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.
Help with some basic stuff in Auria
Have started this thread because I personally find Auria a little bit intimidating what with all that power and configurability. Particularly not coming from a traditional recording/mixing background.
I know there's an Auria forum and i'm sure lots of videos on YouTube - but you guys are so great at quickly answering quite specific, basic questions 
and I know a lot of people on here use Auria.
First question:
Mono or Stereo tracks. To be honest I don't really get mono / stereo at all (why would you ever want mono? why do mono tracks come out of both speakers? if a track is stereo does that mean I can edit the left and right waveform independently? etc. etc.). But my specific question is if recording in from audiobus or pasting in a piece of audio from Gadget or whatever - do I need to make a stereo track or a mono track in Auria? (And if I've made a track mono and done automation on it etc. can I retrospectively change it to stereo or do I have to start again?)
Any help for an Auridiot most appreciated
Comments
I record to mono tracks mostly. Basically a mono instrument gets recorded to a mono track. If you're recording stereo instruments, stereo track. With mono tracks you can move your instruments around in the stereo field. 2 mics on an acoustic guitar can be panned left and right. Vocals stay in the center. As far as editing a stereo track waveform independently, I don't think this is possible but I could be wrong.
It's much simpler to record your instruments and vocals in mono. Some synths and FX can be recorded in stereo but generally it will be far simpler to mix if all your tracks are mono, then you can pan them around the stereo field. However if your tracks are stereo your mix is likely to get more complicated and harder to handle.
Read my other post here from yesterday about why I choose mono vs. stereo. To answer your other questions though, no, you can't edit each side of a stereo file independently. In audiobus you don't get a choice for some apps (or maybe any?) I know jamup only outputs stereo last I checked.
As far as pasting, it won't matter, the track should automatically adjust.
Try lots if things in it though, that's the best way to get answers because you'll find what you like. There's nothing "wrong" about using stereo tracks, Bruce Swedien recorded many things in stereo and there's no arguing with his recordings or mixes.
lol, I thought I had just asked this. It is good to know I'm not the only one that doesn't get stuff. Sometimes. Y'all were very very helpful in helping me understand the diff.
We all don't get stuff, luckily it's different stuff so we can help each other.
I know some stuff. I'm just waiting for it to become relevant. - I agree that Auria can be intimidating. It's too bad you didn't have the fortune to work with audio hardware. It makes routing seem more logical. You get to experiment and see/hear your results right away. I think learning how to use a mixing console and how to hook it up to external racks of gear was the most important part of starting to learn how to record properly.
And if The Powers That Be don't immediately adopt that as the Forum mission statement then they're bananas etc.
I would offer this to the above advise, Auria is about forethought, having an idea and builing upon it. I almost always use strereo tracks with the exception of bass, this suits my currnent ideas of a wide vast sound, although I am going to try Bootsy's and mrufino1's suggestions to see if i can break my mold. I bounce alot in Auria and reimport, great or saving resource and one offing ideas, sometimes i end up backtracking, somtimes i get lucky, sometimes not, but i love the chase.
If you want to go mono after stereo, you could use the mono button on the master channel then render and reimport. For stereo after mono (pseudo) try panning and offsetting or delaying one side. For stereo manipulation, Tonestack's ABY and its panning manipulation is valuable. Also mobile convolution reverb's true stereo is valuable.
But sonic manipulation is a joy to me. I look forward to hearing your results.
Btw mono comes from both speakers as the same signal if centered, although arriving at your ears as cross feed (unless using headphones). I try to learn somthing new everyday.
I need to use the mono button (I'm not sure if that applies to mixdown anyway), just select mono as the output when mixing and decide whether to import as a new track or just mixdown and then manually reimport it to the track.
That is one utility I really wish auria had in the process menu, so that stereo to mono would work just like adding gain or any of the other options. There's other ways to do it, such as the above, but this would keep workflow going for me.
Thank you all for your advice. I'm starting to get it now.
Another question...
Often I want to overlap the effect tail of a piece of audio with the next piece of audio. So a loop that i've rendered out of Gadget with effects that stretch over the start of the loop when it repeats. In Beatmaker 2, when I used to use it, (and I believe Cubasis and nanostudio) you can lay part of an audioclip over part of another audio clip on the same lane/track and it plays both. So you can lay the tail of audio clip 1 over audio clip 2. But in Auria it doen't seem to let you you do this (it kills one of the piece of audio). It seems to require you to make a new track in order to do this - which is a pain. Or am I doing something wrong?
hmmm... Would this be where the crossfade comes into play? I read through the entire Auria user manual yesterday at work, for the third time. We were that busy.....
You can lay one piece of audio over another, and then go up to the top menu and apply a crossfade. Is that what yer looking to do?
Maybe. Thanks. I'll try that. I just want to overlay one piece of audio over another and have both pieces of audio play actually
So re: the mono stereo thing... for someone like me who's not actually recording any live instruments with mics or anything... essentially if the source material comes from an app that is doing some crazy left/right channel panning or played on a keyboard (like Thumbjam's) where I can control the pan based on where I touch, or i've run through stereo designer, or i'm using a patch in a synth that pans the sound - then I want to be creating a stereo track in Auria. But if the source material is identical in both left and right channels then go for a mono track (and this lets you place it around the stereo field in Auria much better). That basically right? Hope so because that makes a lot of sense.
