Starnight Keys

Starnight Keys is a complete instrument for iPad: a library of sampled sounds, three synthesis engines, and a sampler that turns your own recordings into playable instruments. Built for playing live, not for looking at.

■ THE LIBRARY
19 sampled instruments with up to 8 velocity layers: concert, salon and studio grands, uprights, reed and string electric pianos, three historical harpsichords, chamber strings, solo violin, harp, pizzicato and tremolo. With string resonance, hammer noise, damper and pedal noise — the details that make a piano sound alive.

■ THREE SYNTHESIS ENGINES
Subtractive, with alias-free oscillators, a state variable filter with drive, unison and analogue drift. Four-operator FM with eight algorithms. Additive with 32 partials, inharmonicity, spectral evolution and a drawbar view. 22 factory presets, every one editable parameter by parameter.

■ FOUR SLOTS, SPLIT AND LAYER
Four instruments at once. Drag the zones across an 88-key keyboard to build splits and layers, with velocity range, transpose and MIDI channel per slot. Each slot has its own arpeggiator.

■ EFFECTS
High-pass and low-pass filters with an interactive curve, chorus, tempo-synced delay with ping-pong, five reverb algorithms — room, hall, cathedral, plate and spring — with per-slot sends, and a lookahead limiter.

■ YOUR OWN SAMPLER
Import audio from Files, let the app find the root note, set the loop on the waveform and map it across the keyboard. You hear it while you edit: what you hear is exactly what you get.

■ MULTISAMPLE RECORDER
Sample your own piano, note by note, with the app guiding you. It detects each take on its own, waits for the tail to die away, and moves to the next. When you're done it tells you what your piano is tuned to — stretch curve included — and lets you choose whether to keep that or correct it. Stop and pick it up another day.

■ REAL MIDI
CoreMIDI over cable and Bluetooth MIDI. Universal MIDI Learn on any parameter, maps per preset, channel per slot, configurable velocity curve, tempo from incoming MIDI clock, and preset changes over Program Change.

■ BUILT FOR THE STAGE
A purpose-built C++ audio engine with low latency, 128 voices with CPU protection, live meters and memory warnings. The screen won't sleep while you play.

■ NO SUBSCRIPTION
The download is free and comes with two instruments — Grand Concert and Chamber Strings — six synths (two per engine), two slots, the hall reverb and one scene of your own, with no time limit and no watermark. A single purchase opens the rest of the library and the synths, all four slots, every reverb plus delay and chorus, unlimited scenes and synths of your own, the sampler, the multisample recorder and exporting. You pay once. There is no subscription.

Requires an iPad running iPadOS 17 or later.