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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Sidecar & Sidecar Mini update -- vertical format keyboard

Wanted to give a heads-up on a new app -- the idea came from some discussions here on the AB forum, so I figured I'd make the app free for a few days as a "thanks" to the community. After Wednesday, it'll stop being free. With iOS 9, you can have two apps in the foreground -- there's a slide-over mode, and side-by-side too (for the newest iPads). The idea was to have a MIDI stomp box sort of app, with QWERTY keyboard control, to augment whatever app you have as the main focus. There's support for the iON iCade too, if you have one of those.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sidecar-midi-controller/id1073305840?ls=1&mt=8

EDIT: Sidecar Mini, for iPhone, is available now too:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sidecar-mini/id1088629207?mt=8

I had done a couple of different apps in this sort of style -- Stompwatch, FCBFF, and some QWERTY control in Double Decker. I took the Stompwatch user interface, rotated it 90 degrees, spliced in the keyboard stuff from Double Decker, and viola, Sidecar! Many thanks to @TGiG, @oceansinspace, @Matt_Fletcher_2000, @lukesleepwalker, @funjunkie27, @Hmtx, and everyone else, for nudging me in this direction. Also a big thanks to Dan and Nic, the guys behind MIDI Designer and MIDI Bridge respectively. Dan, Nic, and I, work together as "the Power Trio," and are partners in crime on the musicIO project, as well as a couple of other things that are under way.

I'm still cranking away on Infinite Looper -- should be ready soon. Sidecar just sort of popped up as a "gosh, I could do that" side project, and I knocked it together in a few days. Give it a spin -- I hope you dig it!

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Comments

  • Thank you. :)

  • Very cool. Thanks SBD!

  • Thanks a lot.

  • very nice! good idea, very nicely executed. thanks a lot!

  • thanks very much!!

  • No idea what the hell you're doing, but certain you need to keep at it.

  • this was fast :-) thx!

  • Really appreciate this.

    Thanks a lot!

  • Thank you

  • Awesome! Thanks!

  • Very nice and useful utility. Many thanks!

  • I think I love this but I'm also somehow unclear about what it is exactly.

  • Thanks @SecretBaseDesign! This will be very useful!

    @gkillmaster said:
    I think I love this but I'm also somehow unclear about what it is exactly.

    Here hopefully this will help you!

  • Well, I had high hopes for this honestly.

    Being a 'tracker type person' I hoped that I would be able to use a keyboard to play notes but there seems to be no way to play notes using an external keyboard (Apple BT Keyboard) without bringing up the onscreen keyboard that covers over half of the screen?!

    Also the limit of using only the lower row of the keyboard for notes limits the usability, and before I read the manual the notes were 'hanging' like crazy, please add note-off when releasing a key without the need for re-press or 'space'.
    (Attached is a simple 'Tracker Note Layout').

    I've not 'scanned the market' for BT iOS apps but surely there must be a BT Keyboard to Midi mapper type of app that runs in the back-ground??

  • @Samu that's why he built this app. Apple will NOT let anyone put a keyboard in the background (do to some key loggers?) I know, very annoying but this is a compromise!

    That's a useful layout pic you have there!

  • edited January 2016

    @Samu said:
    Well, I had high hopes for this honestly.

    Being a 'tracker type person' I hoped that I would be able to use a keyboard to play notes but there seems to be no way to play notes using an external keyboard (Apple BT Keyboard) without bringing up the onscreen keyboard that covers over half of the screen?!

    Also the limit of using only the lower row of the keyboard for notes limits the usability, and before I read the manual the notes were 'hanging' like crazy, please add note-off when releasing a key without the need for re-press or 'space'.
    (Attached is a simple 'Tracker Note Layout').

    I've not 'scanned the market' for BT iOS apps but surely there must be a BT Keyboard to Midi mapper type of app that runs in the back-ground??

    Do you have a Bluetooth keyboard? Then SBD's app Double Decker is going to be your friend. I use my bluetooth keyboard and Double Decker app all the time since I don't have a regular piano/midi keyboard just yet. I don't have IOS 9 for a capable iPad, so I can't try out Sidecar with my bluetooth keyboard though.

  • Which month is the 21st month of 2016? Is it free until the first of September 2017 then?

  • @u0421793 said:
    Which month is the 21st month of 2016? Is it free until the first of September 2017 then?

    We do everything backwards here just to be a pita...but you know that already ;)

  • Ok, so there are iOS limitations regarding BT Keyboards, what a bummer.

    I guess this 'limitation' is one of the reasons why SunVox doesn't support BT keyboard on iOS...

