REK vs Scouter Synth

REK is a recorder for the idea you're about to forget. Plug in a USB interface, or just use the phone's microphone, press RECORD, and keep the take. One screen, one deck of controls, and nothing between you and the thing you came to capture. Nothing to set up, nothing to name. Every recording saves itself the moment you stop. Capture • 32-bit float by default, so a hot input is stored rather than destroyed on the way in • 44.1, 48 or 96 kHz, at 32-bit float, 24-bit or 16-bit • Stereo when the input offers it, mono when it doesn't. The display never claims a channel that isn't there. • USB audio interfaces appear as ordinary inputs, next to the built-in mic • Gain in 2 dB steps, and what you hear while monitoring is what's being written • Separate left and right meters with a peak lamp, scaled against real levels • If the disk fills or a write stalls mid-take, whatever reached disk is kept. A partial performance beats no performance. Playback • Loop a take, sample-accurate at the boundary • Trim the start and end without cutting the original file • Varispeed from ×0.50 to ×1.50, on a fader down the right edge • Metronome with a one or two bar count-in, 40 to 240 BPM Export • WAV, AIFF or AAC, to Files, AirDrop, Messages, or straight into a DAW • WAV follows the take's own depth, so the lossless option is actually lossless • Optional peak normalize, off by default, so an ordinary export is bit-exact • Exports are kept as well as shared, so you can fetch one again without re-rendering it Your recordings They live in Files.app as plain audio, named for when they happened. No account, no cloud, no sync, no library database to lose them in. Rename one in Files and you've renamed the performance. The device • Light, dark or system chassis, and ten accent colours • Real haptics on every key, knob and fader, with a key click you can switch off • Knobs come back where you left them; double-tap any control to snap it home • VoiceOver throughout, and Dynamic Type on everything the screen shows Free to try Everything works from the first launch, with takes capped at one minute. The library, looping, trimming and export all stay open, so you'll never record something good and then find you can't get it out. One purchase lifts the cap for good. No subscription, no account, no analytics.

ScouterSynth is a music tracker built like a handheld console. Eight tracks, a D-pad, two buttons, and no menus — every operation is a chord you can play with your thumbs. WRITE Phrases of sixteen rows, chains of phrases, and a song made of chains. Write a bassline once and place it four times with different transposes; change it later and every one of those places changes with it. Phrases can be shorter than sixteen rows, so six-eight is as easy as four-four. SOUND A synth voice per track — saw, pulse with PWM, triangle and sine, through a resonant filter and an envelope — or a sample, played whole or sliced. Wavetables for the sounds a plain oscillator cannot make. Per-tick tables for automation that runs faster than a row. SAMPLE Import from anywhere on your phone, or record straight into a slot from the microphone. MP3, AAC, M4A, AIFF and WAV are all converted on the way in. Whatever you choose is copied into your project, so a saved song carries its audio with it. MIX Ten lanes on one screen — eight tracks and two send buses — with level, pan, mute and solo, and three effect slots on each: filter, bitcrush and a tempo-synced delay. Watch the desk as a set of numbers or as ten live traces. PLAY A performance pad wires any two parameters to an X and a Y axis and moves every track at once. A grid of twelve pads holds six punch-in effects — an octave down, tape slow, a stutter, a bitcrush, a high pass and a low pass — held rather than latched, so nothing can be left on by accident, and six one-shot samples to fire over the top. SEE A radar sweep that reads the mix by frequency, a scope on the output, and six palettes to put it all in. INTEGRATE MIDI in and out with clock. A Bluetooth game controller, mapped button by button to whatever pad you own. Export the whole arrangement to a WAV. Songs, samples and exports all sit in the Files app where you can reach them. No accounts. No subscriptions. No network. The manual is inside the app — press SELECT and B on any screen.