Everything people ask.

Etherpad is a free multi-touch music synthesizer app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android. Instead of a piano keyboard it gives you an open surface: slide sideways to move through a scale, up and down to shape the tone, and every finger you put down becomes its own voice. Every note is synthesized live by the Csound audio engine.

No — they only share a name. Etherpad at etherpad.org is a collaborative text editor for writing documents together. Etherpad here at etherpad.app is a music synthesizer app for playing ethereal pads and ambient soundscapes on your phone, tablet, or computer. The two projects are unrelated.

Yes. Etherpad is completely free on the App Store, the Mac App Store, and Google Play — no purchase, no subscription, no ads, and no locked sounds.

No. Etherpad snaps every touch to the scale and key you pick, so there are no wrong notes to hit. Choose a scale — Major, Minor, Pentatonic, Blues, or microtonal worlds like Bohlen-Pierce — and anything you play stays in tune.

Yes. Etherpad ships as an AUv3 plug-in, so it runs as an instrument inside GarageBand, Logic Pro, AUM, and Cubasis on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It also supports MIDI and MPE, so each finger's pitch and tone can be recorded into your DAW and played back.

Yes. Etherpad records your performance as you play it and lets you share the audio straight from the app. You can also load your own backing tracks and play over them.

A Shadow is a recording of your fingers rather than your sound. Turn on Shadows in Settings, tap Record, and Etherpad captures every touch, slide and setting change as you play. Play it back and translucent fingers move across the surface and sound exactly as you did, while the pad stays live for you to play along. Shadows can be shared as small .etherpad files that open and play on both iOS and Android (Yes, cross platform compatible!).

Learning: watch how a phrase is played, then play over it. Teaching: send a friend a Shadow and they see your hands on their own pad. Layering: loop a Shadow as a backing part and improvise on top with your remaining fingers. Sharing: a Shadow is a few kilobytes, so it travels over any chat app, and whoever opens it hears it rendered live on their device rather than a compressed audio clip.

Yes. Share a Shadow from Etherpad to any chat app and it arrives as a small .etherpad file. When your friend taps it, Etherpad opens and replays your performance on their own device: the same fingers, the same slides, the same sound, rendered live by their synth rather than sent as an audio clip. They can pause it, loop it, play along on top of it, and send their own Shadow back.

Yes. Two Custom slots let you pick exactly which notes the surface snaps to, from a simple three-note drone to a full twelve-tone chromatic. Etherpad also ships microtonal scales such as Bohlen-Pierce and the Overtone Series, and a Tuning rack with reverb, delay and saturation to shape the sound further.

Yes. Setups store a complete configuration, including scale, key, octave, size, sound, custom notes and effects, so you can switch between your own presets in one tap.

No. All the sound is generated on your device in real time, so Etherpad works completely offline. It collects no personal information either.