Pentaboard

Hidden Packet

About this app

Pentaboard is a musical instrument that includes an 11-pad pentatonic layout, a two-octave chromatic piano and four drum pads. It is built to let you quickly turn musical ideas into real sound and then either share, develop, or save for later. Pentaboard works offline. It has no accounts, ads or analytics.

Pitched surfaces include six synthesizer voices, 12-tone equal temperament and root-relative 5-limit just intonation. The chords panel can expand pad and piano touches into triads, suspended, and seventh chords. Use the hold and layer features to add more complexity to your sound.

Loop slots use a mix of lengths and tempos to record the keys and drum loops to build the music up further. Loop controls like undo, overdub, launch timing, 1/16 snap, and playback lock or follow let you experiment freely.

Cascade mode plays through held down keys in either up, down, bounce or random order. This can be used freehand or combined with the chords panel as an arpeggiator. Four built-in drum patterns and one editable 16-step Beat Lab pattern run on the shared clock.

The performance recorder captures the app's stereo output as WAV and musical events as Standard MIDI. Files can be exported to Music/Pentaboard or saved through Android's document picker. Export State writes a JSON snapshot of controls, loops and transport state.

For lower playing latency, use the device speaker or wired or USB audio. Bluetooth playback is supported but usually adds delay.

What’s new

Bug fixes and audio health metrics