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 StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Performance problems --- SOLVED!
Hello,
I finally had the time to get into AB2. My problem is that I still have massive glitches, even with a quite simple setup like the one u can see in the photo. I'm running an iPad mini retina with iOS 7.1.
Also I'm having the problem that sometimes the echo pad app starts automatically out of nothing and creates a feedback. To make it stop I can only restart my ipad. When this happens I can only see it' is running because it's saying echo pad recording on the top.
Comments
Oh....that kind of performance problem.... ;-)
Are all of your other apps closed down while running AB/Sector/Echo Pad? Perhaps apps running in the background are taxing your system.
For the feedback problem: are you using the iPad speaker (not headphones)? Perhaps the microphone is on and it is making a feedback loop.
What other kind of performance problems were you expecting of @Granny @MrNezumi? ;-)
@Granny - no feedback or unusual glitching on my mini retina. Here's my preset..
Audiobus preset 'Glitch Test': http://preset.audiob.us/IjslKSkpsTXpPAb
Haha!
I might be a granny. But my performance problems are ipad only.
Thanks for your feedback! I also deleted the app, made a restart and reinstalled. No changes.
The weird thing with echo pad is that it pops up without me even touching AB or any other music app. The last two times the feedback happened was when my alarm rang in the morning and when I was reading my feedly news. And the app is not showing the interface, I only se the message in red on the top. Very weird.
I tested some more and tried this constellation. Everything seems to work somehow until I start playing with e-l-s-a. Then it dies on me
I'm on 512 frames here. My general questions here are: is this a communication problem between the apps, or is it that my ipad can't handle it? When I look at the CPU of Auria it's saying something like 5 percent.
I also put Auria to audiobus mode.
@Granny
Reset your ipad (hold down both home and off buttons until Apple logo appears then let it restart)
Kill ALL open apps
Download and run cMemory (or any app that clears out memory)
If things are still weird then maybe the specific apps you are using are having problems, just troubleshoot until you figure out what's going on. I don't have ELSA (yet) so I can't speak to that, it's a new app so maybe it has issues which don't show up until it's used with other apps, just a guess.
I've never heard of an app launching itself so maybe Echopad was still running in the background and your alarm caused it to feedback? It's a good practice to kill all music apps once you're done creating music which might prevent this from happening. It might be worth contacting the Echopad dev who hangs out here from time to time.
Hope this helps
Hey! Thank you all for your help!
@funjunkie27
Thanks for the patch! I will try this out!
But first I downloaded cMemory and made a reset. I only opened cMemory after and already had 74 percent in use. When I open safari it goes up to 88. I read that inactive memory is still free memory but is this normal?
@Granny - Hi, Echo Pad dev here. From what you're describing I am 99.9% sure you are experiencing the joys of "stuck" Inter-app audio node apps, including Echo Pad.
This is an annoying but common problem with IAA where apps can become stuck in the background, and can suddenly become active seemingly at random. I wrote about this when IAA first released and have pasted those tips below, please follow these steps to deal with this problem until/if Apple fixes it.
Inter-App Audio tips
Avoiding "stuck" IAA apps and crashes
What to do if Echo Pad or another IAA app becomes "stuck" in the background
1.) Launch the app directly from it's home screen/folder in iOS by tapping it's icon.
2.) Once the app has come to the foreground, close it, then remove it from the multi-task bar by double tapping the home button, then swiping the app upwards to remove it completely.
3.) You should now be able to load the IAA app in your host.
Hey, thanks a lot ! I did what you said and hopefully the feedback won't wake me up anymore
It didn't change anything on the ramusage but I tried around a bit and found out that when I open the iTunes Store and close it my ram usage drops to 51 percent and actually stays there. When I now reset the ipad I'm back at 74-75 percent. Opening and closing the iTunes Store again makes it drop back to 51 percent.
I'm not even sure it helps in any way since I heard that iOS has its own ram management that you shouldn't screw around with... Talking about ram cleaning apps.
