If you were waiting on a ROLI

ROLI built the best known expressive instruments there are. If you have ever seen a keyboard bend and slide under a finger, it was probably a Seaboard, and a great many people first understood that a note could keep changing after it was played because ROLI put one in front of them.

What is checkable is small. roli.com does not load: what comes back is a hosting error rather than a page. The support site asks you to sign in before it will show you anything. The account site at my.roli.com still answers.

On the public record, Luminary ROLI Limited, the company behind the ROLI name, is listed as active at Companies House, with no insolvency or administration notice on its record. It is the only thing about the company’s position that anybody outside it can check.

The rest of what is being said about ROLI is guesswork, and none of it changes what to do with an instrument you already own.

A MIDI controller is not a subscription. A Seaboard appears to a computer as a standard MIDI device, which is ROLI’s own description of it, and standard means no driver, no sign-in and nothing that expires. Pressing a key asks nobody’s permission. It will go on playing into any software that reads MPE, and there is a great deal more of that software now than there was when the Seaboard arrived. If you want to know exactly what those messages are, what MPE is and what Sonari sends writes them out one at a time.

The settings you made in ROLI’s software live on the instrument rather than on your computer. ROLI’s own documentation says the Seaboard remembers them when you unplug it, which is how it works with hardware that has no software at all, and it means the Seaboard you set up the way you like is set up that way whatever happens next.

What does depend on the software is changing those settings and updating firmware. So: if ROLI’s software is installed and working on your machine, leave it alone. If you have the installer, keep a copy of it somewhere that is not the machine it is installed on. If you have serial numbers or licence details, write them down somewhere that is not a website. None of that is urgent today. All of it is easier today than later.

This one is different. An Airwave watches your hands with its own cameras, but the reading of them happens in ROLI’s software on your computer. It needs that software running to do anything at all. That software is on your machine rather than on a website, so what is installed and working today keeps working today. It is the next reinstall, the next system update and the next Mac that depend on somebody being there to publish a download.

So do not uninstall anything to tidy up, and do not wipe the machine it works on without a plan. Keep every installer you already have, and keep a copy of it off that machine.

If you paid and nothing arrived, the useful first call is whoever took the money. A shop you bought from has its own obligations to you. A card issuer or PayPal has a dispute process, and those have time limits, which is the reason to ask now rather than to keep waiting quietly.

You are in the same position for the same reason, and possibly have been for longer. The Leap was always just a sensor: everything musical about it, GECO included, happened in software on your computer. Ultraleap, which makes it, was acquired by ROLI in November 2025, so that rig and an Airwave now sit under the same roof.

The rule is the one above. What is installed goes on working while the machine does, and anything that would need a fresh download is the part to think about.

Two families, and they are not interchangeable. Instruments you touch, which is what a Seaboard is, and cameras, which is what an Airwave was. Every one of them is its own instrument rather than a Seaboard with a different badge, and the prices are what each maker asks, in the currency they ask it in.

Expressive E Osmose. A keyboard whose keys move in three directions, and which makes its own sound rather than needing one. Around €1,799 to €1,999, with newer controller-only versions from about €999 for somebody who already owns the synths they love.

Haken Continuum and ContinuuMini. A continuous surface with no keys on it at all: the pitch is wherever your finger is and there is nothing to land on. The Continuum is from around $1,799 and the ContinuuMini around $999. Nothing else feels like one, and nothing else asks as much of you.

LinnStrument. A grid rather than a keyboard, from Roger Linn, around $1,149 to $1,599. Every pad reads pressure and movement the way a Seaboard’s surface does, and a grid is a different geometry to learn rather than a lesser one.

Intuitive Instruments Exquis. From around $275, which makes it much the least expensive real way in. If the number above is the problem rather than the instrument, start here.

Embodme Erae II. A flat pressure-sensitive surface you lay out however you want, around €849.

AirBending and KAOS. On the camera side, and much closer to what an Airwave was doing. Both are Mac applications, both watch your hands through the camera your Mac already has, and neither makes a sound of its own: what you hear is whatever you already own. AirBending is around £9 to £13 and KAOS is £9.99. If the job your Airwave did can be described in terms of MIDI, one of these and the synths on your machine may simply do it. The gesture MIDI controller page puts them beside the hardware.

Sonari is not a Seaboard, and if what you want is a keyboard that bends under your fingers then one of the instruments above is the answer and this is not. There are no keys, no surface and no hardware of any kind. There is nothing under your hands at all.

What it is: a Mac application that watches you through the camera the Mac already has and makes the sound itself. 10,000+ sounds come with it, so there is no synth to own first. It can hold you inside a scale, 490+ of them from 8 living traditions, so a swoop is something you choose rather than something that happens to you. There are seventeen ways to play in it, including one with no notes of its own that only shapes something already sounding, which is the one a keyboard player usually reaches for first.

It sends MIDI as well, if what you actually wanted was a controller for the rig you have. Two limits. It will not play from a keyboard: incoming MIDI can be taught to work the loop controls and to pick a song out of a set, but notes from your Seaboard will not sound Sonari’s instruments. And it needs a Mac with Apple silicon running macOS 26 or later.

So: if you want to keep the Seaboard and add something a camera can do that a keyboard cannot, that is a reasonable thing to do with this. If you want a replacement for the keyboard itself, this is not one.

ROLI, Seaboard and Airwave, and every other product named here, belong to their owners. Sonari is an independent product: not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or otherwise connected to any of them. Prices and availability change without notice.

If anything on this page is wrong, or somebody would rather their product were not written about here, one message to contact@playsonari.com is enough. It gets corrected, or it comes down.