Simulation Mode and the unlock

PedalScope is free to download and comes with Simulation Mode, which is the whole instrument pointed at a virtual pedal. One purchase, the Measurement Unlock, adds measurement of real devices.

The boundary is one sentence: the unlock buys measuring real things.

What is free

• Simulation Mode. A virtual pedal you dial directly, measured by the same pipeline as hardware — the same signals, the same analyzers, the same arithmetic. What comes out is a real measurement of a device that happens to be made of maths.

• Every chart, on anything in your library: Harmonic Distortion, the Gain Map, Compression, the Transfer Curve, Chord IMD, the Waveform Matrix, Compare.

• The Hear-it audio and the plain-language summaries.

• Import and export. Measurements published for PedalScope open in full — double-click a downloaded .pedalscope library (see Sharing and opening libraries) — and anything in your library exports as a library, as JSON, as a record bundle, or as an annotated PNG.

• Your library, permanently. Records you have already measured stay readable, exportable and visible whatever the purchase standing says.

Simulation Mode is complete and permanent. It does not expire, it does not count anything down, and nothing in it is held back — a page of this guide teaches with it precisely because it is the same instrument.

What the unlock adds

Measurement of real devices:

• Hardware — a pedal in a loop through your audio interface, with the calibration, gain staging and capture-quality machinery that goes with it.

• Plugins — an AudioUnit measured through the render path.

Everything a measurement then produces, you already had. The unlock adds the capture, not the analysis.

The price is shown in the app (Settings → Unlock) and on the App Store. It is a one-time purchase, not a subscription, and it belongs to the Apple Account that bought it — it is not shared through Family Sharing.

Buying, restoring, and being offline

Buying happens from Settings → Unlock, or from the panel that appears when you point PedalScope at hardware or a plugin without the unlock. Before the unlock, the controls that start a real measurement — New Measurement and Live Mode in the toolbar, Measure Fingerprint on an empty pedal page — carry a small lock badge, and hovering says that the Measurement Unlock is what opens them; clicking one opens that panel. Apple handles the purchase; PedalScope never sees an account, a name, or a payment detail.

Restore Purchases sits beside the purchase button in both places. Use it on a new Mac, after a reinstall, or any time the app does not know about a purchase you made. It reports one of three things, and they are genuinely different: the unlock was restored; the App Store has no such purchase for the account signed in on this Mac; or the restore did not complete, reported with the reason the request ended on. The third is not the second — it means nothing was checked and nothing was changed, and PedalScope does not guess at the cause: a cancelled request and an App Store it could not reach both end there. Dismissing the sign-in prompt that Restore raises simply ends the restore, with nothing said.

A bench with no network is the normal case, and measurement does not care. PedalScope reads the purchase standing from a local record that macOS keeps, so a measurement never waits on a round trip and never fails for want of a connection. Only buying and restoring need the network.

A purchase waiting for approval — Ask to Buy, or an extra verification step from your bank — is not a failure and is not a dead end. The app stays open and usable, and the unlock activates on its own the moment the purchase completes. There is nothing to buy again and no need to relaunch.

If a purchase is refunded or revoked, PedalScope returns to Simulation Mode and says so. Nothing is deleted and nothing is hidden: every record you measured stays in the library, opens in every chart, and exports exactly as before. Measurements you have taken are yours.

For App Review

The whole product is exercisable without any hardware: open Simulation Mode, dial the virtual pedal, and run any measurement kind. No audio interface, no pedal, and no purchase is required to see every chart, the summaries, the Hear-it audio, Compare, and export.