Hmm, it's also that Apple says I don't even have to close any app at all
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5137
Must say that iOS is still a mystery to me. Tomorrow I will experiment some more and if I find something useful I post it here. Now it's time for Easter beer. Cheers!
One more thing. How much percent do you guys still have to fill with apps? One sucker for me might also be the fact that I have an iPad mini cellular.
Can you tell whether it's the SeekBeat or Sector parts that are creating the unwanted glitches? If it were me, I'd try to isolate it to the offending app. Of course if it's this specific combination causing the problem, you won't be able to isolate it, but by that you should then know that it's this specific combination. You could also try swapping out each app with another that is similar in function.
SeekBeats gave me problems on both iPad2 and iPhone 5s when I first bought it. But part of that may have been that I assumed it was so low-resource that I wasn't taking the usual precautions of shutting things down, etc. It actually has been running fine since.
I encounter an issue with AudioBus now and then that I think is caused by the latency settings, but is perceived as an overrun CPU. They really advice that you start AudioBus FIRST, set your latency (frames) in there, and then open up the input/effects/output apps. If you don't do this, sometime the (latency?) settings of the music app will fight with AudioBus and the whole thing is rendered unusable. May not be what is causing your issue, but worth a thought.
Question: What does that "% used" readout in cMemory mean? Is that the percentage of RAM being used? Or is it some weird combination of RAM and storage memory? When I first opened it up, I was at 88% and my iPad2 was clogged up really good. At that time, I had about 300MB of HD space. Basically, I did nothing except delete Drum Beats + and some other large apps to get to about 1GB of free space, then did a full reboot. The cMemory number dropped to 74% and things did seem to run better. This still seems high, but cMemory itself does not give you the option to clean anything out, it just tells you about processes running.
cMemory does free up RAM and stops unused running processes. It has Quick and Deep Refresh options, or have I misunderstood you?
The central display shows the % of RAM used and below is a value of how much is free.
@thinds said:
Okay, well I will have to look harder for those options. I didn't see any "buttons" or menus to do anything - it simply displayed the usage. Thanks.
Just press the red bar for a deep refresh, or in settings you can set it to run at app startup.
I don't think the latest version of cMemory can clear RAM. The whole app got pulled from the store awhile ago and when it came back that feature was gone.
Mine still does with the latest updates applied. Maybe a new purchase doesn't have that feature. Not sure on that.
I got cMemory recently and it refreshes the RAM.
I got it 2 days ago and unfortunately it doesn't have that feature anymore as you can see in the description. It seems that there is a possibility to upgrade. But there is no explanation about it anywhere and in the app itself the only thing you can do is sharing your info.
Ha! Just found out there is a Chinese version of it that is still in the App Store. I downloaded it and the features are still there.
It's in English by the way
App store does say that cMemory doesn't clear memory, but I think it means the basic version. I have the upgraded version. Its only a $0.99 give it a try.
OMG! It's working! 4 rows and no glitches with 256 frames! happy!!
@thinds: there is no way to update the app. Well, I couldn't find any. But the Chinese version seems to be identical to the one you have. And it's in English and free. It's the one on the pic.
Dang! I'm überhappy! Finally I can make some Krach on this thing!
Here is the link for the app:
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/ji-su-nei-cun-zhu-shou/id784596968?mt=8
I'll be damned! Not only is free, but it does display in English when you load it. My iPhone 5s (newest device!) was at 98% used when I loaded it. How...what...I can't even... The deep refresh took it down to 66% and cleared a bunch of cached memory.
Update: actually it fell to 37% after I closed some background apps that were open. Woah!
Does anyone actually understand how this works, or is it just magic from the Far East?
Thanks, @Granny !
I'm tentatively going to agree on the "miracle" comment, but reserve the right to my original question: WHAT does it do to my phone to make it run faster?! Is it clearing out copy/paste, or other caches such as photo pre-loading? And if it IS working this well, why the hell isn't something like this built into iOS, or why would they try to suppress it?
