Dawcade vs CRATE

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.

CRATE is a sampler you talk to. Type or say a vibe — "dusty boom bap with rhodes", "NewJeans type beat", "dark plugg with bells" — and in a second the pads fill with drums, a chopped sample and a bass line, already playing. Then shape it the way producers do on an MPC or an SP-404, just faster. MAKE A BEAT IN SECONDS • Describe a beat and CRATE builds it from its sound library: drums, chops and bass in key. • Ask for changes in plain words — "add a sax line", "more hats", "punchier snare", "clear the bank". Only that part changes. • Drag a pad down and say what you want there. Swipe a pad left or right for another sound, up to remove it. PLAY IT LIKE A SAMPLER • 16 pads in four banks, a step sequencer and live recording that lands on the beat. • KEEP JAM saves what you just played over the loop. • Punch-in effects: hold FX and an effect pad, higher = more. • Sample from the mic straight onto a pad, or import a song and chop it into 16 pads. CHOP AND FLIP • Auto-chops land on real attacks, on the grid. • FLIP re-sequences the chops into something new while the drums keep playing. • Per-pad level, filter, attack, release, reverse, key shift and time stretch. FINISH THE SONG • Arrange intro, verse, hook and outro from your patterns, or let ARRANGE do it in one tap. • Change tempo, swing and key; export the song as audio to share. MADE FOR IPHONE DUO • On iPhone Duo the hinge is an effect: fold to build tension, snap open for the drop. The outer screen keeps the beat in view when it's folded. • Works great on iPhone and iPad too.