Yes, unless you want to take your stereo track and have it on the left side (for example), where the left channel is fully left and the right is in the center, or vice versa. In that case you'd need two mono tracks. I tend to not have very many stereo tracks anyway, but the music I record is people playing live, so the factors may be different if you do different types of music.
A quick example is the recordings I do at the church where I do sound (the recordings are purely for my own enjoyment and the occasional reference by the musicians). It is a jazz service, usually piano, guitar, trumpet or sax, bass, and drums. I record the piano in stereo, everything else is mono expect for drum overheads. But, I keep the piano and OH as two mono tracks each because I don't want either one spanning the whole stereo field. I typically will have the piano on the left and center, to give a little width but reflect its place onstage and in the music. For the drums, I want them to have a little width while the kit is panned center, so I'll pan the overheads maybe 40-50% right and left.
On my band recordings I do each summer, we had one song with many synth tracks coupled with distorted guitars tracks. For that, I used my Xio as well as imini and sunrizer. I recorded all of them in mono so that I could put different parts in different places in the stereo field, for instance doubling my sunrizer track with a slightly different sound then panning them opposite each other. So it was a stereo effect but it had some different qualities than if it was one track in stereo moving around the field. Not that I'd never use a stereo synth, just that in this case that worked for the song.
Hopefully that made sense.
Cool. Thanks very much @mrufino1
I'm getting the centre-right or centre-left thing now. So thanks for your post.
That would be a great feature, something like the mono maker from Brainworx. I know Rim has alot of feature requests right and has his goals of releasing soon, but would also like to see a feature like you described in the future, either plug on on strip.
You're welcome, I'm glad it was helpful. I'm also glad to know I make sense outside of my own head. Either that or you should be concerned you understood me! ;-)
The 'quick split to mono tracks' is oft requested at the Auria forums. Presumably on the list. Would be nice. So would individual pan controls on stereo tracks.
+1, again to @mrufino1's stereo/mono thoughts. I record almost everything in mono. Even drum overheads. Room mics and solo instrument recordings (which I never do any more) are about the only things I want to recreate the stereo image from. That and if I'm capturing something with stereo effects already applied to it like a synth through a ping-pong delay or electric guitar through a stereo reverb that I know I want to keep. If you're bouncing synth stuff into Auria, this may be the case. Of course, lots of people will remove the effects before recording it so that effects can be applied at mixing instead.
@matt I mentioned it in the other thread but I think it's worth saying again: recording in stereo when you don't need to is chewing up twice as many system resources (storage, CPU and RAM).
A 'stereo' track is really just two mono tracks mashed together. Lots of software, like Pro Tools, do not even work with stereo wav files. You record to a track armed as stereo but it actually creates two mono files with -L and -R suffixes and then presents them as a single stereo track in the waveform overview. This is just like recording to tape. There are no 'stereo' tape tracks—there's a track for the left mic and a track for the right mic. When you play them back, you pan them hard to recreate the stereo image. This is the case with a typical cassette deck as well; it plays stereo mixes but it's actually a four-mono-tracks machine: Side A left, side A right, side B left and side B right.
@mrufino1 @syrupcore Thanks for the explanation/overview. I was just the fool who presumed 'well, it's stereo innit, must be bettah....' No wonder I've got thirty gigs of I don't know what in Auria...
@syrupcore would you mind telling the other half of the story, maybe interleaved, panning laws and stereo bussing? Please? Its material and producer specific right?
Probably not the best qualified to answer but I'll give it a shot @wmwm.
Interleaved refers to an actual stereo wav file vs the separate -L and -R wavs I mentioned above. Again, it's always two separate streams of information (otherwise your stereo couldn't split it to two speakers). If you download a song, it's interleaved. Interleaved is really, I think, 'multichannel' so you could also download an interleaved 7.1 audio file.
panning laws... tl;dr: if you play a mono signal out of two speakers, it'll be louder than if you play it out of one. Imagine moving a sound source through the stereo field from far right to far left. As the sound gets close to center, it'll be louder than it was at the extremes. In acoustic music, that doesn't make any sense so engineers compensated for it via the pan control, usually by attenuating the signal by -3db when center panned but there were other ways (or just ignoring it). What happens to the volume of the track when it's panned center are the panning laws and most daws have at least 'none' and '-3db'. I wouldn't sweat it but it can be good to know how your DAW is set up if you spend a lot of time moving stuff around the stereo field. You can always compensate with the fader as needed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_law has the details.
Stereo bussing? They're just sub-mixes that retain stereo position information. Most common would be a drumkit—it could have 4-14 microphones/tracks and those tracks might be panned out a bit. If you want to turn the drums down a bit, moving all 14 faders would be a pain! Hurry bussing. In a 24 track rock mix, you can imagine a bus for drums, bg vox, guitars, synths, atmospheres... There's lots of uses for bussing — grouping faders is just the most common. Auria Pro will enable parallel bussing which will be sweet.
Many Thanks @syrupcore for that answer. I created this mix referenceing some of your info. They are all stereo tracks though wih the exception of a short part of ilectric in the begining which is mono and Electro which is recorded in stereo annd then I used the output matrix's "Mono" button on its subgroup in which it solely resides. Thanks again for the through answer.