MPE hardware is expensive and heavy. A Seaboard, a LinnStrument, an Osmose — all wonderful, none of them things you throw in a bag on the way to a friend's studio. MPEdie is the cheapest possible answer to that problem: a free MPE controller app for iPhone and iPad, updated on 7 September 2026 to version 1.1.3.
It is developed by Diego Capoccitti (34Audiovisuals), and its most distinctive quality is not a feature. It is honesty.
The Pressure Problem, Stated Plainly
Most touchscreen MPE controllers advertise "pressure sensitivity". iOS glass cannot measure downward force. What it can measure is contact area — how much of your fingertip flattens against the screen as you press harder. That correlates with pressure, but it is not the same thing, and pretending otherwise produces response curves that feel unpredictable.
MPEdie exposes contact area as exactly what it is: a source in the modulation matrix, labelled as such. You decide whether to route it to channel pressure, and you shape the curve yourself. The result is a controller that feels less magical on first touch and considerably more reliable on the tenth take.
Four Surfaces, Not One
The app offers four playing layouts rather than a single glass keyboard:
- Piano — the familiar layout, but sliding a finger follows the pitch under it rather than snapping to key widths.
- Isomorphic grid — chord shapes stay identical in every key, with configurable rows, columns and interval offsets. Closest in feel to a LinnStrument or Striso board.
- Ribbon — one continuous strip with no key boundaries, for fretless glides and microtonal work.
- Scale grid — only notes in a selected scale are lit, across 14 scale presets, which is hard to beat for live improvisation.
Every gesture feeds an 8-source by 7-destination modulation matrix. Sources include sideways glide, absolute and relative vertical position, contact area, strike force, time held and fixed values. Destinations cover pitch bend, timbre (CC 74), pressure, strike and lift velocity, plus two free MIDI CCs. Each link has its own gain, offset, inversion and response curve.
What Changed in 1.1.2 and 1.1.3
The recent updates are unglamorous and genuinely useful — the sort of fixes that only surface once people play an app seriously.
Stray MIDI is gone. The app used to re-broadcast its MPE zone configuration every two seconds for as long as it was open, which had the side effect of resetting your instrument's CC 74 back to 64 over and over. It now repeats only for the first twenty seconds, and sends nothing that moves a value. A new AUTO MCM switch in SETUP ▸ ZONE lets you disable outgoing MIDI entirely until you actually play.
Two-sided sources behave properly. The relative-vertical source (Y REL) now works in both directions — move up and the value rises, move down and it falls, with the full range reachable from wherever you landed. Previously only one direction did anything. Two-sided sources also centre on their destination at 64 instead of being clipped, so no movement means no change.
Better visibility and routing. The info row now displays every outgoing value, pitch bend and free CCs included, each under its own CC number. You can choose the CC numbers for the two free slots, and a number already in use on that channel stays silent rather than fighting for control. Custom scales can now use accidentals, and the octave's keys are named by degree (1, b2, 2, b3, 3, 4, #4, 5, b6, 6, b7, 7).
Presets saved by earlier versions convert automatically on load.
Getting It Into a Desktop DAW
MPEdie makes no sound of its own — it is purely a front end for any MPE-capable instrument. Inside iOS it runs standalone or as an AUv3 MIDI plugin in hosts like AUM, Drambo or Loopy Pro.
For desktop work, there is a free companion app for macOS and Windows. It receives MPE over the local network and republishes it as a virtual MIDI port, so Ableton Live, Logic Pro or Bitwig Studio treat the iPad exactly like a plug-and-play USB controller — including recording per-note expression straight into a track.
Worth Your Time?
A tablet will never replicate the physical feedback of a silicone keywave or a real keybed, and MPEdie does not claim it will. What it does offer is a legitimate MPE surface, four layouts, deep routing, and no cost — which makes it the most sensible way to find out whether per-note expression suits your playing before spending four figures on hardware. For existing MPE owners, it is also a decent second controller for ribbon and microtonal parts that a keybed handles awkwardly.
MPEdie is a free download on the App Store, with no subscription.