Vectorscope 2 vs Toaster
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Vectorscope 2
Visualize your stereo audio signals in real-time. Understand stereo width, phase relationships, and channel balance through intuitive X/Y and Polar displays. Analyze your mix's mono compatibility and overall energy distribution.
- Stereo field visualization
- X/Y and Polar display modes
- Correlation meter
- Balance meter
- Peak and RMS level meters
- AUv3 plugin support
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See your stereo field. Vectorscope 2 shows the shape of a stereo signal as you hear it: how wide it is, where it leans and whether its channels work together or cancel each other out. Rebuilt from the ground up, it runs as an Audio Unit (AUv3) inside GarageBand, AUM, Logic Pro and any other host, and on its own with your device's microphone or an audio interface. TWO VIEWS OF THE SAME SOUND • X/Y: the classic Lissajous display. Mono sits on the vertical axis, wide material spreads across the diamond, and a signal out of phase turns sideways. • Polar: the half-disc view, with left, center and right laid out as you'd place them in a mix. • Short or long trail, automatic or fixed zoom, and four trace colors. METERS THAT TELL THE REST • Correlation, from +1 (mono-compatible) to −1 (out of phase), so you catch phase problems before they reach a mono speaker. • Balance, so you know where the energy sits between left and right. • Peak and RMS level meters with held peaks and clip indicators. Tap to reset. • A notice when the input is mono, so a single vertical line never looks like a broken meter. MADE FOR EVERY SCREEN Vectorscope 2 lays itself out for the space it's given: an iPhone upright or sideways, an iPad, iPhone Duo folded or open, and a plugin slot in a host, from GarageBand's compact strip to its expanded view. QUIET BY DEFAULT On its own, the app starts with its output muted, so the microphone never feeds back through the speaker next to it. As a plugin it passes your audio through untouched. From Monolith DSP. Terms of Use: https://monolith-dsp.com/terms/ Privacy Policy: https://monolith-dsp.com/privacy/
Toaster
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Toaster turns your TV into a music display for the room. It listens and writes what it hears out as live code: named lines typed onto the screen, big enough to read from the sofa, lighting up as they play over moving visuals. It finds the beat, the kick, clap and hats, the bass line, the chords and the key, and keeps rewriting the code as the song goes on. It's a live reconstruction for show, not an exact transcription. The code is Strudel, the open-source live-coding environment for music. It runs with nothing pressed. The first time, it opens on the demo beat; after that, on whatever you picked last, with an ID card showing the tempo and key, and a new background every 32 bars. What it listens to • Your iPhone as the mic: Toaster hears the room, so the music on your speakers, a DJ or a band becomes code (Apple TV 4K, 2nd generation or later, with an iPhone on iOS 17 or later) • Internet radio: sixteen stations built in, from downtempo and deep house to soul and live shows, and your own: add a station by typing its stream address, with a name if you like, and it's kept on your Apple TV. When a stream sends the song's title, Toaster shows it and looks for the cover • The demo beat, built in, to start right away What you see • 13 backgrounds, including a spectrum, a tunnel, a spiral, a pitch wheel, a spectrogram, rain and a scope • Chrome: a pool of liquid chrome that the kick drops beads into • Worlds: close-ups of everyday materials filmed as planets, cutting to the next one on the kick, in looks such as film, ink, risograph, cyanotype, thermal, night vision, CRT and VHS • Scenery: eleven animated scenes, from a lake and a campfire to a city in the rain and a koi pond • A mosaic that cuts a radio song's cover, or one of a dozen bundled artworks, into squares and scrambles them in time with the music • A dot orb, punchcard or domino blocks, a liquid glass lens over the code, and five color themes • Drop effects, off until you turn them on: when the kick comes back after a break, a retro desktop floods with pop-up windows, a crash screen flashes up, or a frozen window smears across the visuals Your iPhone as the camera With Continuity Camera, your iPhone puts you behind the code: tinted to the theme, with your eyes and mouth blown up, or drawn as text, with seven effects including cut-out, glass, dots and voxels. Your hands work as a remote: frame a window with your fingers to see through one of 16 filters, make a circle with your hands to open a portal, and hold up two fingers for the next theme or a fist to hush the code. The Siri Remote Click up or down to change the background, left or right to move between the radio stations. Swipe to change the background's look or the theme. Play/Pause turns the background changes off and on, and a click in the middle opens the picker with everything else: what to listen to, the picture, the size of the code and the camera. Top Shelf With Toaster in the top row of the Home Screen, its scenes play across the Top Shelf. Pick one and Toaster opens on it. Everything Toaster hears and sees stays on your Apple TV. No account, no ads, no tracking. Toaster is a native port of Toaster, the open-source app by Colin (github.com/StopBanning/toaster), used under its MIT licence. It is an independent app, not made by or affiliated with the Strudel project.
Screenshots
Verdict
Vectorscope 2 and Toaster are too close to call on the numbers: across 6 compared parameters — price, update cadence, ads and in-app purchases among them — neither pulls far enough ahead to decide it. What separates them is feature set and interface, not measurable difference.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Vectorscope 2 ships an update every 8 days, Toaster daily. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 10, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Vectorscope 2 | Toaster |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (2 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 2 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 8 days | Daily — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | Apple TV |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 44 MB | 13 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 9+ |
| Developer | Ruben Nine Blanco | Insula Technology Inc. |
In-app purchases
Vectorscope 2
No in-app purchases
Toaster
No in-app purchases





