Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM vs PolyrhythmLab
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM
This app provides a versatile guitar pedalboard and amplifier simulation for mobile devices. It offers a wide range of effects, amp modeling, and a built-in tuner, allowing musicians to create and perform with their desired sounds.
- Guitar pedalboard simulation
- Amp capture player (NAM, AIDA-X)
- AUv3 plugin support
- Built-in tuner
- Stage view for live performance
- MIDI footswitch control
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Caesura Pedals is a guitar pedalboard and amp for iPhone and iPad, and a full line of effects that also work as AUv3 plugins in GarageBand, Logic Pro, AUM and other hosts. WE BELIEVE OURS SIMPLY SOUND BETTER Any effect gets you from A to B; what separates them is the ride. We design these pedals for ourselves: each one has to be something we'd want to play, and if it doesn't cut it, we don't release it. They are the same pedals we sell for the Mac, voiced by ear. NO DAW NEEDED Plug in your audio interface and play. Build a board of up to ten pedals, in any order. Put on a backing track in Apple Music or YouTube Premium and play along; the board keeps running behind it. BUILT FOR PLAYING LIVE A stage view made for gigs. Assign pedals and scenes to a MIDI footswitch board over USB, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and run your rig from your feet, straight to the PA. Pedals come on at your dry level, so stomping one never jumps out of the mix. MIDI, scenes and the stage cost nothing. A REAL AMP: IMPRONTA Impronta plays Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) and AIDA-X captures with cabinet IRs. Search TONE3000 inside the app, star and load captures, or import a whole pack. Step through your library mid-song without a click. Load a second capture and tap the right footswitch: two rigs on one track, lined up and level-matched; tap again and a virtual second guitarist plays your part with you, a little behind you, a little loose. A TUNER ON THE BOARD Guitar and bass, standard and tuned down, locking within one cent. THE PEDALS Dirt: Craquelure (fuzz, free). The cracks are the character. Attacca (distortion). Saturation that honors the rests. Delay, reverb, tremolo, harmony: Hemiola (dual delay). Two pulses, one handed to the next. Smorzando (decay delay). Every echo grows older. Rovescio (reverse answer). It answers you backwards. Morendo (decay reverb). Shapes the way a note dies. Battimento (tremolo). Between amplitude and harmonic. Intervallo (harmony). The space between voices. Chorus: Cangiante. Three engines, maximal. Barcarola. Set it and let it drift. Respiro. A chorus that breathes with you. Corso …breaks into a haunting. What remains: Sedimento (failing medium). Your signal, failing; the residue settles. Già Visto (fragment memory). Already seen; the fragment returns. Cenere (counted echo). Let it burn, a counted number of times. Cadenza (re-sequencer). In time, in pieces. Deriva (pitch drift). Off course. Of course. Often misunderstood: Tacet (rhythmic gate). Plays the silences between the notes. Sospeso (freeze pad). The held pause, made playable. Side Affects: The Ghost Gig (empty venue reverb). The Validator (applause machine). You got this. Amp: Impronta (amp capture player). Big readable faces, visible toggles, live value readouts, exact values typed into any knob, and low-latency processing that answers your picking dynamics. Same pedal, deeper on the desktop: the expanded pattern editor (Tacet), preset libraries, and impulse-response loading (Attacca) are exclusive to the desktop editions at caesura-effects.com. START FREE The app and Craquelure, our fuzz, cost nothing. Add the pedals you want one at a time, or take the whole library in a single purchase. One-time purchases, no subscription. A purchase unlocks the pedal in the app and in every AUv3 host, on iPhone and iPad. Restore Purchases is built in. No account needed: purchases live with your Apple ID. No tracking. A written manual for every pedal, free at caesura-effects.com/support. Caesura Effects is an audio effects company.
PolyrhythmLab
Create complex, evolving musical rhythms and dynamic visual performances. This app offers a unique polyrhythmic engine for sound layers and a live visual mixer with customizable effects and camera controls. Export audio, MIDI, or video of your creations.
