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.
Revisited Nanostudio
Although all these great apps like Cubasis, or Beatmaker2 or iMPC Pro (with all the included bugs) are doing a lot of stuff, I still find joy in Nanostudio.
I didn't liked and I still don't like the UI that much, but I appreciate that the dev has made it vectorial (it scales on different devices like Mac) and very freaking fast to navigate and it doesn't sport that touch lag of other apps like iMPC Pro. And I'm not talking about audio buffer. I'm talking about playing triplets on hihats fast.
But man, after you get passed the UI, the app in it's minimalism is very very powerful. You have midi, automation, a good drum machine which cand duplicate pads with duplicate samples, so you can chop them individually, also a good synth / sampler which YES it does sample chopping and you can use that to speed up loops.
I freaking love it. And I've read on their forum that Matt is working on v2 which doesn't have a fixed date yet but he's taking his time. He said it can go as far as mid 2015, but hell yeah... if it's at least (and it will be) as good as v1, we will have a winner here.
Comments
I think I've unwittingly become NanoStudio fanboy #1 but yeah, totally agree. It's still the app I get the most actual music written in and even, egad, completed in.
Best sequencer on iOS by far (followed closely by BM2, natch), decent to very good selection of FX, super buttery workflow. The thing about NS is how it all works so unbelievably well. Eden is a great synth; it's no Sunrizer but it's a great synth. Plus, it's a basic sampler (with all of the Eden synthesis stuff on top of the samples, not just a sample player with a filter) and you can have 15 of them going at once with four LFOs, automation and effects on a low spec'd device. Try that with Sunrizer.
I'm happy to wait as long as it takes for NS2. NS1 is superb.
Also, since this is the AB forum, it's incredibly easy to sample other iOS apps into NS via AudioBus. Select an eden or TRG pad, go to 'record' under the sample and you the record button in the AB panel is armed. Switch to your app of choice, trigger NS record and hit a key. Eden samples will be mono but for most sounds it works surprisingly well.
me too,
NanoStudio is still one of my Favs!
The usability is superb, Sounds great & its fast.
Cant wait for NanoStudio2
hope Matt birth, it earlier than mid2015
I wish Nanostudio had a pop-up preset list. It would be helpful to be able to mark, and automatically collect your favorite presets into a Favorites bank, like Alchemy mobile does. It already lets you save a patch into a user bank; but adding a Favorites bank would speed up the creative process of making music.
@bsantoro said:
This. I bought it at $6.99 a few months back with no intent on using it as a DAW (without Audio Tracks, it really isn't a full DAW). But it has a GREAT synthesizer in Eden and sequencing to go with it. (This was even more appealing before apps like Caustic that also had a piano roll sequencer got on the Bus).
But the preset management, or lack thereof, just kills me, and I've either deleted it or been tempted to do so on a number of occasions. Hang around the NanoStudio forums and you can actually come across some great-sounding presets/banks...everything from thick basses to atmospheric pads. But it's just so damn tedious getting them all in there, and then I can never tell if they're actually saved there, or if I wreck it all by moving or deleting the source "project" that I ripped them from.
I tried saving them in banks by category, so "A" was all leads, "B" was basses, and so on. But when you click through the presets, half of the new ones didn't work anymore because they referenced a source project that was no longer open or was deleted. It reminds me of the preset issues with Cassini in a lot of ways, except that Eden is a much better synth.
@stormjh1 If you save a preset into any of the banks other than the project bank, they'll be available to any project. The tricky bit is Eden is also a sampler and some of those presets may reference samples. If it came from a downloaded project/NSP, those samples will be in that project's folder. If you want to use them and delete the source project, go to the preset in eden, tap 'edit sample', hit 'save as' and put it in your global /samples folder. Then, save the preset.
The thing that's a bummer for me is that you can't have a project going and then import a preset from another project. You have to close your project, open the project with the presets, save it to a global bank and go back to your project to use it. Flow killer for sure, but it works I guess. I'm pretty confident that NS2 will make sharing of presets easier but at the moment, it's not awful if you know what's what/where.
And yeah, here's to hoping for both a dropdown or browser of some sort with tagging in NS2.
Nanostudio was the first app that made me get an ipad and think that complete tracks were possible on ios. I just ended up running out of sounds and the quality of some of the synths on ios are really amazing now.
I use Audiobus to sample synth loops into TRG pads, and play them as long notes. Works just fine. And if you really want to go wild, you can load the sample in Eden and split it on the keys and speed the tempo.
PS: I forgot to mention the most awesome feature of NS: Each projects saves all the junk files recording and so on IN PROJECT FOLDER. And that's what I HATE about Beatmaker. So no mess here.
@syrupcore said:
I too started out with NS, but did not know this idea/trick. Now returning to it again, and through the facility of AB, along with all the other synths and effects we have today, it's like a new app, but with all the many Pros that were there from the start.
Thank you Mister Syrup.
Eden sampling works surprisingly well for most synth samples. If the originating app's sound has a lot of stereo effects on it or it has a lot of modulation movement it doesn't translate well but it usually at least translates ... interestingly. The modulation stuff will change speeds as you move up and down the keyboard, natch, but sometimes that makes for very cool sounds.
I usually turn off the stereo effects in the source app and recreate them with NS effects. There's no phaser and the reverb in NS is far from magic but that process usually works well in the end.
Plus, since Eden has all of that synthesis stuff on top of the sampler, you can often remove the modulation from the source and recreate it with Eden.
And then you have 15 tracks.
I usually sample 5-6 seconds, trim the end pretty tight and then set the loop to forward+backward. Use the AMP envelope to adjust as decay and release as needed. Usually pretty seamless. Hopefully NS2 has the ability to set loop points. I have a preset called "sampling template" saved to C-00 that is built for sampling quickly with the sort of stuff I usually want to manipulate.
Pro tip: Set the knob or an XY pad axis to 'Sample Start' and you can experiment with cutting off the start of the sample - you can even modulate it with an LFO or record movements as controller data. Don't forget that you can set the amount of modulation in the matrix to adjust how far that knob travels.
Wow. Was considering watching a movie, but that idea just got shot down
Unless it's "NS: The Return". Thanks so much for your insight. Very gratefully received.
Speak of the devil... NS is 50% off this weekend.