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.
Apollo Remote Recorder, out now....
There are some nice iOS DAWs, but none of them have gotten me to abandon Logic. That motivated a re-think on how things could be integrated better, leading to.... Apollo Remote Recorder. It's waiting for review at Apple, and should be out some time next week.
Comments
Seems brilliant to me. Maybe Apple should just go ahead and hire you as a consultant.
Looks good, Patrick. Can you explain more about the web server? Does it run on the iDevice?
Would be cool to have a remote server plugin inside Logic that automatic connect and place the recording in Logic Pro....
Can it work from iPhone to ipad cutting out desktop altogether?
Ooh. This looks great, what an excellent wireless workaround. Thanks!
@telecharge -- the web server runs on the iDevice (it's integrated into the recorder app), and you toggle it on and off as needed. You point your browser at the IP address of the iDevice, and it will send back HTML with a list of recordings, or the recording itself.
@Sinapsya -- tighter integration with Logic, through a plug-in, is something I'm looking into.
@DaveMagoo -- we've already got an app for iPhone-to-iPad MIDI connectivity, Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth. The new app is Apollo Remote Recorder -- I'm planning on adding a few things that will let them work together, simplifying things further.
Cool idea! Does it work with only the premium DAW's, or would something like Audacity work with it?
^ or Reaper?
Brilliant. Simple bits (recorder, trigger recording start/stop via midi + iOS webserver) put to great real-world problem solving use. Big high-five @SecretBaseDesign.
It imagine this would work with any DAW that can a) send midi and b) import aiffs. So Reaper: yes, Audacity: no. Seems to me this would work on Windows too. If that's true, I'd seriously consider holding off launch just a bit to update the video to make sure all potential customers are aware of it when you get the launch news bump.
@theDoctor Not sure if this will work in anything but webkit based browsers (chrome/safari) and I'm not sure if logic will play along nicely but this fella figured out Google Gmail hack to drag files from the browser as the actual source: http://www.thecssninja.com/javascript/gmail-dragout
Might be a way to skip the 'save as' and folder steps.
Oooh -- thanks for the drag out link, Syrupcore! I'll see if I can get that to work. That would be sweeeeeeet!
Audacity will import AIFFs, and you can set up a snap-to-beat thing; if you've got some other sequencer to send the MIDI, you could make things work, but it's kind of rickety.
@SecretBaseDesign just to make sure I understand correctly, you won't be able to use it in say Cubasis ?
@davemagoo you could use it after you record in Cubasis (by sending the Cubasis output via Audiobus to Apollo) but not from that app directly. Well, I dunno obviously as I didn't make the app but I don't think so unless Cubasis has an 'audio through' mode or perhaps if Apollo remote recorder can be used as an IAA effect to which you could route Cubasis tracks.
This is simply a recording app with some very thoughtful grease added to the wheels. I don't mean to diminish it by using the word 'simply' but I'm thinking that might help to expose use cases. You record audio into it, the recording is timed with a MIDI note, it immediately makes the recording available for download, you grab it and rock on. Actually, I'm pretty sure you could do something like this with MTD but it would require a bunch of overhead (export to FTP, download and manually line it up and trim it). Dr P made an app tightens that entire workflow. Such an obvious app... now that it's been made!
@DaveMagoo -- the recording works with Cubasis, and a pair of iOS device -- I'm running Cubasis on an iPad, and have one MIDI track set to channel 16 (the record controller), and the other track to channel 1. All MIDI output is sent to an iPhone (I'm using Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth, but other options should work).
The recorder on the iPhone toggles on and off correctly, and captures the recording. The iPad web browser can see the iPhone web server -- but for right now, Safari on the iPad doesn't seem to know what to do with the downloaded file. With version 1.0, it's not easy to get the recording from the iPhone over to the iPad, but I'll work on that.
And just so you know.... I've got Reaper on Windows 8, controlling Animoog on my iPad, using RTPmidi. It toggles recording as desired, and there's no trouble with getting the audio from the iPad into Reaper. I'll see about doing a video....
@secretbasedesign An idea for your app-idea backlog: Looks like you have most of the pieces together for a sweet iOS multi-sample creator.
Recording would happen on any note on event (AB panel record-arming please!). You already have the note as MIDI info so you could save the file as *%user-prefix-if-set%__%ab_app_name%_%MIDI-note%.aiff* like "bass__iSem_c4.aiff". It would need a release threshold of some sort to capture note decays (user set or preferably automatic; once the sound level falls below -Ndb + an imposed quick fade length). Even without a MIDI note, you have the tech from MIDI Morphosis/Spectral Eye to detect incoming note names (say for oboe sampling/instrument creation) and saving files. Hot damn.