- True polyrhythm engine with independent step/pulse counts per layer
- AUv3 plugin support for DAWs like GarageBand and Logic
- Live MIDI output for driving external synths
- Integrated VJ mixer with audio-reactive visuals and effects
- Song mode for arranging patterns into full tracks
- Save and reload groovebox patterns and VJ setups as presets
- Export audio, MIDI, and video recordings
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PolyrhythmLab is a groovebox built around true polyrhythms: every sound layer gets its own step count, pulse count, and rotation, so layers of different lengths interlock and drift in and out of phase instead of locking to one shared grid. NEW IN 2.0 — AUv3 PLUGIN Use PolyrhythmLab as a real instrument inside GarageBand, Logic, AUM, and any other AU-compatible host. Four independent polyrhythmic layers, each exposed as automatable parameters, real MIDI output so your performance actually records as a MIDI region, and its own compact control panel with a live pattern wheel, a randomizer, and optional sync to your session's tempo. NEW IN 2.0 — LIVE MIDI OUTPUT Send a real Note On/Off for every layer hit straight from the main app — one MIDI channel per layer, over a virtual MIDI connection — to drive another synth, app, or piece of hardware in real time, not just sync tempo. NEW IN 2.0 — CAST VJ MIX Send the VJ Mix visuals to a TV or projector over AirPlay or a wired adapter, while your device keeps the full set of live controls. Save and reload VJ Mix setups — visual styles, effects, camera moves, and their LFOs — as named presets, same as patterns. GROOVEBOX • Euclidean-style rhythm engine — set steps, pulses, and rotation per layer • Drums, glitch/textural one-shots, classic synth voices (piano, bell, pad, bass), and melodic synth patches • Per-layer filter, reverb, delay, pitch, and LFOs on every parameter • Randomize engine biased toward musical, playable combinations • Chord modes, scales, and modal note selection for melodic layers SONG MODE Arrange your saved patterns into sections and chain them into a full song. VJ MIX A live visual performance surface: blend two audio-reactive visualizations, layer on real-time color and shader effects — RGB split, kaleidoscope, pixelate, glow, trail — and a 3D camera with zoom, pan, orbit, and tilt, each with its own LFO. Randomize the whole look by hand, or hand it to an autonomous "robot" that keeps remixing itself. Record the performance in real time via ReplayKit, or export a styled video clip. PRESETS Save and reload both groovebox patterns and VJ Mix setups as named presets. EXPORT Render your patterns and songs to audio, or export them as MIDI. No account, no ads, no analytics. Everything is stored locally on your device.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM at Free against PolyrhythmLab's $4.99. Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM also leads on rating (5.0 vs 1.0) and update cadence (every 2 days vs every 4 weeks). PolyrhythmLab's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 10). On ratings volume, ads, device support and iOS requirement 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
Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM is free to download; PolyrhythmLab costs $4.99 up front. Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM sells 10 one-off in-app purchases. PolyrhythmLab asks for nothing beyond the download.
Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 1.0. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 1 and 1 respectively.
Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM ships an update every 2 days, PolyrhythmLab every 4 weeks. The most recent releases landed on November 10, 2026 and November 5, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM | PolyrhythmLab |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $4.99 |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | 1.0 (1 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | — | 0.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 1 | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 days — better | Every 4 weeks |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases — better | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 16.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 173 MB | 401 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Guy Nollez | Martin Adler |
Customer experience
Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM
PolyrhythmLab
In-app purchases
Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM
- 14-day TrialFree
- The Ghost Gig$1.99
- The Validator$1.99
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- Cesello: Graphic EQ$1.99
- Livella: Compressor$1.99
- Impronta: NAM Amp Player$4.99
- Deriva$7.99
- Barcarola$7.99
- Corso: Scattered Chorus$7.99
- The Whole Library$99.99
PolyrhythmLab
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM free?
Is PolyrhythmLab free?
Which has better reviews, Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM or PolyrhythmLab?
Do Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM or PolyrhythmLab have ads?
Which is updated more often, Caesura Guitar Effects & NAM or PolyrhythmLab?
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