Any time I see a new app, the first thing I check (even before the price, sometimes) is the memory size. Not only does 16GB fill up in a damn hurry after you load up your phone with the "essential" apps, but there are SO many hidden sources of file bloat on iOS, from photos stored in your iMessage chats, to the email app, to iCloud Photo Streams cached for quicker/offline loading. And we're seeing that RAM processes dip into that same memory pool, so your phone/tablet actually can run slower as you have that storage almost all used up.
I'm likely deleting Garage Band off of both my devices. It's an incredible program, free, and is actually a darn good DAW for most users. But it's bloated to 800MB and I can't justify that for any one program. MT DAW and dozens of synth/drum apps can perform its functions with more variety and LESS memory.
To be fair, GB is so big because it includes so many instruments. MTDAW includes no instruments, and to do what GB does, you'd need to add Sampletank or something, so there's your hundreds of MB again.
@Zymos said:
I accounted for that. My point was that GarageBand does a ton of stuff and does it all for free - that's outstanding, but it's not like you can delete the portions that you aren't using. I don't use the synthesizer in GB over Sunrizer or Magellan. There's some drum loops I've used in the past, but not anymore now that I have DM-1, SeekBeats, and JamMaestro. The guitar amp modeling functions, but is far inferior to JamUp/BIAS and AmpKit+. And I don't have a need for something like "Smart Bass". Bismark BS-16i is SoundFont player with an initial install of less than 50MB, and it has tons of those same sounds.
My point was that I've ALREADY replaced all the critical functions of GarageBand with several other specialized apps, so I can't any longer carry GarageBand along with it.
i can tell you that yesterday i had the most fun ever since i got my ipad. i still had a grin on my face afterwards. i think i might change my avatarname to grinny.
before, i had mixed feelings about using an app that does magic to my RAM.
but i didnt experience any problems yet and i can definitely life without apps like the itunes store stealing my ram (okay, im guessing here since i only have this memory app to show me the usage of ram. but the "test" i posted before gave me this impression)
would be interesting to know, why the original app was put down.
well, i hope that this app will stay updated to always work with the recent ios.
i also hope i wont post something like
my ram is screwed!! i lost important data!!! next week.
we'll see
That Chinese app reports completely wrong (and "magical") numbers on my Air, unlike all other system monitors on the AppStore. Better hide your credit card information, porn, dealer contacts etc! Btw, the regular cMem app have the clean function here, not sure if I paid for any IAP though. Sys Activity Monitor is another app that "cleans" the RAM with consistent numbers.
Usually tho for iOS musicians, if there's something that is noticeably dragging down the performance, using battery etc, it's a stuck IAA app. Follow Holderness info above to keep those IAAs in check.
@ChrisG said:
Awww, maaaannnn. ChrisG just took a massive dump all over our performance party! Is there a prior example of a "trojan horse" app that actually made it through Apple's approval process? What you are describing is sort of like a virus that Apple is hosting on their App Store.
Are you saying the System Activity Monitor actually works as a "cleaner", or simply that you've verified the number readouts are correct?
cmemory and the chinese letter version seem to be from the same people. they have the same weibo account (chinese twitter version).
@ChrisG:
as i said before, the original cMem app doesnt have the clean function anymore (for people who download it now) and you cant update. i didnt know about system activity monitor. is it really cleaning the ram? because i cant see anything like that in the description nor on the pic of the interface. maybe it also lost this function with the last update (21. feb 2014)
getting spyed by the chinese with this app also came through my mind. well, all i can say is that it worked for me and im open for solutions from more reliable sources.
"Sys Activity Manager Plus" refreshes the RAM (it mentions it in one of the screens). The free version doesn't though.
Latest update for cMemory here was on April 16 last week (bug fixes), and it hasn't removed any of the RAM refresh functions. The full name for the app is "cMemory for iOS 7", (it does seem to have some IAP thing now, so perhaps that's needed now to unlock things like "ram cleaning").
Both available in the US and EU stores.