Best Friend and the KO II
Written on September 22nd , 2026 by cachemix
Teenage Engineering finally has a real companion app for the EP series. It’s called Best Friend, ten bucks, and it also covers the EP-40 and the EP-1320 if you have those. iOS 26 or macOS 26 on Apple Silicon. Plug in over USB-C and it finds the unit.
The thing I actually wanted was the scene view. The KO II is great right up until you’re eight banks deep and can’t remember what’s playing where. Best Friend lays every sequenced note across every bank onto one timeline, which is the view the hardware can’t give you on that little screen. That alone is worth the price.
Second thing: stem bounce. It’ll dump all 48 pads as separate tracks, fader automation included. Previously getting anything out of the KO II meant recording the stereo out and living with your decisions. Now the sketch that happened on the couch can become a session without redoing it.
Other stuff in there, roughly in the order I care about it:
- MIDI controller mode, with a chord builder and arp. Useful, though I keep going back to the pads.
- Sample editor with the usual suspects — EQ, comp, saturation, delay, reverb. Fine. Not why you own a KO II.
- Stem splitting, which pulls drums/bass/vocals/guitar apart. Works better than I expected on clean source, predictably worse on anything dense.
- Backups and bank snapshots. Boring and the most important feature here. The KO II has no undo worth the name.
Worth knowing before you buy: it’s per-store, so iOS and Android are separate purchases. Lightning devices need an MFi adapter, which is the usual tax on older hardware.
The part I’m still turning over is whether this changes how I use the thing. The KO II’s appeal was always that it’s a closed box you can’t fiddle with forever — limited screen, limited options, so you commit and move on. Bolting a full editor onto it removes that constraint. I suspect the right discipline is to keep composing on the hardware and only open the app at the end, for bouncing and backups. Ask me in a month whether I managed that.