Pixelsynth vs 95 LoFi

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 lives on one screen. No setup and no menu-diving. 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.

95 Lofi writes complete tracks. Press write and you get 52 bars — an intro, three main sections, two lifts, a breakdown and an outro — played by a dusty-keys synthesizer and a soft drum kit, then recorded onto tape. Keys, bass, a melody line, a pad, the kit, and the record surface underneath it all. Nothing is sampled. There are no audio files in this app at all — the Rhodes, the kit and the vinyl crackle are all synthesised as they play, which is why the whole thing is a few hundred kilobytes. The music comes from chaos maths. Three Lorenz attractors shape the melody, the rhythm and the mood. Two logistic maps run underneath the drums and the bass so they wander independently of each other: turn the logistic control down and the hats repeat every bar, turn it up and they never do. Chaos on its own is noise, so a small model filters it. It is rewarded for consonant intervals and rehearses over the changes before writing. The CHAOS / TASTE slider decides how much say each one gets. Nine styles, and they are properly different. Chillhop and Jazzhop sit where you expect. Boom Bap hits harder and drier. Study Beats takes almost everything away. Drift slows to a crawl. Lo-Fi House pushes past 106. Celtic and Medieval are not jokes — modal progressions, different cadences, nothing else on the shelf sounds like them. The tape deck is the other half of the sound: a wow-and-flutter transport that never quite runs true, vinyl crackle with real pops and decaying tails, hiss, bit crush and saturation. The crackle is seeded, so the scratch lands in the same place on every play and every export. 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. A seed from the browser version rebuilds the same track here. You can play over it, too. The pads are the notes of the track's key rather than a piano keyboard, so nothing you touch is wrong, and the sixteen-step lane runs in time with the track and follows your host. Both play any part you like — keys, bass, melody or pad — through that part's sound and out on its MIDI channel. Choose which sections the lane plays in, just the breakdown say, and preview it without starting the track. Turn on RADIO and it keeps playing, picking a new key, mode, style, sound kit and tempo for each track. You also get: • 9 styles, 8 modes, 12 keys, tempo, swing, density and humanise • A three-layer voice: an FM tine, one or two detuned bodies, and a sub • 16 presets and 9 sound kits, from Tape Deck to Music Box, plus random patch • Six-part mixer, chorus, a long dark reverb, synced delay and sidechain pump • A tape deck: tone, wow and flutter, crackle, hiss, bit crush and drive • MIDI in, so your keyboard plays whichever part you have selected • Export a MIDI file, a WAV mix, or stems — one WAV per part plus the record surface on its own (in the app; in a host you record the audio there) • A note and a MIDI channel for every drum, not one channel for the whole kit • UI scale, so the panel is not tiny on a big iPad • Live spectrum and waveform, and the chaos engine drawn as it runs Two Audio Units, an instrument and a MIDI processor. Each part sends on its own MIDI channel and every drum has a note and a channel of its own, so one instance can drive a rack of them. The MIDI version passes your keyboard through instead of swallowing it. Both follow your host's tempo and transport, and 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.