Pixelsynth vs REK

Make a sound in seconds—and shape it while it plays. Pixelsynth turns taps, drags, melodies, and chords into a colorful instrument you can understand by watching it. Everything you play lives on one screen. Touch a note and start exploring. FROM THE DEVELOPER OF PIXELBOOP Pixelsynth is a new visual instrument from the maker of Pixelboop. Both apps share a love of playful grids, immediate feedback, and musical ideas that begin with one touch. PLAY FIRST. LEARN BY WATCHING. Sixteen pads invite you to find a melody, hold a chord, or strum across the screen. Notes light up as you play, and every sound control moves in front of you. You can see what each gesture is doing while you hear the result. SHAPE THE SOUND LIVE • Switch waveforms to change the character of your sound. • Sweep the filter from bright and open to soft and focused. • Shape attack, decay, sustain, and release for crisp plucks, swelling notes, and long tails. • Add motion with LFO, repeating echoes with delay, and depth with reverb. Each control is a colorful tank. Touch higher or lower inside it to set the value directly. Values in the upper half stay where you leave them; notes in the lower half drain away after you lift. It feels immediate because the picture and the sound follow the same gesture. MADE TO BE SEEN Created by a Deaf musician, Pixelsynth treats visual feedback as part of the instrument. The entire musical surface is drawn on a 40 by 24 pixel grid—just 960 pixels—so every control stays visible and every change has a visual response. PLAY IT YOUR WAY Open Pixelsynth as a standalone instrument on iPhone or iPad, or load the included AUv3 instrument in a compatible iOS music host. Your host can send MIDI notes and save the instrument state with your project. A compatible host is available separately. FREE TO EXPLORE No account. No in-app purchases. No third-party ads. The instrument works offline. The standalone app may occasionally show developer news or an introduction to Pixelboop, which you can close immediately. Pixelsynth does not track you or collect the music you play. Open it. Touch a note. See where it takes you.

Record your synth, groovebox or drum machine straight into your iPhone, up to four tracks at once. Plug in over USB-C, press RECORD, and the take is saved: 32-bit float, up to 96 kHz, ready for your DAW as a mix or as stems. REK is a recorder built like a piece of hardware: one screen, one deck of keys and knobs, nothing to set up and nothing to name. It works with class-compliant USB audio devices and with the iPhone's own microphone. PLUG IN AND RECORD • Class-compliant USB audio: interfaces, mixers, grooveboxes and synths with USB audio out. • Up to four tracks in one take, each on the input you choose: a single input or a stereo pair. Every input lights up with its signal, so you can see which one you are playing into. • The tracks are cut from the same audio, so they line up to the sample. • 32-bit float by default, so a hot signal is stored instead of clipped. 24-bit and 16-bit too, at 44.1, 48 or 96 kHz. • Gain in 2 dB steps, and what you hear while monitoring is what's being written. • Left and right meters with a peak lamp, and a meter for every track. MIX IT • Every take opens on channel strips: level, pan, mute and solo per track. • You hear changes as you make them, and they are saved with the take. • An export contains exactly what you hear. NEVER MISS THE FIRST NOTE • Head start: REK is always listening, so the second before you press RECORD is on the take. • Hands free: press RECORD and the take starts when you start playing. • Count-in: one or two bars of click, and the take starts on the downbeat. • Pause and resume while recording, with a clean join. • Record from the Action Button, Control Center, the Lock Screen or Siri. LOOP IT, PITCH IT • Loop any take, and trim the start and end without touching the original file. • Record length: set 1 to 16 bars and the take ends exactly on the bar, then loops. • Varispeed from ×0.50 to ×1.50, pitch and all, like tape. • Metronome from 40 to 240 BPM, through the take or through playback too. • Keep listening with the phone locked, with play and stop on the Lock Screen. GET IT OUT • WAV, AIFF or AAC, to your DAW, AirDrop, Files or Messages. • Stems: one WAV per track, named for the performance and its track. • WAV keeps the take's own bit depth, so lossless means lossless. • Optional peak normalize, off by default, so an ordinary export is untouched. YOUR TAKES • Plain audio files in the Files app, named for the minute they were recorded. No account, no cloud, no database. • Rename them, tag them (VOCALS, DRUMS, IDEAS, LOOP or your own), and filter the library by tag. THE DEVICE • Light, dark or system finish, and ten accent colours. • Haptics on every key, knob, fader and mixer strip, at the strength you choose. • Double-tap any control to snap it home. • VoiceOver throughout, and Dynamic Type on the display. • Long-press the speaker to blow it. Playback only: your recordings are never touched. FREE TO TRY Everything works from the first launch, with takes up to one minute long. The mixer, looping, trimming, tags and export are never limited, so you'll never record something good and then find you can't get it out. One purchase removes the limit for good. No subscription, no account, no ads, no analytics. Requires iOS 18 or later.