Support

zhiii0x@gmail.com

There is no ticket system and no bot. Mail goes to the person who made the instrument.

What to include

• Which sheet — its code, S-01 through S-11, or the name in the menu
• Whether it happened in the app or in the Audio Unit, and if the latter, which host
• Your iOS version and device
• If it is about sound: roughly where on the board your finger was, and what pitch the ribbon was resting on

Restoring a purchase

Open Settings — the mark at the top right of the sheet, three short lines — and choose Restore Purchase. Restore is always available there, whether or not Pro currently shows as unlocked.

You should rarely need it. Contour asks the App Store about your entitlement every time it launches, so a reinstall, a new device, or a purchase made elsewhere normally unlocks on its own.

Contour Pro is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. It is tied to your Apple Account, works on every device signed into it, and is covered by Family Sharing.

Using the Audio Unit

Installing Contour also installs an AUv3 instrument plug-in. It appears in any host that loads Audio Units — GarageBand, Logic Pro, AUM, Cubasis, Drambo, and others — under nono: Contour.

• Load it as an instrument, not an effect
• Position on the board is exposed as two automatable parameters, Map X and Map Y, so a gesture can be recorded and replayed by the host
• The sheet, reverb and envelope are parameters too, so a saved project recalls the instrument exactly as you left it
• The plug-in does not own the transport — recording is the host's job there, which is why the REC control is absent
• From 1.0.2: the plug-in's own map plays under your finger, the same as in the app. Before that it moved the position but sounded nothing unless a MIDI note was already held
• Composing and baking a sheet stays in the app. In the plug-in, SHEET is the list of sheets you already have — baking runs a search and writes a file, which is the app's job
• A sheet you bake in the app joins the plug-in's list, but the plug-in reads that list once when the host loads it. Reload the plug-in — or reopen the host — to see one you baked while it was running

What Pro unlocks

Locked controls are drawn with diagonal hatching, the way a survey sheet marks ground you cannot enter.

Why some sheets sound like a room

Some corners are audibly wet with SPACE at zero, and no setting takes it out. That is not a fault, and it is not Contour's reverb leaking — the space is part of the timbre itself.

The four corners of every sheet are neural decoders trained on the NSynth dataset. Some of those sources are acoustic instruments recorded with a microphone in a room; others are synthesised or electronic and have no room at all. A decoder learns whatever was in front of it, so where the source was acoustic, the early reflections and the tail are part of the spectrum it reproduces — in the same way the body of the instrument is. Contour is resynthesising a sound that already had a space around it.

SPACE is a separate reverb, added afterwards. At zero it is genuinely off: the wet signal is multiplied by exactly zero, and what reaches your ears is the dry instrument. What you can still hear is the room that came with that corner, and it cannot be switched off because it is not a process — it is what the sound is. Taking it out would mean a different recording, not a different setting.

It differs from corner to corner, so it also differs with where your finger is. Moving away from a wet corner is the only control over it, and on most sheets that is enough. To hear this clearly, put your finger in each of the four corners in turn with SPACE at zero.

Known limits

• Portrait only on iPhone. Landscape does not leave enough vertical room for the board without squeezing it below a usable size
• Each sheet has its own pitch range, set by what its four corners were actually trained on. The ribbon shows that range rather than a fixed keyboard, because asking a decoder outside its range does not merely sound wrong — it answers with noise