Audiobus: Use your music apps together.

What is Audiobus?Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.

Download on the App Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Time Signatures! for the love of Pete

I've been waiting and waiting to make a purchase for a DAW, any DAW that can:

  1. Change time signatures within a song.
  2. Support many different odd time signatures.

It really doesn't seem like too much to ask, considering time signatures are a FUNDAMENTAL element of music. Only allowing one time signature per song is like driving a car that has only one gear. I really don't understand the difficulty here with supporting this. Is it laziness among app developers,? a flaw in the iOS operating system? Can someone enlighten me?

The glimmer of hope here is that it looks like MultitrackStudio might support the above, but it currently doesn't support Audiobus. Hopefully when they do implement it my prayers will finally be answered. But for now I'll just splash like Magikarp.

The song Schism by Tool alters meter 47 times. Stravinsky's ''Three Pieces for Solo Clarinet'' changes meter almost every bar.

«134

Comments

  • edited April 2014

    I've got no answer for ya

    But

    LOL to the topic header, (I agree)

  • You are in the niche of a niche in the iPad music market, unfortunately. It's probably not too difficult to implement, technically, but more a problem of finding room in the interface and not confusing the app's primary demographic, who are probably just making disposable dance music or 4/4 rock/pop. This, among many other similar limitations, is why I use my iPad more as a spontaneous musical sketchpad, always bringing everything back to the Mac (DP in my case) to really get into the meat of things. Maybe we can all guilt the developers into implementing it someday if we bang the drum loud enough... and at various time signatures. Ehem.

  • Not a DAW, but DrumPerfect can change both time sigs and tempo throughout the course of a song. Since it's essentially a sequencer, that means that it's certainly not a limitation of iOS.

  • edited April 2014

    @aaronpc Sadly you are probably right. Not to dis' all of the dance music or 4/4 rock/pop creators out there, but DAWs should be tools to be used in the production of all forms of music including jazz, classical, progressive, etc. and not just targeted for the largest sales demographic. If I buy a hammer I expect it to pound all kinds of nails and not just roofing nails. Something like Garage Band I can see the need to keep things simple, but not for app developers who are charging a premium price for products aimed at the professional market.

  • Symphonix Evolution Pro might be able to do it.

  • So just record everything yourself... I mean how did people do it in the past? Did the bebop masters have better idevices and daws?

  • edited April 2014

    Gadget does it. In Cubasis a region does not have to fall on a measure marker. So set your grid to say 16ths, lay out a region of 5 duplicate as desired and ignore the time sig. In theory any way. That's how I've been trying to learn to sequence those Carnatic polyrhythm things. Not a lot of success but the fault is mine.

  • Got a chance to work with and record w/ one of the bebop masters later in his career :-) He was an early tech junkie w/ the latest and greatest DAWS, keyboards, and sequencers of the time. One of the main reasons I'm so into this stuff. Go figure...

    I'm jumping in, because, I too, am very much wanting the major DAWS to go ahead and add multiple time signatures to their feature lists. The ability to freely and easily change time signatures is one of the most important features of all musics that aren't primarily in the mainstream/pop genres. And a lot of mainstream/pop songs have more odd meter modulation shifts in and out of 4/4 than the "non-trained" ear tends to pick up on. It's funny that Korg Gadget's scene's settings is making this sort of stuff easy to do, but the traditional DAW formats like Cubasis still can't change time signatures.

    Having said all that, yes, we do need to have the chops to do this the old school way. But, the desktop DAWS added this feature a long time ago. IOS DAWS, we're ready for multiple time signatures within songs!

  • One iPad DAW that does both time sig and tempo changes midsong (not yet AB enabled, but IAA enabled) is G. Bremmers' MultitrackStudio. Also does triplets and other splits in its Score midi edit mode

  • edited April 2014

    @ShawnLeonhardt said:

    So just record everything yourself... I mean how did people do it in the past? Did the bebop masters have better idevices and daws?

    That's true. Record without MIDI sync of any kind. Use the DAW like a multitrack tape machine (although it is/was possible to sync a tape machine to sequencers and MIDI), and record everything by hand. Another option is to record parts. Each part has its own signature. After recording, put each part together with an audio editor app, or with the DAW app.

    I know this seems like a primitive approach nowadays, but it works. As it has worked in the analog days. But I guess it is only a question of time until there will be more apps that can do different signatures inside a project.

  • Fingers crossed that Cubasis implements a composer track with their upcoming automation update. Not a Cubase user, but since the two are supposed to talk, you would think they'd want to have signature change events and tempo curves eventually.

  • edited April 2014

    @Littlewoodg said:

    One iPad DAW that does both time sig and tempo changes midsong (not yet AB enabled, but IAA enabled) is G. Bremmers' MultitrackStudio. Also does triplets and other splits in its Score midi edit mode

    https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/multitrackstudio-for-ipad/id776998585?mt=8

    http://www.multitrackstudio.com/ipad.php

    Just saw a recent post on their forum that AB should be coming this month for this app.

