A real person reads this.

Which iPhones does it run on?

Tonaut needs iOS 26 or later, so it runs on any iPhone new enough for that, with one exception: the 4.7-inch iPhone SE. Held sideways, that screen is too narrow to fit fourteen keys at a size you can reliably hit, and shrinking them below that was not worth doing. It is left out rather than shipped badly.

The layout is drawn for each screen size rather than scaled. The four bands you touch — lanes, control strips, buttons, keys — keep their height on every phone, and the two windows absorb the difference. On a bigger phone you get taller windows and more list rows, not bigger buttons.

Pro Max sizes

956 × 440

Pro sizes

874 × 402

Standard

852 × 393

Older standard

844 × 390

Smallest supported

812 × 375

Sizes in points, landscape.

Why is it landscape only?

Because the keyboard is real. Fourteen round keys across the bottom, ten more above them at the accidentals, every one of them big enough for a thumb, plus two windows and four control strips above. That needs the long edge of the phone. Rotating this layout into portrait would mean either keys you miss or an instrument with half the controls taken away, and neither is worth having.

So there is no portrait mode and there is no lock to fight. Turn the phone and it plays.

Will it work with my MIDI keyboard?

Almost certainly, yes. Tonaut takes external MIDI in over USB and Bluetooth, and it was built that way from the first version rather than added later.

USB: plug the controller into the phone. Anything that works as a class-compliant USB MIDI device works here — which is nearly every keyboard, pad controller and grid box made in the last fifteen years. A keyboard with its own power supply plugs straight in; a bus-powered one may need a powered hub or a camera-adapter style connector that can take power, because a phone gives out very little.

Bluetooth: put the controller into pairing mode and pair it from inside Tonaut. It uses the standard iOS Bluetooth MIDI pairing screen, so if it pairs with anything else on your phone it will pair here.

Incoming notes play the lane you have in focus. Velocity, pitch bend, mod wheel, channel pressure, breath and expression all arrive and can be pointed at anything through the Breath modulator. Settings has a MIDI section showing the input, the channel it is listening on and how many sources are connected — if the count is zero, the phone is not seeing the device at all and the problem is upstream of the app.

Where do my recordings live, and how do I get them out?

Your projects are called reels, and each one holds its four tape tracks, its patches and kits, its patterns, its mix and any samples you recorded. They are kept in Tonaut's own storage on the phone. They are not in your photo library and not in iCloud Drive. With iCloud sync turned on they are also copied to your own iCloud, which is not iCloud Drive either — Tonaut's files never appear there — and there is still no server of ours anywhere in it.

To get audio out, use the export. It renders a stereo mixdown through the master chain, or the tracks as separate stems, as 24-bit WAV files into Tonaut's Exports folder. That folder is visible in the Files app under On My iPhone › Tonaut › Exports, so you can AirDrop it, drop it into a DAW, or copy it to a computer without going through anything of ours.

Deleting the app deletes the reels on that phone. With iCloud sync off, which is how the app arrives, there is no cloud copy to restore from — so if a reel matters, export it. With sync on there is a copy in your own iCloud, and it is a copy and not a backup: it follows what you do rather than remembering what you did.

Does it need an internet connection?

No. It needs no internet connection for anything of its own — not for licensing, not for analytics, not for registration — and there is no server of ours to reach. On a plane in airplane mode it plays, records, samples and exports exactly as it does at home. The one thing that uses the network is iCloud sync, which is off until you turn it on, and which simply waits until there is Wi-Fi again. See the privacy policy for the detail.

How does iCloud sync work, and how much space does it use?

It is off when you install the app. Turn it on in Tonaut's settings and your reels start copying to your own iCloud, so your other iPhone opens the same work.

The small part — patches, kits, patterns, mixes, tempo, quick slots, samples — is well under a megabyte a reel and crosses whenever you save. The large part is the tape, and it is genuinely large: four tracks of 32-bit float audio is about 23 MB a minute a track, so a two-minute idea on two tracks is around 92 MB and a full six-minute four-track reel is about 550 MB. Nothing is compressed, because compressing it would change the recording, and this is a tape machine.

So the tape of a reel crosses when you open that reel, and not before. Press OPEN on a reel whose tape is on your other phone and the reel opens immediately — the sounds, the patterns and the mix are all in the small part, so you can play it straight away — and the tape arrives behind it. The reel browser tells you the size before you press anything, and sync uses Wi-Fi only unless you say otherwise.

If you edit the same reel on both phones, the last save wins, and the one that lost is kept on disk as that reel's previous version rather than thrown away. If you delete a reel on one phone it goes from both — unless the other phone has a recording the deleting phone had never seen, in which case the recording wins and the reel comes back. Delete it again once both phones agree and it stays deleted.

Headphones, Bluetooth speakers and AirPods

All fine for listening. Wired headphones or a USB interface are what you want for playing, though: anything wireless adds delay between your finger and the sound, and no app can remove that. Bluetooth is for hearing what you made, not for timing it.

Recording to tape is latency compensated either way, so a take lands where you played it rather than where the audio came back. Audio also keeps going when you switch away from the app or lock the screen.

How do I switch between the silver and graphite housings?

Settings, THEME. Three choices: Auto, Light, Dark. Light is the default; Auto follows the phone's own appearance and changes live, mid-note, when the system does. Only the housing changes — the black windows are identical either way.

Is there an iPad version? A plug-in version?

Not today, to both. Tonaut is an iPhone app and the layout assumes a phone held in two hands. An iPad version and an Audio Unit plug-in version are both wanted and both on the list, after the iPhone app is finished properly. Neither exists yet and neither has a date, so neither is being promised here.

Something is wrong. What should I send?

Whatever you have, plus these four things if you can: your iPhone model, the iOS version, the Tonaut version from the top of Settings, and what you were doing in the ten seconds before it went wrong. A screen recording is worth more than a paragraph. If it is an audio problem, say what you were listening through.

hello@coastcreative.studio

It isn't on the App Store yet. When can I buy it?

There is no date to give, so there isn't a fake one on this site. It will be $49, paid once, with no subscription and nothing to unlock afterwards. Send an email and you will hear when it is out.