Demo vs licensed

MIDIpad is a free download, and Demo Mode is the complete instrument - every gesture, both instruments, MIDIpad's own sound in full, forever, with no time limit and no nagging. The demo is MIDIpad playing at its opinionated defaults.

A licence changes two things: what leaves the MIDI ports, and how much of the instrument you can reshape.

While unlicensed, a Demo Mode badge sits at the right of the title bar. Clicking it opens the License pane.

What's always free

• Every playing gesture, in both instruments. Nothing you do with your hands is ever gated: both strums - touchpad and strum stick - the plant, the squeeze, Stretch, shaping by touch, the shake, and all of Drums' streams, pushes and feels.
• The key's root - any of the twelve.
• Single-channel Chords output: plain notes and velocity, into any synth.
• Drums on its own port, at the General MIDI defaults.
• MIDIpad's own sound, playing the instrument's full expression.

What a licence unlocks

• The full Chords output: per-string channels, MPE, and six-way channel-splitting. Demo collapses everything onto one channel as it leaves the port - the instrument upstream of that is identical.

• The Expression wiring: where Energy and Agitation land in MIDI - the output, floors, ceilings, resting convention and CC. See App settings.

• The home face: whether Major or Minor is the wheel's home. Demo plays every root with Major as home; the minor chords stay on the wheel either way.

• The rest of the voices beyond the demo's three.

  

• The instrument's character: Ring, Bias, Dynamics, Squeeze response, the Sustain squeeze direction, and the Stretch handover. In demo these sit at the instrument's defaults.

• The Shake settings: the gesture plays in full in demo, because on at its natural response is the default. What a licence buys is overriding it.

• The Drums voice map: which note and channel each control sends, and the silencing map.

• The Instrument Overlay: the instrument's face floating over your DAW. See The overlay.

• Routing MIDIpad's own sound: sending the internal voice to a chosen output rather than the system default, which is what lets you record it into your DAW through a loopback device. Demo plays through the system default.

Activating

1. Buy MIDIpad from the purchase page. Your licence key arrives by email.
2. In the app, open Settings → License, paste the key, and press Activate. Activation checks the key online once; everything unlocks immediately.
3. From then on, MIDIpad works fully offline. The licence is verified locally, and the app quietly re-confirms it in the background when it happens to be online.

Once activated, the pane shows Activated as and a name for this machine - its model and a short code, like MacBook Pro · 4f9c. The code is generated for the activation; it isn't your computer's name.

A key covers up to two machines at once. Remove key in the same pane deactivates the current machine and frees that slot for another.