orphinio vs ostinata
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
orphinio
This app offers a unique virtual musical instrument with an interface that allows for expressive melodies and soundscapes. It's designed for both beginners and experienced musicians to create music through intuitive finger movements on virtual pads.
- Unique glockenspiel/jaw harp sound
- Expressive polyphonic music
- Intuitive virtual pad interface
- Various articulations and shaker mode
- MIDI output for other synths
- Record and share performances
- Audiobus support
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orphinio for iPhone is a musical instrument with a unique sound between glockenspiel and jaw harp. Like on its bigger brother Orphion for iPad you can play expressive, wonderful sounds and easy or virtuosic melodies on it just by moving fingers on virtual pads. This video shows you how: https://vimeo.com/82138127 What can I do with it? ◦ Express the sounds you feel ◦ Play polyphonic music very expressively ◦ Crazy drumming and shaking ◦ Dream and relax ◦ Create soundscapes and melodies without musical knowledge ◦ Visually explore music and music theory ◦ Use orphinio’s innovative interface to play other synth apps via MIDI Features ◦ Different articulations from soft to plucked to hardly slapped ◦ Natural interaction ◦ Shaker mode ◦ Individual voices for each finger ◦ Extend your ways of expression as a percussionist, guitarist, pianist or other musician ◦ 9 transposable pad layouts with different tonalities from easy to complex ◦ Record and share what you play via EMail, SoundCloud or AudioCopy ◦ Audiobus support: Now you can stream live audio directly to other Audiobus-compatible apps! See http://audiob.us for more information. Follow orphinio & Orphion on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/orphion or Twitter: https://twitter.com/OrphionApp
ostinata
Visualize and share your music discovery journeys. Map connections between artists, albums, and genres, explaining your reasoning. Explore and remix others' musical paths or create discovery challenges for the community.
- Create visual music discovery paths
- Connect artists, albums, and genres
- Add reasoning to connections
- Search music via MusicBrainz
- Fork and remix existing journeys
- Post community discovery challenges
- Private iCloud data sync
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ostinata lets you map the actual paths you take through music. ever gone from radiohead to aphex twin because kid a changed how you think about electronic music? from miles davis to j dilla because someone sampled a love supreme? ostinata turns those invisible threads into visual, shareable directed graphs. — how it works — create a journey by adding nodes — artists, albums, genres, emotions, or concepts. connect them with directed edges that show which discovery led to which. add reasoning text to explain the connection. the result is a map of your taste that others can explore, fork, and build on. — search & discover — search for artists and albums via musicbrainz, the open music encyclopedia. album nodes display cover art. long-press any node to open its musicbrainz page for deeper exploration. — fork & remix — see a journey that resonates? fork it. you get a copy of the entire graph — all nodes, edges, and reasoning — that you can extend, rearrange, or take in a completely different direction. — bounties — post discovery challenges for the community. set a topic like "find the link: kraftwerk to detroit techno," define seed nodes as starting points, and offer resonance as a reward. other users form guilds of five to tackle the challenge together. — your data, your cloud — everything syncs privately via icloud. we store nothing on our servers. your journeys, your data, your control. — design — black canvas. white lines. ibm plex mono. all lowercase. album art in grayscale. ostinata is built for people who care about how things look as much as how they sound. ostinata — discovery through human curation.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: ostinata at Free against orphinio's $0.99. ostinata also leads on update cadence (every 9 days vs every 8 months) and rating (5.0 vs 4.7). orphinio's advantage is ratings volume (15 vs 1) and iOS requirement (7.0 vs 17.0). On ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
ostinata is free to download; orphinio costs $0.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
ostinata holds the better App Store score, 5.0 against 4.7. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: orphinio has 15 ratings behind it against 1, so its average is the more settled of the two.
orphinio ships an update every 8 months, ostinata every 9 days. The most recent releases landed on November 11, 2026 and November 5, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | orphinio | ostinata |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0.99 | Free — better |
| Rating | 4.7 (15 ratings) | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 83.3% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 15 — better | 1 |
| Update frequency | Every 8 months | Every 9 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPod | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 7.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 13 MB | 2 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Bastus Trump | Joachim Groeger |
In-app purchases
orphinio
No in-app purchases
ostinata
No in-app purchases









