Billie Tracker vs 1981 FM

Billie Tracker is a groovebox: a step sequencer, synth instruments, a sampler and a mixer, built as one instrument for your phone or tablet. You write music in a grid. Notes go into patterns, patterns chain into sections, and sections line up into a song, so a full track grows out of small pieces you can reuse and rearrange. Trackers have worked this way for decades. If you have used one, this will feel like home. If you haven't, a built-in tutorial walks you through your first pattern, and every screen has help one key away. It is not tied to one sound. Shape the synths from clean tones to heavy drive, sample anything and play it back as an instrument, and make whatever you want to make: techno, ambient, hip hop, pop, or the 8-bit styles trackers are known for. Rows hold up to eight notes, not just one. Every instrument is polyphonic, so a chord goes into the grid the same way a single note does. Hold one on a MIDI keyboard and it lands across the row's note lanes, quantized and in key. What you get: - A step sequencer for notes, instruments, volume and effects, with chains and a song view for arrangement - Up to eight note lanes on every row, so chords are typed in like single notes, on any instrument - Synth instruments you can shape: timbre, color, filter, drive, envelopes and LFOs - A sampler that records straight into the app, so your own sounds sit next to the synths - A mixer with per-track levels and sends - BOUNCE and STEMS, so a finished song leaves the app as audio - Bundles: a song and every sample it uses travel as one file - A control surface built for tracker speed. Hold one key, press another, fast. Rearrange the layout to fit your hands, or plug in a hardware keyboard or game controller - Themes, KEY and SCALE settings, and a HELP key that explains whatever you are looking at Your songs are ordinary files. There is no account and nothing to sign into. Send a song to a friend, email one to yourself, or move it around in your file manager. Nothing is uploaded to us and nothing is locked to us. Billie Tracker is made by Billie Workers' Co-op. The people using it steer what gets built, and the Discord is the fastest way to reach us.

1981 FM writes complete tracks. Press generate and you get 64 bars with an intro, verses, choruses, a break and an outro, played by a four-operator FM synth. Lead, bass, arp, pad and a drum machine, through chorus, delay and reverb. Nothing is sampled. Every note is made on the fly and no two tracks come out the same. The music comes from chaos maths. A Lorenz attractor shapes the melody, rhythm and mood. A Hénon map keeps the arpeggio moving. A logistic map handles the drum fills: turn it down and they repeat every bar, turn it up and they never do. Chaos on its own is noise, so a small model filters it. It gets rewarded for consonant intervals and practises over the chord changes before it writes anything. The CHAOS / POLICY slider decides how much say each one gets. Ten styles, and they are properly different. Funk plays a 16th-note slap line with ghost notes between the backbeats. Bebop walks the bass and puts the ride in charge of the time. Bossa runs a clave. Space strips the kit back to a pulse. Every track is built from its seed. Write the seed down and you can have that exact track again, note for note, whenever you want it. You can play over it, too. The pads are the notes of the song's key rather than a piano keyboard, so nothing you touch is wrong, and the sixteen-step lane runs in time with the song and follows your host. Both play any part you like: lead, bass, arp or pad, through that part's sound and out on its MIDI channel. Choose which sections the lane plays in - just the choruses, say - and preview it on its own without starting the song. Turn on RADIO and it keeps playing, picking a new key, mode, style and tempo for each track. You also get: • 10 styles, 6 modes, 12 keys, tempo and density • Four-operator FM engine, 6 algorithms, 11 presets, random patch • Five-part mixer, chorus, delay, plate reverb and filter • A PLAY panel: pads in the song's own key, and a 16-step lane running in time with the song and only in the sections you pick • MIDI in, so your keyboard plays whichever part you have selected • MIDI export: five tracks, one per part • Live spectrum, waveform and a view of the chaos engine at work Two Audio Units, an instrument and a MIDI processor. Each part sends on its own MIDI channel, drums on 10, so one instance can drive five instruments. The MIDI version passes your keyboard through instead of swallowing it. Both follow your host's tempo and transport. One install registers both. The app is free and nothing in it is held back. Using the Audio Units inside other apps is a one-time purchase, and each AUv3 session plays for two minutes first so you can try them properly. No account, no ads, no subscription. Works offline.