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.
Book your flights! Next San Francisco Mobile Music Meetup is October 14, Hosted by Retronyms!
It's pretty fun to watch @extentofthejam rockout on his own creation Phase84. Lots of other good stuff.
Hope to see you there!
Comments
I'm just curious how many members of these forums live in the SF Bay Area
Just a reminder to anyone with in transporter distance of San Francisco!
My teleporter is on the fritz John :-(
Retronyms huh? I live in SF but would never support those idiots, I would love to meet with them face to face and let them know how sketchy they are and maybe even give them a good slap upside their heads for being such douchebags.
Whatever happen to wearing flowers in your hair?
There are a lot of things about Retronyms I don't get. Basically, I think their strength is in the creativity of the developers.
Take Phase 84 for example. It's really innovative, and the developer has been pouring his heart into the app.
IMini... Also a love letter to vintage synth. Iprophet a noble app as well.
They could do better in some of the basics. First, these great apps have been tainted by poor midi implementation, and of course no Audiobus. And let's not even go there with tabletop! I just don't get the walled garden thing.
That said, this meetup isn't ~about~ Retronyms, it's graciously hosted by them, but the lineup at that night is about WAY more than Retronyms products. For example, ANI does the most incredible live looping in nanostudio that you've ever seen.
If you're actually in the area, I hope you do come. Everyone is friendly. And you can tell the Retronyms folks what you think. You may disagree with how they do thinks, but they are super nice. They've taken a lot of criticism, some for good reason.
But I really hope you do come and meet some really nice and creative people, and see how other people are performing live on iOS
While I disagree with @sexygirl's sentiment, I think it's important to kindly respect it.
Remember how IK apps used to have those horrible popups? Vocal users led to a change in policy.
@sexygirl, what could Retronyms do better?
For one the impc is unfinished. They charged a lot of money which is fine but finish what you started before trying to sell other apps. I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Trust me they are probably the most hated music iOS developers out there. Everything they do is half finished. I'll never spend another penny with them and I surely wouldn't go to anything they're hosting.
Wait, @sexygirl, I'm lost. You want to give them a piece of your mind but when presented with a 3d real life opportunity, you just talk about it on the Internet? Go!
+1. Unfortunately they don't have planes in deepest, darkest, rural Wales otherwise I'd love to go and do some real live 3d moaning, and 3d pats on the back and pints bought where due.
Funnily enough despite HATING (bit too negative there Monzo) iMPC Pro, and always finding the sound quality of iMini too intense for use, I bought Retronyms iProphet a month or two ago. Probably because it was on sale, but despite the cheap lookin UI it sounds great (phew, brought it back with some positivity). I like iSEM too (no need to go overboard).
I'd love to go to one of these things though, and I think there should be a Song of the Month stage too.
iSEM wasn't developed by Retronyms.
Ha! Right, so we've got the sounding great and looking crap iProphet, and, erm...
Neither was iProphet, it's developed by Arturia and ported by retronyms
Same story with iMini
http://www.arturia.com/products/ipad-synths/iprophet/overview
http://www.arturia.com/products/ipad-synths/imini
iSem was ported by another dev, again for Arturia
Yes the developer who crafted NlogSynth Pro, and lately Attack, but not 100% about that.
Tempo Rubato did NlogSynth Pro and iSEM, and recently did the Ruckers app (great Harpsichord app). Pretty sure he wasn't the dev for Attack.
It`s pretty easy: all the (here mentioned) stuff that works perfectly OR (if it has a problem) will get fixed asap is from Rolf/Tempo Rubato and the sad rest (iMini,iProphet,Attack) is not
Rolf is one of the best developer on iOS,also responsible for Nave (but again...not Attack).And iSem is hands down my favorite iOS synth.
What's the difference between developing an app for iOS, and porting one?
Developing is starting from scratch. A port takes code that has been written for one device, and makes it work on another device.
Yeah I understand that - I'm a developer myself - the point I'm trying to make is that regardless of who created the original, the developers that created the iOS version are responsible for how well it performs on the new device. I'm just attempting to stick back together the hair that was split by Mireko.
Where to lay the credit and blame? Think the hair splitting had to do with taking credit away from R.
You're probably right. My terrifying forays into app building lead me to believe there was a heck of a lot of re-development work to do - maybe a more accurate statement would be that A are the developers of the original software, and R developers of the iOS version.
'Porting' sounds like they picked a thing up off the carpet (some wool, or maybe a sausage), looked around the room a bit before putting it on the shelf. It sounds like nothing.
It's not nothing, porting is a massive job in of itself. It's not the same thing as developing from scratch though, esp with audio code. The reason they even bothered to port all these synths is that arturia is well know for their excellent virtual versions of old hardware. The code to recreate a classic bit of gear faithfully is very difficult to create, much more so than the act of shoehorning it onto another platform. I'm not splitting hairs, there is a massive difference between the two. They both require skill and talent, but in different domains.
I'm reading the AudioProgrammers Handbook, and it's mind blowing how complicated advanced synth development gets. Great book, recommend it
Most punters won't know the difference though, hence my comment about splitting hairs - your average user will assume R are the developers of the app, regardless of their precise role in the process. Even some experts make this assumption: "Retronyms – developer of iMPC Pro, iMini, iProphet and other iOS apps" - http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/10/07/retronyms-intros-wej-a-hub-for-ios-music-making/
Hence why I made the comment :P props where props due
Not to split a split hair (singularity?) but they are the developers of iMPC Pro, aren't they? I got the impression that was a ground-up build (built based on Roger Linn's MPC workflow/paradigm, natch) in which they basically licensed the Akai brand. I don't know why I think that but I do. Question for the meet up!
I'm guessing the core code of the Arturia synths is written in cross platform C or C++ that then connects to operating system specific APIs for audio, interaction, storage, MIDI, graphic rendering.... I think we're assuming that "porting" to iOS means hooking up those I/O bits to iOS APIs. That's presumably true, of course, but A) that doesn't mean it's 200 lines of code and off to the races and
I imagine there was also a healthy amount of lower level work to get stuff happy on ARM based systems. To @monzo's point, far from picking something up off the rug (even without 
!
Would be nerdily interesting to actually find out from the developers. Can't remember which one it is but there's definitely a bug in iMini (stuck bass note?) that also exists in the desktop versions meaning it's a bug in Arturia's code, not R's iOS port. Thing is, the Retronyms dev that did the port said here on the forum that he might be able to fix it for iOS. So, it's obviously not like black-box code where they only connect the pipes to iOS. Would love to find out more about this (porting) in general. Someone ask at the meet up please!
Would also be interested to understand the relationship between R and the companies they do work for. If we want a feature, do we beg Arturia/Akai (R=hired gun, A/A=budget and priority setting) or do we beg R (R=full partner in the endeavor). Do they have maintenance contracts or is it "pay to build, fix initial bugs and then we'll see what's next"?
@syrupcore
Agree 100%, never said it was easy, just different. In the case of impc pro in assume they wrote that from scratch.
On the iMPC Pro page Akai state it's "Developed in partnership with R..." - so I think it's fair to push both on updates and fixes for that one. Arturia take full credit for iMini etc. so any requests/bugs should be posted on their forum, but you might wait a while for a reply: http://forum.arturia.com/index.php?board=105.0