Timed capture, automatic naming and copy and paste would be enough for me to buy it on the upper end of audio app pricing. You might even be able add the note off event timestamp as the loop end (presuming the audio capture format supports that). If you can work out how to then turn them into a soundfont or a Beatmaker2 sampler preset directly on the iPad... holy epic-value-add IAP!
BM2's .bmk2 sampler format is a simple xml file. And, for what it's worth, Cakewalk's SFZ format is a reasonable and clear seeming multisample format with great documentation. I don't think there is a player for it on iOS yet [OHAI NTBYFS]. There are a few for the desktop, including a free one from Alchemy.
Going to far... there are desktop apps out there for converting hardware instruments into sample sets. They cost $100-500 bucks. They send a midi note out, capture the returning audio, save it and build multisampled instruments out of it. You set how fine grained the note separations are (every note... every 4 notes...) and it spreads the samples out in the target sampler format.
"Such an obvious app... now that it's been made!"
Couldn't agree more with this -- I had been thrashing with clever ways to send audio over WiFi with low latency, and beating my head against a wall. Then, looking at the problem differently, the solution seemed obvious.
This is sort of a hack on the way that old ADAT tape recorders worked -- there was MIDI control for these, and you could have them automatically fast forward or rewind to a specific point in time, and then start recording. There's a bunch of MIDI protocol for this.
I thought about implementing the ADAT MIDI interface, but this doesn't seem to be supported by many modern DAWs (Logic has it, but I'm not sure it works right, or if I understand how it works). Just stealing one MIDI channel, and having a simple one-note protocol, was a solution that I think everyone can handle.
For connections between devices, it would be great if the remote recording app could transfer the recording to the "MIDI source" device, without user interaction. Then the newly acquired file could be put into the paste buffer -- with that happening automatically as well. (cough, Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth could do that, and it would be a nice way to differentiate the app from what Apple will release with iOS 8, cough).
@syrupcore -- oh, that's a good idea. And totally do-able.... I'd probably have Apollo Automatic Instrument Sampler send out MIDI notes to the thing being sampled, so that I've got the exact pitch for sure, and an idea of how the note fades...
God, I need another project like I need a hole in my head. But this stuff is just so much fun!
@syrupcore @SecretBaseDesign thanks for taking the time to explain it
it makes sense now (almost!)
Here's another video,
And the iTunes link...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/apollo-remote-recorder/id898553024?ls=1&mt=8#
The app is $5 for release (intro pricing).
Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth is dropping to $3 for the weekend, MIDImorphosis is $4, and Voxkit is $2.
I'm heading out tomorrow for FAWMstock (woot!), but I should have email and web access. Let me know if you run into trouble!
Only brave men release and leave! Congrats on both!
I will have to work with this tomorrow. Really fantastic idea and If your past efforts are any indication, I'm sure a very good implementation too. Even if your iOS app has no midi, you can at least make a precisely timed recording. This could be good for drones and similar sounds where specific notes aren't as crucial as being able to put it into a slot you've got in mind for it.
Will have to explore the possibilities of between iOS device recordings too.
It would be great if an auto-sync would be possible on a certain folder on PC/MAC. Make a recording(s) and the file(s) are automatically transfered on local folder. Also I'd like to ask if it supports AB state saving.
What sort of state would it save?
Oops, you are right! I was thinking of AB2 preset saving which has nothing to do with an an app's state saving...Should drink more coffee ,before posting...!
Just downloaded it and looking forward to using it.
I'm thinking that Max for Live in Ableton could be used to import the audio automatically, obviating the need for the web server, download and dragging into a daw part. It's beyond my technical expertise, though.
I think an iOS audio recorder with integrated web server (Rode Rec, TwistedWave) can do similar things. And if proper timing is needed, it can be done via Auria (and then AudioCopy the recording to said audio recording app, to finally transfer the recording wirelessly into the desktop DAW).
Also, you can record iOS app audio directly into your DAW, which is actually even more convenient (although you'll have D-A and A-D conversions in between if you don't have an iOS audio interface with S/PDIF out, or one of those iConnect interfaces).
I'm sure Apollo Remote Recorder has it's advantages, I just wanted to point out that there are already existing ways to integrate apps into your desktop DAW.
@Korakios -- automatic sync of recordings to a Mac will happen shortly. An iOS version should happen too, and I'll work on the PC on as well.
My Windows PC has Bluetooth 4. Any possibility of developing an "Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth" app for Windows users?
I've been working on a PC version of Apollo MIDI -- but with the Apple announcement, it's not clear if there will be a market (MS might release something compatible -- in which case there's zero market for my app -- or they might not, which might let me keep things alive).