Pulse16 vs Retales Sampler

Pulse16 is a beat maker and groovebox for your phone: a drum machine with 16 pads, a sampler, an 808 and an acid synth in one app. Sample a sound or pick a built-in one, tap a beat into the step sequencer, add a bass line with slides and switch patterns while the beat keeps running. No ads, no subscription, no account. Everything works offline. One small purchase unlocks saving projects and your own presets. START WITH A GROOVE • Six complete loops to start from: Acid Drive, Peak Time, Neon Nights, Midnight Run, Kit Jam and French Filter. One tap loads drums, bass line and tempo. • Ten built-in drum sounds for techno, house, trap and synthwave DRUM MACHINE AND STEP SEQUENCER • Four tracks, 16 steps, eight patterns • Tap the drum pads to set steps; the playing step lights up • Velocity per step: long-press a step • Every track can have its own length from 1 to 16 steps • Eight patterns A to H; while playing, the next one starts on the next bar • Copy, paste, clear, shift and duplicate patterns and tracks • 20 to 300 BPM, tap tempo SAMPLER • Load WAV, AIFF, MP3 or FLAC files into the sampler, or record with the microphone • Trim on the waveform, tune up or down by two octaves with fine tuning • Low-pass or high-pass filter and distortion on every sample KITS AND FINGER DRUMMING • 16 sounds on the drum pads of one track, each with its own sample • Finger drumming with Rec records into the pattern in time, with erase and undo • Volume, pan, tune, filter, distortion and choke groups per pad 808 • Synthesized kick and bass with a note per step • Decay, punch, click and drive • Slide steps glide into the next note without a new attack SYNTH • Sine, square, saw and triangle, sub oscillator, unison, filter with envelope, four LFOs, distortion and reverb • Arpeggiator with seven chord types • Draw automation curves over the pads: cutoff, resonance, drive, distortion and reverb per step • The same synth plays mono acid lines on tracks A to C, with slides • Nine factory sounds, from Berlin Minimal and Acid 303 to Outrun Bass MIXER • Volume and pan per track • Pump per track: ducks on every beat, like sidechain compression • Reverb send on tracks A to C • Boost: multiband compression on the master • Output and CPU meters, with a warning light when the mix gets too loud MIDI • USB MIDI controllers: map knobs, faders and pads with MIDI learn • MIDI clock over USB: follow a drum machine or DAW, or send clock to your gear On tablets the groovebox gets a side panel: sound, mixer and presets stay open next to the pads. Pulse16 (Pulse 16) is a beat maker made by one developer in Germany. Feedback and bug reports go straight to me: pulse16@anzalichi.de

Retales is a drum machine made of scraps of sound. Eight pads, a step grid and little else: everything is on one screen, and you understand it by looking at it. It comes with 320 kits ready to play, but the point is making your own: you tap out a few hits on the table, the app finds them, assigns them to the pads, and you have a kit nobody else has. EIGHT PADS Each pad has volume, tune, pan, character, attack and length. The filter is a single knob, low-pass one way and high-pass the other, with resonance. There are also delay and reverb sends, choke groups and reverse. SEQUENCER, PATTERNS AND SONG 16 or 32 steps. Each step has its own velocity, probability, tune and repeat. Eight patterns, A to H, that you chain into a song. Export the pattern or the song as WAV. RECORD AND SLICE Up to 20 seconds from the microphone, or an audio file. Retales finds the hits and assigns them to the pads. Clean up removes background noise from the recording and evens out the hits, without touching the original. What you make is saved in the Mine bank, with a cover photo, and you can export the project. MIDI AND AUDIO UNIT Notes 36 to 43 for the pads, Program Change and Bank Select to change kits, and MIDI LEARN, endless knobs included. As an Audio Unit instrument (AUv3), Retales opens in apps that load Audio Units v3, with the host's tempo and transport and settings you can automate. MAC, IPAD AND IPHONE It is the same app on all three. Held upright, the iPhone is for playing: the eight pads fill the screen. Turned sideways, it is the editor. In eight languages. TEN BANKS, 320 KITS, 2560 SOUNDS Every sound is synthesized for Retales. The app is free, with every feature and the Materia bank, 32 kits, unlocked. "Full Retales", a one-time in-app purchase, unlocks the other nine banks, 288 more kits, and covers the Mac, the iPad, the iPhone and the AUv3. No accounts, no ads. It collects no data.