ARC-24 Multitrack Groovebox for iOS - Multitrack synth, sampler, drum machine, and looper for iOS.
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An eight-track music studio for iPhone and iPad. Pick a key and every pad is in key. There is no wrong note to hit.
Build a track from synths, drum kits, and your own samples. Record a loop, keep playing over it while it cycles, edit any note on a grid, then arrange the loops into a song.
10 drum kits. 21 synth presets. 16 sampler pads you can fill with a recording of anything. A full effects rack on every track.
7 days free, then one payment of $9.99 USD. No subscription, nothing to cancel.
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Every time I picked up my iPad to make music, I lost the first twenty minutes to setup. Pick an instrument, assign it to a track, arm the track, choose a sound. By the time it was ready the idea was gone. And if you had never done any of that before, you were not getting past the first screen at all.
ARC-24 has eight tracks and you never assign any of them. Play the note pads and that track becomes a synth. Hit the drum pads and it is a drum kit. Load a sample and it is a sampler. Clear the track and it is free to be something else. There is no setup screen.
Everything locks to a key and a scale, so you can move fast without landing on a wrong note. Record a loop, keep overdubbing while it runs, then fix whatever you fumbled on a piano roll grid. Once you have a few loops, chain them into a song, or leave the transport running and launch them by hand from the mixer.
What is in it:
Eight tracks that work out what they are from what you play
Scale locked note and chord pads. Hold latches notes, Pulse retriggers them on the beat
A sixteen pad sampler. Import or record audio, chop it across the grid, or map one sample over every pad and play it pitched
Ten drum kits, from 909 and trap to lo-fi, boom bap, and hand percussion, with tuning, pan, and level on every pad
A two oscillator synth with 21 presets, filter, envelope, and LFO. Save your own
25 arpeggiator patterns. Hold one pad and it plays a phrase, always in your key
A full effects rack on every track rather than one shared send. Filters and motion, dynamics, distortion and bit crushing, delay and reverb
Song mode with unlimited loops, MIDI over USB and Bluetooth, WAV and AAC export, iCloud sync across devices
Pricing: seven days free, then $9.99 USD once and it is yours. No subscription, no renewal, nothing to cancel. Worth saying plainly, because several people have assumed the trial is the usual subscription trap. It is not.
It is all native Swift with no third party dependencies. Audio runs through a hand written render callback and custom DSP on top of AVAudioEngine, which is what keeps eight tracks of synths, samplers, drums, and effects running on a phone.
That leads to the one thing I get asked about most. There is no AUv3 version and there is likely not going to be one. Running as a plugin means giving up control of the render path, and that control is where the performance comes from. As a plugin I would be optimizing for the worst host anyone might run the app in. Standalone, I am optimizing for one thing. Also not in it: Ableton Link, Audiobus, background audio, and MIDI output. Those I may revisit. If AUv3 is a must-have, this is not your app.
Happy to answer anything. The question I keep going back and forth on: if you have never made music before, what is the first thing you would want the app to do when you open it?