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.
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Comments
Oh yeah I forgot about the sound on sound thing with cubasis.
Sound on sound thing! I hate it! Is there some secret way to turn it off?
Not that I know of but I haven't looked into it.
Just tested clocks again in bm2 and cubasis.
Sync'd both apps (74bpm)and turned both metronomes on. Pressed play so that both apps would play together.
Both in sync for first 8 bars,but then one would drift.
Next, plugged animoog into input slot of AB and tested each DAW separately (sending clock to animoog,as it displays the bpm on screen-just above keyboard on right side of window)
Bm2>animoog,tempo was perfect(74.0bpm)
Cubasis>animoog tempo would drift(74.0-74.1-74.2-.3-.4-.5)
Mythmongrel "Sound on sound thing! I hate it! Is there some secret way to turn it off?"
I don't think so, but if you use the select tool you can highlight the overdub and use the glue tool to make it one part.
@commonstookie
Yeah, BM2 has already been thru the ringer from users about midi clock, and they've managed to get it to be usable. Intua is crazy (possibly in a good way) to allow midi clock in, as you can watch your audio tracks jump all over the place if the clock isn't tight.
Hence why cubasis only does midi clock out and why Auria probably will follow suit. To do otherwise would require real time time stretching to try and follow a less than stable clock. Protools has never allowed midi beat clock input as its just too rickety.
DHD,thanks
But wot I don't get is that cubase was 'midi'.
Back in the day,everyone had an Atari and cubase and you could set your watch by it.
It was that tight.
Yesterday,Jesse(thumbjam/drum jam) touched on the midi latency settings in bm2 and how a small adjustment fixed the synch issue some of us had come across.
(Thanks Jesse...we'd be lost with you)
I'm no midi expert,but two 2's seem to be pointing towards cubasis default latency setting not working for some apps.
If steinberg had tested it on a few more apps,they may have realised this.... And possibly included an adjustable midi latency feature.
Yes. iOS apps need to start having a negative midi latency setting as well so everything starts on time.
You assume that MIDI latency remains the same from moment to moment. It only does so if that's how the OS is written. The Atari's MIDI implementation was hardware, that's why it was rock solid, the OS reacted to the hardware interrupts and nothing was allowed to get in the way.
It seems to for bm2..
Edit
I see.
Just to be clear, there is a good chance DrumJam has some issues that need fixing to make it work better with other apps' clock output (and vice versa), but the latency adjustment setting in BM2 did solve at least one issue. I probably need to add a similar setting to provide flexibility when using DJ as the master.
I don't have Cubasis, but it seems to me that they are not even sending clock tick events (so that other apps can't even get tempo information out of it, let alone make sure the transport is synced and doesn't drift). [EDIT - they are sending it, sorry!]
This from the Cubasis help documentation.
Synchronize: Send MIDI clock
When MIDI clock is activated, the following signals are sent to all the connected MIDI devices and background apps:
MIDI clock is sent continuously during playback.
MIDI start, continue and stop messages are sent when playback is toggled.
The MIDI song position pointer is sent when the playhead is positioned.
Note: MIDI clock can only be used to synchronize MIDI data, not digital audio.
Cubasis does not support being a MIDI clock slave (i.e. cannot receive MIDI clock parameters from other devices).
@sonosaurus- as I posted earlier in the thread, cubasis is actually sending a clock. Why apps aren't responding I don't know.
Which brings me to another snake oil theory- since midi clock is listed as a real time event based on the iPad's internal time, is it possible that could be what's making midi timing so strange? Does anyone know how often iOS uses the Internet connection to adjust the time? Just a crazy thought....
Never if you stay in airplane mode.
Has anyone tried a midi monitor app to see how the clock data looks from Cubabsis compared to any other app that is working well? I've never tried this personally, but it seems to me that it should appear in the stream and be reasonably easy to filter out from the rest of the data.
@funjunkie27
http://forum.audiob.us/discussion/comment/14184#Comment_14184
Having a tough time with keeping up with it all, I guess. Thanks @PaulB.
Any app that sends midi clock events should be sending them ahead of time with timestamped events for the (very near) future, allowing iOS to properly schedule their delivery and ensure that the correct timestamps are available to the receiving app. That way, when apps compute the tempo based on the spacing between the ticks it should result in a rock solid tempo, at least when using virtual midi between apps on the same device. Perhaps this is part of the issue people are seeing with Cubasis? Just an educated speculation based on no tangible data.
This same principle applies when sending the midi clock start message, in order to send a properly timestamped message you'll want to post-date it a little bit and also delay the time that you actually start your own transport to match that latency. I'm guessing that this is what the latency setting in BM2's options controls does. In DrumJam it is currently a fixed value that seemed to work well in general (~60ms), but probably should be an option.
Jesse,have you any thoughts on what I mentioned earlier....
'Next, plugged animoog into input slot of AB and tested each DAW separately (sending clock to animoog,as it displays the bpm on screen-just above keyboard on right side of window)
Bm2>animoog,tempo was perfect(74.0bpm)
Cubasis>animoog tempo would drift(74.0-74.1-74.2-.3-.4-.5)'
And why this might be happening?
@commonstookie, my previous message is my best guess as to what Cubasis might not be doing which results in the unstable clock.
So are drift and late sync connected?
No. Drift will happen whenever there is two "independent" clocks.
Thanks DHD,
Really hope ios and midi start luvin each other soon.
I'd just be happy if Cubasis sent clock as advertised. I guess we'll get another stab at it next month. 50 bucks to be a beta tester is sort of bogus imo (unless the app is Auria - then I'm actually cool with it).
Read this from the Steinberg engineer, the experts at Steinberg are pretty convinced its not a Cubasis issue, and I'm no expert but I tend to agree with Steinberg as what they say makes good sense but I'm no developer.
https://www.steinberg.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=40220
Interested to hear what @sonosaurus thinks as they mention Drumjam in the tests and say this....(scroll to bottom of thread in link below)
http://www.steinberg.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=183&t=40214
In cricketing terms,I'd call that a forward defensive shot,with a very straight bat,from steinberg..
& a 12th man at silly midi on !
Like I said before, I'm pretty sure DrumJam has a bug that is causing the late start in certain circumstances. But all the other troubles people are reporting (especially regarding drift or instability) with other apps leads me to believe that there could be issues on both ends.
Oh ok, I was under the impression there might be a fix coming, but I realize now that Steinburg is just dismissing the problem. I can go ahead and delete this app from my iPad now. I didn't realize what a magical feat sonosaurus and all of the other developers who have managed to implement midi across other apps consistently pulled off. Kudos to you guys for having more magical powers than Steinburg.
No app is an island....