Sampletoy (App Store link) is a new musical instrument/plaything that’s part sampler, part granular synthesiser.

You can use it to capture sounds through the iPhone microphone and then play, loop, pitch and distort them live on the screen.

Features:

• Create your own instruments out of any sound.
• Email your performances as audio files straight from the app.
• Built-in resonant filters, delay and envelope.
• Auto-saves current recording and state and recalls it again on next launch.
• Stepped mode allows chromatic, major, minor, pentatonic and whole-tone scales to be played.
• Totally multitouch – play up to 5 notes at once.
• 44kHz/16bit – professional quality sound.
• Built-in comprehensive manual.

Best of all, SampleToy lets you “Record any old crap and make it sound awesome!”, according to its creators.

SampleToy sells for $1.99.

If you’ve tried out SampleToy, leave a comment with your thoughts!

Description:

There are plenty of features under the hood, such as resonant filters, delays and envelope. You can enable “stepped” mode to play your sounds like a traditional keyboard, or keep it in “free” mode for some microtonal madness.

Once you’ve recorded a sound, use the main area of the screen to play it back at different pitches (up to 5 fingers at a time). You can crop the sound by dragging a selection over the waveform. The crop area is also multitouch and you can adjust the crop while playing the sound too.

The y-axis is pitch of the sound, and the x axis is configurable to control filters or envelope.

You can record your performances on Sampletoy and send them via email within the app as a CD-quality wav file (mono or stereo)

Sampletoy requires audio input, so works only with the iPhone (built-in mic or headset mic) and iPod Touch 2G (headset mic)