Chiptune Sequencer vs WorldWandering

T.W.Y. MUSIC DEPT. Presents: C.H.I.P. is a Chiptune Handheld Instrument Player: sequence and build four channel chiptune, the sound of a 1989 handheld console. Arrange is your song. Sections stack top to bottom and play in order. Drag one to move it, or drag its right edge to loop it. Pattern is where notes go. Four lanes down, time across. Tap a cell, then play a key or a drum pad to fill it. Effects come from a menu you can read, so you pick Arpeggio, major instead of memorising a code. Sound is the synth. Every control has a plain name, a sentence saying what it does, and a button to hear the result. There is a preset library if you would rather start from something that already works. Song is everything else. Tempo, tuning, the mixer, saving, and export. The whole interface is drawn a pixel at a time, in the style of an early nineties desktop. Have it in grey, or behind a green LCD. Every sound is made as you play. Nothing streams, and there is no sample pack hiding in the background. Two pulse channels, a wave channel you can shape, and a noise channel, emulated at the register level so the controls mean what they meant on the original chip. Plug in a MIDI keyboard to play the instrument you are editing, and write notes straight into the grid. Export a mix as a WAV, or the song as a MIDI file to carry into whatever studio you use. There is a compare screen for the curious. Load a recording of real hardware and it lines the two up to the sample, matches their levels, and tells you how far apart they are and where. You can listen to just the difference. Songs and save files read and write in their original layouts, byte for byte, so something you write here can go back to the device it came from. Whether you want a quick lofi beat or a finished song, it is a music maker for sitting down and actually writing. Made for people who like retro sound and do not want a manual to get going.

WorldWandering stretches a short sound up to ten million times into a slowly drifting resonance. It can also speed a sound up tens of thousands of times into a dizzying pulse. Every action and setting takes effect on the spot, so you can create new sounds while the sound plays. The screen is the sound. A band across the middle shows the material as a waveform or a spectrogram, with a line where it is being read and the range it loops over. Touch the band to move the reading position and the volume with your finger. Pinch to widen or narrow the loop. Turn the device sideways and the material fills the whole screen. Touch above or below the band to send the sound on a journey. Left to right is the reading position; top to bottom runs through six places with very different characters — Drift, Haze, Shimmer, Swarm, Pulse and Tape — with the top and bottom joined into a loop. A crosshair shows where you are aiming, and when you lift your finger the sound travels there over the Transition time while a circle closes in on the spot. Tap three times to stop or start. The sound can also wander the map on its own, and Randomize moves every setting somewhere new. The settings that shape the sound are in the Sound sheet, grouped into three tabs: - Material — five built-in sounds: voices, nature, drum loops, an orchestra and an old vocal recording. With Pro you can import your own sounds from the Files app. - Playback — three ways of playing: Simple (like a tape: slower is lower), Granular (short grains joined and overlapped, with synchronous, asynchronous and WSOLA types) and Spectral (the sound is dissolved into its frequencies and stretched). Playback speed runs continuously from ×0 through ×1 to ×∞, with pitch up to two octaves up or down, the window length and shape, grain length, density and jitter, the loop and a shift that moves it along a little on every round, and a crossfade that hides the join of the loop. - Effects — a ping-pong delay, a reverb and a limiter. Four visualizers follow the sound across the whole screen: Pulsar, Aurora, Ring and Nova. Their colours follow the timbre and their size and brightness follow the loudness. Send the sound to Bluetooth speakers, AirPlay speakers such as HomePod, or a USB audio interface, and control it from Control Center and the Lock Screen. Record exactly what you hear as a 48 kHz / 24-bit WAV file. Leave it running while you work, read or rest. Background Playback keeps it going when you leave the app, Prevent Auto-Lock keeps the picture awake, and the corner buttons can be hidden while still working where they are. A quick guide is built in. WorldWandering is free with a banner ad. Pro, a one-time in-app purchase, removes the ad and unlocks every setting, recording, and your own sounds. The Sound sheet is fully available without Pro, apart from importing your own sounds.