Anacru vs Dawcade

Anacru is a scratchpad for constructing advanced rhythm. Most rhythm apps measure time — Anacru builds it. Instead of tapping along to a click, you assemble the rhythm you're hearing in your head from its parts: interlocking meters, tempo modulations, phase shifts, and tuplets nested inside tuplets. Then you play it back, watch it move, and export it to your DAW. Built for composers, drummers, producers, and teachers who work past 4/4 — and for students trying to finally *feel* how these ideas fit together. WHAT YOU CAN BUILD • Polymeter — stack independent layers, each with its own meter, subdivision, accent pattern, and phase offset. Watch 5/4 drift against 4/4 and snap back into alignment, locked to one shared pulse. • Metric modulation — pick the note value before and after a tempo change and get the exact new BPM instantly, with the direction never ambiguous. Chain modulations into a timeline the playback steps through as it loops. • Nested tuplets — put a quintuplet inside a triplet inside a bar. The engine handles the math; you just stack them. • Phase & accents — tap a pulse to accent it, or drag a layer's ring to rotate its phase. The wheel is the instrument. THE INTERACTIVE WHEEL Every layer is a ring of pulses on a single wheel, color-coded and voiced so you can follow each stream by eye and by ear. A playhead sweeps the cycle so you can see the relationships, not just hear them. HEAR IT PROPERLY Each layer gets its own pitch, stereo position, and selectable voice — woodblock, marimba, pluck, sine, or a kick/hi-hat drum kit — so interlocking parts read as separate instruments instead of one wash. SEE IT NOTATED Each layer is rendered on its own staff with correct meter, beaming, accents, and tuplet brackets. TAKE IT WITH YOU • Save and recall your patterns on-device. • Export a MIDI file — a clean tempo map carrying your modulation timeline, plus one track per layer — and drop it straight into any DAW. PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account. No sign-up. No tracking. No internet required. Everything lives on your device. One purchase, yours to keep.

Dawcade is a complete music studio that fits in your pocket. Record, sequence, mix and arrange anywhere — everything runs on your device alone. No account, no subscription, no cloud, nothing to unlock. Buy it once and everything is there. TWO WAYS TO BUILD A TRACK Session view lets you launch clips and scenes freely while you find the arrangement by playing it. Arrangement view puts the same material on a timeline when you are ready to commit. Clips move between the two, so nothing has to be decided up front. INSTRUMENTS More than fifty instruments and effects ship with the app. Wavetable, virtual analog, FM, phase distortion, vector, spectral, supersaw, granular, physical modelling and chip synthesis all have purpose-built editors rather than a generic parameter list. Sampled acoustic instruments cover piano, electric piano, organ, guitar, bass, strings, brass and woodwinds. DRUMS AND SAMPLING A library of factory drum kits, each with per-pad tuning, envelope, filter, pan and send controls. The sampler loads your own audio, and the drum surface can be played as pads or programmed as a step sequencer. PLAY SURFACES Sixteen selectable play surfaces sit under the mixer instead of a single fixed keyboard. Alongside the piano keyboard there is a chord pad grid, a Tonnetz lattice, a circle of fifths, a strum surface, a fretboard, a bowed-string surface, an XY pad, and generative surfaces that keep playing while you shape them. Every surface follows the project key and scale, so wrong notes are opt-in. MIXING AND AUTOMATION Per-channel volume, pan, mute, solo and record arm, with return channels and sends. Twenty-four audio effects including compressor, multiband compressor, limiter, transient shaper, parametric EQ, reverb, plate reverb, delay, filter delay, grain delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, distortion, amp cabinet, bitcrusher, vocoder, resonator, frequency shifter, auto filter, beat repeat, gate, spectral and step effects. Any parameter can be automated on the timeline. MIDI AND GENERATORS Class-compliant USB and Bluetooth MIDI controllers are supported for input, and Dawcade sends MIDI back to control surfaces that have pad or key lighting. Insert an arpeggiator with classic, Markov and Euclidean generators, or a scale-quantiser, ahead of any instrument. RECORDING Record audio through the microphone or an audio interface, straight into a channel. Count-in, pre-roll and post-roll are configurable, and takes land as clips you can move, trim and reuse. PRIVACY Dawcade does not ask for an account and does not collect personal data. Crash and error reports are the only thing that leaves the device, they are not linked to your identity, and they are processed in the European Union. Your projects, recordings and samples stay on your device. Requires iOS 17 or later. Includes a demo project and a guided tour on first launch.