spool. vs Contour

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.

Contour is an instrument you play by walking. Four neural decoders sit at the corners of a square. Your finger somewhere in the middle is a blend of all four, and the square is drawn as a survey sheet. The contour lines are not decoration. They come from what those four decoders actually produce, laid out so that equal distances on screen are equal perceptual distances in sound. Cross a line and the sound has changed by a measured amount. THE SHEETS Eleven of them, each a different set of four corners, each chosen by measuring the whole library rather than by ear. They are grouped by what the measurement found: BRIGHT — HEHUAN, the brightest, where all four corners hold their own. CONTRAST — BEIYIDUAN, the widest corner spread at 8.2 times. BREATH — NENGGAO, the breathiest. DEPTH — MABO, the deepest at 53 dB. RANGE — YUSHAN, the widest at 66 semitones; JIAMING, the most focused at 17. They are named after Taiwan's high mountain traverses. PLAYING IT Touch the sheet to sound it. The ribbon underneath sets pitch, or send MIDI and play it from a keyboard. Press harder and the note opens up — the contact patch of your finger is the dynamic. Hold on empty ground to drop a mark you can come back to. The readout above the ribbon tells you where you are while you are there: brightness, noise, the grid reference, the frequency. IN A HOST Contour is also an AUv3 plug-in. It runs in AUM, GarageBand, Cubasis, Logic for iPad and anything else that hosts Audio Units, with the position automatable as two parameters and the sheet recallable with your session. The plug-in draws the same map the app does, laid out for the window a host gives it. WHAT IS FREE Three sheets — BEIYIDUAN, NENGGAO and YUSHAN — with the whole instrument: the map, the ribbon, MIDI, reverb, marks, and the plug-in. No time limit and no account. CONTOUR PRO A single purchase, once, unlocks: • All eleven sheets • Recording, straight to a file • The envelope panel — attack, decay, sustain, release • Composing sheets of your own from the library, 4,845 combinations of four corners, with the map baked for the pitches they share Requires iOS 16 or later. iPhone and iPad.