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.

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

The original Etherpad was created by Paul Batchelor in 2014. The modern iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Android apps are built by Dinesh Yadav, who rebuilt the instrument from the ground up while staying true to the feel of the original.