For five years the only way to run Dirtywave’s M8 was to own one — a machined-aluminum handheld with a tiny screen, made in small batches, perpetually sold out. As of September 9, 2026, there’s a second way: M8 Music Tracker, an official iOS app from Dirtywave LLC, $29.99 on the App Store.
Not a companion app
The thing worth stating plainly is how little was cut. The app carries the full instrument list — Wavsynth (the wavetable/chip-flavored engine), Macrosynth (40+ synthesis models), FMSynth (four-operator FM), Hypersynth (the multi-oscillator swarm), the Sampler, and MIDI instruments — with up to 128 instruments per song. Sequencing is the same eight independent monophonic tracks, the same instrument tables, scales, grooves, probability, and the dense two-character effect commands that give the M8 its reputation for being cryptic and then, abruptly, fast.
Connectivity is real too: CoreMIDI in and out, external keyboard and controller support, explicit Launchpad Pro MKIII handling, and Inter-App Audio. Version 1.0 requires iOS 15.0 or later and weighs about 235 MB.
The file-compatibility part is the actual news
Songs and bundles are fully compatible with M8 hardware in both directions. A project started on the train in an iPhone’s portrait layout opens on a Model:02; a song sketched on the handheld comes back to the iPad for arrangement. Projects, instruments, samples, themes, and rendered audio all sit in the Files app rather than in an opaque app sandbox, which means iCloud, AirDrop, and a plain folder structure instead of an export wizard.
That’s a different posture than most hardware-companion apps take. It treats the app and the box as two enclosures around one instrument, not a product and its accessory.
What it means for the tracker crowd
Trackers have been well served on mobile for years — nanoloop, SunVox, and the community-built m8c client among them. What was missing was the M8 specifically, from Dirtywave, with its own synths intact rather than reimplemented. Anyone who wanted to learn the workflow before committing to a hardware queue now can, for the price of a plugin.
There’s no Android version. Given that m8c runs on nearly everything and this one doesn’t, that gap is conspicuous.