$39.99 App Turns Your iPad Into A Tenori On Style Matrix Synthesizer

Developer 4pockets has released Aurora Sound Studio HD (App Store link) – a $39.99 app that turns your iPad into a pretty sick Yamaha Tenori On matrix synthesizer clone.

Aurora Sound Studio HD lets you gets do basic matrix synth sequencing, but also lets you dive in and edit the musical scale assigned to the matrix, edit sounds, add effects. arrange sequences to create songs, sample sounds and do real time XY-style audio effect manipulation.

$39,99 seems high for an iPad app – but that may be because we haven’t seen a lot of deep music apps yet. Check out the details below and let me know what you think. 

Aurora Sound Studio HD Features:

  • Full screen 14 Channel Mixer
  • New Effects Rack View
  • Ability to Solo and Mute Individual Layers
  • New Layer Mix Palette
  • Synth Engine Features Combined into Single Screen
  • File Sharing via iTunes and FTP
  • Use Accelerometer to Control XY Mode
  • Upload and Share Songs on the Online Song Library
  • 4 Independent Engines – Drum Machine, Analog Synth, Pad Synth and Sampler
  • Inbuilt Sample Recording
  • Export Songs as WAV and AAC
  • Layer Automation
  • Splice and Dice Audio with Atomizer Mode
  • 9 Effects including – Delay, Reverb, Chorus etc

Did Aurora Sound Studio HD just make the Tenori On obsolete?

21 thoughts on “$39.99 App Turns Your iPad Into A Tenori On Style Matrix Synthesizer

  1. I've been waiting anxiously for the iPad version of this app. But at $39 (4X the iPhone version) I think I'm going to pass for now. Too bad – I had a lousy day and would have dropped $19 on it in a heartbeat.

  2. Aurora for the Iphone/touch is pretty good except that managing the gate is a real pain which really ruins the whole app for me.

  3. Ok, posting after the facts but.. No, they didn't make the tenori obsolete. Quite the contrary.

    First there's the issue of connectivity. While the size of the two devices may be relatively equal, the iPad has near to none options for easy connectivity. That is what is going to kill any option to turn it into a tenori-one.

    High prices software? Solely from a programmers point of view I heavily disagree. No, I wouldn't spend $40 myself to turn an ipad into a tenori kind of toy, but I think many posters here are ignoring the options behind the tenori and the time required to port all of that into a totally different device.

    I dare say that for the time and effort invested $40 is cheap.

  4. Re: the $39 price point. Are the iPad-specific features really worth 4X the price of the iPhone/iPod Touch version? How much work went into the upgrade? Would the software have sold more than twice as many copies at a $19 price point? I can't answer these questions for the developer, but as a consumer the price seems out of line with some of the amazing music apps already out there.

  5. Honestly for the app to be worth 40 to me, it has to operate exactly how I want it to. As I recall I was looking at the iPhone version of this recently and there were a few things I was looking at that made me go, “that’s annoying but for a 10 dollar tenori on type app, I can live with it.” For 40 bucks, that kind of stuff just won’t fly.

  6. I accidentally installed the iPod version on my iPad a couple of weeks ago, hoping that like so many other apps, the upgrade path would be free. No such luck. The promise of Aurora is what prompted me to get an iPad to begin with, but I am very hesitant to drop two Jacksons on this thing.

  7. You can not just dedicate your own price point for a app in the app store. Regardless of what you think its worth, the app store is a organic market place. When you make a money grab it sticks out like a sore thumb. The wolframalpha app comes to mind.

    I think its better to make a lot more sales at a cheaper price point then a few sales at a much higher one.
    But that is just me.
    Their may be other factors I do not know about but I am not going to pay that much for a app.

  8. I bought the teniri on when it first came out for over £500, I bought this today for 25, in my opinion it is better in most respects….if it had been A VST from NI or similar it would have been £100

  9. Better than tenor IMHO for the range of sounds, being able to edit synth, pattern management, mixer, effects….

    Better than iPhone version as it looks and feels like a pro instrument and is big enough to use!

  10. but how can it be better than the Tenori-on when its not a midi-controller? The tenori-on is really a midi sequencer designed for sequencing sounds held in another place (eg a hardware sampler). The internal sounds are just there to get you going. The aurora is basically a toy tenori-on.

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