spool. vs Wave Slicer
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
spool.
Create full songs on your phone with this pocket music studio. It offers a variety of sound engines, sampling capabilities, step sequencing, and a 4-track tape recorder for recording and mixing your music. Effects and MIDI controller support enhance the creative process.
- Multiple sound engines
- Sampling and sequencing
- 4-track tape recording
- Extensive effects rack
- MIDI controller support
- Step sequencer
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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.
Wave Slicer
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Wave Slicer cuts a sound down to the piece you actually want. Load a track, record something, or send a file to it from anywhere on your phone — then zoom in until you can see the individual samples and cut exactly there. WHAT IT DOES A waveform that stays smooth on a ten-minute file and keeps going down to sample level. Drag the edges of a selection, slide the whole selection along, or draw a new one. Every edge snaps to a zero crossing, so a cut never clicks. A full effect chain that you hear while you turn it. Transpose by semitones, high-pass and low-pass with resonance, tanh saturation, bitcrush and sample rate reduction, echo with feedback, and a reverb that can ring out for eight seconds past the end of the slice. An amplitude envelope you draw by hand. Tap to add a point, drag to move it, bend the curve between two points. The same envelope drawing as the pitch curve in Drum Rack. Fades on both ends, and a loop crossfade that folds the tail over the head so a loop comes round without a seam. Export as a 16 or 24-bit WAV, with TPDF dither on 16-bit. The file lands where you choose to save it, named so you can find it again in a DAW browser. Record straight from the microphone when you want to sample something in the room. Echo cancellation and noise suppression stay off, because those are built for speech and ruin anything worth sampling. Twelve sounds are built in to start with, including two drum loops on the grid, so there is something to cut the moment you open it. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No account. No sign-in. No advertising. No analytics. No tracking. Audio you load, record or export never leaves your device. The app asks the internet for exactly one thing: a small text file holding the current links shown on the last screen. FROM THE LAB Wave Slicer is part of Lumlux Art Lab, a set of free browser tools for people who make music. The same slicer runs on the website, so you can try it before installing anything. Made in Antwerp by FDR-Sound.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Wave Slicer at none against spool.'s 1. Wave Slicer also leads on iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. spool. sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Wave Slicer asks for nothing beyond the download.
| Parameter | spool. | Wave Slicer |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (9 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 9 — better | — |
| Update frequency | — | Every 4 days |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 2 MB | 20 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Kristopher Yang | Frank De Rop |
In-app purchases
spool.
- Spool Pro$9.99
Wave Slicer
No in-app purchases









