Velvet Vocoder vs ABDCTN
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Velvet Vocoder
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VV17 turns your iPhone and iPad into a real-time vocal studio — auto-tune, harmony, and vocoder in one app. Sing or speak into your device and VV17 corrects your pitch to any key and scale as you go. Turn on harmony and it stacks up to four in-key voices under your lead, TC-Helicon style. Switch to Vocode mode and play a MIDI keyboard to drive the tuning by hand — your lead locks to the nearest held note while the others become live harmonies. FEATURES • Real-time auto-tune with adjustable correction amount and speed, from natural to hard-tuned • Automatic diatonic harmonies — stacked in-key thirds, 1 to 4 voices • Infinite mode swaps the harmony stack for a shimmering harmonic series • Vocode mode: control the tuner live from held MIDI notes • Classic vocoder / talkbox synth layer driven by your voice • Choose your key and scale, or explore just-intonation temperaments • Vocal FX: spread, humanize, sibilance, and response controls • Presets to get you started, including lush choir and modern hard-tune rigs • Works standalone or as an Audio Unit (AUv3) plugin inside GarageBand, AUM, Cubasis, and other hosts All processing happens on your device. No account, no sign-up, no data collection.
ABDCTN
This app generates classic sci-fi synthesizer sounds live from oscillators, filters, and envelopes. Interact with a visual farm interface where elements control sound parameters. Create unique sounds by bending, stretching, and rebuilding them.
- Live sound generation
- Visual instrument interface
- Interactive sound manipulation
- Customizable oscillators and filters
- Automated sound sequencing
- AUv3 instrument support
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Every science-fiction film had a sound department, and somewhere in it stood a synthesizer. ABDCTN is that synthesizer, rebuilt for your phone and your iPad: not a collection of recordings of those sounds, but the machine that makes them. Theremins, saucers, tractor beams, alarms, talking computers, and everything in between, generated live from oscillators, filters and envelopes. Each sound is a starting point, yours to bend, stretch and rebuild until it is one nobody has heard before. THE PICTURE IS THE INSTRUMENT There are no knobs, no sliders, no menus. The whole screen is a farm at night, and everything on it is a control. The fence is the keyboard: planks are white keys, flower pots are black keys. The alien on the left is the envelope: pull its body for attack, stretch its neck for decay, lift and reach its hands for sustain and release. The alien on the right is the filter. Lift the cow's tail to detune, lift the whole cow into the beam and the reverb grows. Slide the barn door for volume. Raise the chimney for drive. Tap the hayloft window to crush the bits. The clouds are the LFO: how much, how fast, what shape. Drag the saucer higher and the echo follows. Tap a light on the saucer to choose a sound, tap the moon to change the bank. THE RAY GUN A ray gun hangs next to the moon, and it makes the farm play itself. Tap the gun to choose the ray's speed. Light blue sweeps every second, cyan every three seconds and pink every ten. Tap once more for static, which erases. Hold the gun and it comes off its hook. Point its tip at anything on the farm, and whatever lights up yellow can be hit: an alien's legs, neck or either hand, the cow or her tail, the saucer's dome, the barn door, the chimney, the hayloft window or a cloud. Let go and that part turns the ray's colour. It then sweeps from one end of its range to the other on its own, in time with the sound. The filter opens and closes, the cow floats up into the reverb and sinks back, the window flickers the crusher on and off, and the third cloud steps through the LFO shapes. Shoot as many parts as you like, each at its own speed. Touch a swept part and it holds still under your finger. Shoot a part with static to stop its ray, or double-tap the gun to clear every ray on the sound. Rays are saved with each sound and in your presets. In a host, every ray is an automatable parameter. Every edit is remembered per sound. Hold a light to take a sound back to the factory. A REAL SYNTHESIZER Two oscillators with band-limited saw and pulse, an endless Shepard stack for lifts that never stop rising, noise and ring modulation. A state-variable filter that sweeps from low-pass through band-pass to high-pass, with envelope, key tracking and LFO. Real stereo: the oscillators spread across the field, voices sit where their keys are, a ping-pong tape echo bounces between the speakers, a spring-like reverb on each side. IN THE STUDIO Works as an AUv3 instrument in AUM, Drambo, Logic Pro, GarageBand and other hosts, with the same picture inside the host and every control exposed as an automatable parameter. MIDI 2.0 with full MPE: per-note pitch bend, pressure and timbre, so expressive controllers play it the way they were meant to. A hold latch keeps chords sounding with no fingers on the screen, and the instrument keeps playing in the background from a MIDI keyboard. Save and load your own presets from the transmission log. Pay once, own it. No subscription, no ads, no account, no tracking, nothing leaves your device. Somewhere a cow is rising slowly into the light. She sounds wonderful.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: ABDCTN at $6.99 against Velvet Vocoder's $24.99. Velvet Vocoder's advantage is device support (4 vs 2) and iOS requirement (12.0 vs 18.0). On rating, ratings volume, ads and in-app purchases 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
Velvet Vocoder costs $24.99 and ABDCTN $6.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 5.0 for Velvet Vocoder against 5.0 for ABDCTN. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 2 and 2 respectively.
| Parameter | Velvet Vocoder | ABDCTN |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $24.99 | $6.99 — better |
| Rating | 5.0 (2 ratings) | 5.0 (2 ratings) |
| Number of ratings | 2 | 2 |
| Update frequency | — | Daily |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | — | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 12.0 — better | 18.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 17 MB | 2 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 9+ |
| Developer | Paul Wand | LASZLO DOBROVOLSZKI |
In-app purchases
Velvet Vocoder
No in-app purchases
ABDCTN
No in-app purchases