    So there might be a niche market for 'Qwerty Style' Midi BTLE controllers in addition to all the 'Pad' and 'Piano' controllers :)

  • @Samu said:
    Well, I had high hopes for this honestly.

    Being a 'tracker type person' I hoped that I would be able to use a keyboard to play notes but there seems to be no way to play notes using an external keyboard (Apple BT Keyboard) without bringing up the onscreen keyboard that covers over half of the screen?!

    Check to see if your BT keyboard is connected -- the on-screen keyboard should slide out of the way if the iPad detects an external keyboard.

    Also the limit of using only the lower row of the keyboard for notes limits the usability, and before I read the manual the notes were 'hanging' like crazy, please add note-off when releasing a key without the need for re-press or 'space'.
    (Attached is a simple 'Tracker Note Layout').

    I'll probably put a second octave on a shifted set of lower keys -- and something to switch the octaves up and down -- in the next release. I want to keep the upper rows (qwerty, numbers) for selecting different MIDI destinations, and for triggering programmable pads.

    With Bluetooth keyboards, there's no "key release" information -- simply not supplied (I think by the keyboard itself, and it definitely doesn't get to the app). The space bar will turn off any sounding notes from the piano keyboard. The pads toggle on and off (I did this for backing chords, where you might want them to stay going until you shut them off).

    I've not 'scanned the market' for BT iOS apps but surely there must be a BT Keyboard to Midi mapper type of app that runs in the back-ground??

    No background keyboards as far as I know -- a big potential security hole that Apple isn't going to open up.

  • @u0421793 said:
    Which month is the 21st month of 2016? Is it free until the first of September 2017 then?

    I used the US-style month/day/year (which, yes, makes nearly as much sense as the US political system). In my personal notes, I always use year-month-day, but I have not seen it happen in many other spots.

    But.... free until this coming Thursday. Now would be the best time to grab it. I'm hoping to get some download traffic, so that it bubbles up in the Apple search engine rankings. It'll bounce between $1 and $2 after that.

  • Ah, that's not what I imagined. I was taking the piss because I thought you'd mistyped the 2 standing for February, and hit the neighbouring digit as well.

  • edited January 2016

    @Samu said:
    Ok, so there are iOS limitations regarding BT Keyboards, what a bummer.

    I guess this 'limitation' is one of the reasons why SunVox doesn't support BT keyboard on iOS...

    So there might be a niche market for 'Qwerty Style' Midi BTLE controllers in addition to all the 'Pad' and 'Piano' controllers :)

    So can you use a USB I keyboard with Sunvox? Was so disappointed my new BT keyboard didn't work. :(

  • Thank you for this. Your description at the top of the thread had me confused but the video helped a lot - and you can't argue with the current price!

  • @SecretBaseDesign Thanks. Now it's hidden. Had to reboot the iPad. My BT keyboard is connect most of the time.

    As for 'key-release' I think it's iOS related as the keyboard (Slim Apple BT Keyboard) works perfectly when used with apps on OS X and for example when playing sounds in Live or Logic X the sounds stops once the key is lifted and playing chords with multiple keys works fine too. Hopefully iOS10 will have 'better' support for BT-keyboards.

    Extra octaves will be a welcome addition and maybe an option to transpose the keyboard.

    @ghostly606 No luck in using any type of keyboard (tried USB and BT) with SunVox on iOS but I'm slowly getting used to playing the onscreen piano and having one finger on the 'ins' button to simulate arrow-down on a regular keyboard to add a rest or 'skip a line' in tracker terms. Can't beat a keyboard for Renoise, SunVox or other 'Trackers-Type' apps.

  • edited January 2016

    Congrats and thanks ...

    @Samu, sidecar + keyboard from another ipad via apollo midi over bluetooth directly to the app of preference does the remote control trick in a circuitous way.

  • OO, I get it now after getting in a plugging away a bit. Very cool. The "touch value" button doesn't seem to work for me. Its seemed to once then i couldn't get it to work again. For Velocity or CC values.

  • With touch value on -- the velocity or CC is determined by horizontal position (there was more room to move horizontally than vertically), higher values to the right. For CC, you can touch and drag either left or right.

    For CC, there's the option to have touch value off -- and it sends only a fixed value when you tap the pad. This is handy for things like bank select (where you might want a very specific bank).

  • Bravo, @SecretBaseDesign! It works exactly as I was hoping it would and just solved the "foreground Bluetooth key binding" problem for my setup. Thank you!

    On a side note, I just found the difference between Slide Over and Split Screen in iOS9. Given that my current iPad doesn't support the Split Screen view that would make Sidecar especially helpful, I think it's time for a new iPad! ;)

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