Songkeeper Studio vs Topline

Songkeeper Studio is a songwriting app for guitarists who want to keep recordings, lyrics, chords, and practice tools together. A song can hold multiple recordings for playback and multiple drafts that can be copied, moved between songs, renamed, or deleted. Guitar tools include chord diagrams, a chromatic tuner, tuning options, and chord transposition. The writing editor offers word suggestions, rhymes, a music keyboard, tablature stamp mode, and trackpad cursor control. For practice, users can set a tempo, use a metronome or drum loops, and enable tempo-based autoscroll. Reference videos can be linked and played in the built-in YouTube player. The free Basic plan costs nothing and allows five songs, two drafts and two recordings per song. Pro costs $0.99 a month and adds unlimited songs, drafts, and recordings, Cloud Vault, sharing, collaboration, import, and export; it includes a 7-day free trial. The app runs on Android and iOS. Songs are also stored locally, and the site warns they can be lost if the app is uninstalled or the phone is lost.

Topline is Abbey Road Studios’ multitrack recording app for songwriters who want to capture music ideas. A project can contain up to three audio layers, with lyrics, notes, tags and pictures available to keep material together. Import audio from Mail, iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox; projects can also sync to those cloud services. Tags and a map feature help organize projects and identify where recordings were made. Users can export projects as M4A on iOS or MP3 on Android and share them by email. The help information also describes sharing a project WAV through the phone’s file-sharing system, and records audio at 44.1 kHz. iOS-specific tools include reverb with nine impulse responses, a mixer panel, Bluetooth headphone support and automatic mono-to-stereo conversion for imported tracks. Topline is free for personal, non-commercial use. Its terms require users to be at least 18 to accept them and download the app.