  • PaulB
    Thanks for adding links, meant to do that...
    Great DAW. Soon to be greater, the dev is on the case on AB and ongoing improvements.

  • edited April 2014

    @PaulB said:

    @Littlewoodg said:

    One iPad DAW that does both time sig and tempo changes midsong (not yet AB enabled, but IAA enabled) is G. Bremmers' MultitrackStudio. Also does triplets and other splits in its Score midi edit mode

    https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/multitrackstudio-for-ipad/id776998585?mt=8

    http://www.multitrackstudio.com/ipad.php

    Just saw a recent post on their forum that AB should be coming this month for this app.

    imagehttp://static4.businessinsider.com/image/5049fdefecad04a361000008/throwing-money.gif

  • @Coloobar
    How did you get ahold of that footage of me? I thought I had bought and burned all negatives...

  • @Phil999 - I'm clearly no music theory whiz, as my comments will reveal, but aren't there workarounds for this? Apart from the obvious method of doing things by ear (or lining up visually), isn't this just an expectation of having everything available to be lined up using a "snap" function?

    A tempo of 120 beats per minutes in 4/4 is 2 beats per second. Or 30 measures within one minute. Can't you just record, for example, a measure in 3/4, note where the measure ends, and have that be your increment for cutting/pasting additional measures?

    I understand time signatures being a problem in, say, drum apps, but I guess I'm missing what you want the DAW to do.

  • Yeah, that's basically what I've done when I've mixed time signatures in a song. The DAW doesn't know the difference if you're bringing in mixed meters via AB or ACP or live recording or whatever. The only catch is trying to do MIDI sequencing in two different time signatures in the DAW... but that has not really been an issue for me thus far.

  • edited April 2014

    Ok, say I have a song with an 8 bar intro, a 16 bar verse, then an 8 bar chorus, another 16 bar verse, another 8 bar chorus, followed by a 4 bar bridge into an instrumental solo. Since I like odd rhythms, the intro and the verse are in 7/8, the chorus is in 5/4 and the bridge and solo are in 6/8.
    Due to the restrictions of Cubasis, I left the DAW set to 4/4, since any time sig would be wrong at some point. Which beat in which bar do I jump to in order to drop in my solo? I could do the maths, but maths isn't why I make music...

  • Once iOS DAW's do offer more in-depth time signatures, I await hours of disposable prog.

  • @PaulB

    Not trying to be snarky, but why do you need to know what beat and bar it is by number? Shouldn't the logical "feel" of the song dictate its placement?

  • @jesse_ohio Well, I could just listen through until the right point in the song comes up, but that's time consuming and not conducive to the streamlined 'workflow' that everyone always likes to bleat about when complaining about interfaces.

    @CalCutta If that's what turns you on...

  • When I'm putting a song together I usually don't have trouble knowing where discrete elements of a song lie (chorus, verse, bridge, etc), so its pretty trivial to hop the playhead marker right to the general vicinity that the solo should begin, back up a few seconds, then start recording. But maybe my workflow isn't the same as yours.

  • @PaulB I haven't had to check for a while, but can't you set start and end markers and punch in and out while recording until you get it right?

  • Actually, no matter what specific scenarios I dream up to justify the need for time sig flexibility in DAWs, it probably just boils down to wanting what I'm looking at to match the map I have in my head. If it was a tape recorder, I wouldn't even be thinking about it...

  • Haha! Makes sense! :-)

  • @PaulB said:

    Actually, no matter what specific scenarios I dream up to justify the need for time sig flexibility in DAWs, it probably just boils down to wanting what I'm looking at to match the map I have in my head. If it was a tape recorder, I wouldn't even be thinking about it...

    +1

    Yes, this... For those of us who work this way, it's WAY easier to work with multiple time signatures. For those of you who don't want them, don't need them, you're all set...

    It is a major waste of time for me to work in a DAW setting the way @jess_ohio describes. Especially when I start to cut and paste in a repeated section. Especially when that repeated section is varied every so slightly from a previous section. Can become a lot more work than just using multiple sections. Especially when working with other musicians and they don't have a clue as to what I've written or am trying to do... The track doesn't give them any help at all when there aren't any time signatures, etc...

    Also, if I'm writing something that's hard to play/count, using the metronome to help keep track of timing goes out the window. Not ashamed to say I need the metronome on some difficult sections when I'm trying to bring imagined material into reality... And this also goes for musicians who may need the 1 to come in. (Which then leads me to start building custom click tracks... More wasted time...) Oh, and don't let me decide that third part really has 5 beats instead of 7. MAJOR EDIT TIME....

    Going into cold sweat just reliving the experiences LOL :-)

  • Yep, it's all about editing. Recording is maybe a bit of a pain but editing can get really difficult/messy. I mean, if the song is finished and you're making one or two global edits, that's one thing but if you're an editing-arranger type (me), damn. 1/1 anyone?

  • @CalCutta, LOL at "hours of disposable prog" - just like instagram but with music.

    Well it's not necessarily a DAW and I still need to dig deeper into this, but it looks like Jam Maestro supports most time signatures and the ability to change meter within the song.

Sign In or Register to comment.