, a Sampler, and two drum machines — each with its own animated, touchable visualizer and four hands-on controls. Sample anything. Record straight from the mic into the sampler or drum kits, trim it, and play it across the keyboard. Drums & beats. Build kits, chop a sample into a playable kit, and lock in grooves with the step sequencer. Playful sequencers. Pattern and arpeggiator to start; unlock Stream, Taps, and the bouncing-ball Gumball machine for happy accidents. Six minutes of 4-track tape. Record, overdub, varispeed (including reverse), scrub, and bounce your jam to a finished mixdown — export to WAV. Your tape is saved with your project. Effects & mixer. A deep rack — delay, spring reverb, drive, compressor, chorus, multimode filter, phaser, tremolo/auto-pan, beat-repeat stutter, and a pitch-shifter/harmonizer — many tempo-syncable. Plus a master EQ and brickwall limiter so it always sounds finished. Plays with your gear. Connect a USB or Bluetooth MIDI controller and play Spool like hardware. AUv3 plugin support is planned for a future update. Free to download and make music with a starter set of engines and sequencers. A single one-time Spool Pro purchase unlocks the full instrument — all engines, sampling, every effect and sequencer, unlimited projects, export, and MIDI. No subscription. Spool is an original, independent work by a solo developer — affiliated with no hardware maker.

Rithmatic is an FM synthesizer with 36,118 classic DX7 voices built in, and an AUv3 plugin for GarageBand on iPad and your DAW on the Mac. Browse them by family and by character, learn how FM works by watching it shape each one, build and blend your own, and play them from the on-screen keys or a MIDI keyboard. No account, no ads, nothing locked. Built for iPhone Duo: half open, it stands like a keyboard synth, the waves above the fold and long keys on the flat half. IN YOUR DAW • Put it on a track in GarageBand on iPad, or in an Audio Unit host on the Mac such as Ableton Live. • Its window is the app's own Patches screen and Patch Builder, with your library. • Your bank appears as the plugin's presets, and Brightness, Attack, Decay, Release and Feedback can be automated. The patch is saved with your project. A LIBRARY THAT SHIPS FULL • 36,118 unique DX7 voices come with the app: no download, no account, no network. • Start with Essentials: the famous sounds and the songs they're on. • Browse by family, or by character: percussive, plucked, metallic, bright, sustained, swell, evolving, mellow. Or search by name. • Patch of the day: one classic voice each day, in the app and in a widget for iPhone, iPad and Mac. PLAY IT • A DX7-compatible synthesis engine runs inside the app, so every patch plays with nothing plugged in. • Play from the on-screen keys, your Mac's keyboard, or any MIDI keyboard you connect. • Pitch bend, mod wheel, breath, sustain and aftertouch, with aftertouch set to vibrato, tremolo or swell. • Velocity from a MIDI keyboard, or turn it off and choose how hard every note plays. • An arpeggiator (up, down, up and down, random or as played, over up to three octaves) and a latch that holds each key. • Record what you play and share it as a WAV. • Five tunings: equal, just, and Wendy Carlos's Alpha, Beta and Gamma scales. • Light or dark, as your device is set or as you choose. Drag the keys taller or shorter. SEE THE SOUND The waveform follows what you play: each operator's envelope, how hard you hit, the pitch, the LFO's wobble, and a chord as one layer per note. Resize it, go full screen, or watch the output itself in the Scope look. PATCH BUILDER: LEARN HOW FM WORKS FM is famous for being hard to program. The Patch Builder shows you why a sound sounds the way it does. • All six operators on a graph, each cable carrying its wave: see a modulator reshape its carrier as you drag. • Draw a cable and the builder snaps to the nearest of the 32 algorithms, so you learn routing by doing it. • Plain words beside the jargon. Edit each operator's ratio, level, envelope and tuning, the LFO and pitch envelope, or use FEEL: thickness, touch and brightness. BLEND Pick two patches and Rithmatic blends them into eight new ones. Play each, and keep the ones you like. YOUR BANK AND FILES • Gather patches from anywhere into your bank, then drag pads to swap or reorder them. • Export the bank as standard DX7 .syx files. Open .syx banks, or a .zip of them, from Files, Mail, AirDrop or the Finder. • Share a sound as a short clip of it playing, with a card and a code that brings the patch into anyone's Rithmatic. WITH A SYNTH, IF YOU HAVE ONE Hardware is optional. Choose your synth in Settings: • Korg Volca FM2 (firmware 1.10 or later, over MIDI): read its current patch, write to any of its 64 memory slots, back up and restore all 16 sequencer patterns, and capture the whole instrument to a snapshot. • DX7 family: send patches and 32-voice banks to a DX7, TX7, TX802, the original Volca FM or the M-VAVE FM-1 over standard Yamaha voice dumps. FREE AND PRIVATE Every feature is free; tips are optional and unlock nothing. Rithmatic works offline and collects no personal data: no account, no analytics, no ads. KORG and volca are trademarks of Korg Inc., DX7 and TX of Yamaha Corporation, M-VAVE of its owner. Rithmatic is an independent app, not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.