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.
Arturia iMini kills...everything?
Just wondered if anyone else has this problem; whether I use iMini through AB, AUM or IAA as soon as it loads I either get horrible sounds from all my other synths or everything else goes silent until I close iMini or basically restart the whole project.
Sucks because I really like the sound and feel of iMIni. But it's unusable atm!
Comments
Did you restart the ipad? (Holding down power and home button at the same time?)
At the moment I had to put it off as it was clearly unstable...
Now I've almost a stable setup, I'll try again to see and let you know.
Yeah this happens all the time, after a restart as well. Should mention it's an Air 2 on latest iOS.
Thanks Crony, appreciate that!
Bahhhh. Add Model 15 to that as well. Same deal. Soon as I load it into AB all other synths go quiet.
iMini sounds great, but using it via IAA has always been unreliable for me, and hair pulling frustrating on more than one occasion. I haven't experienced problems through AB, though, but I haven't used it latelly.
Yeah man it's super frustrating right now. I've got a handful of apps I could make great music with, but they seem to interact in weird ways. Funkbox and iSEM? Fine. Add Model 15...Funkbox dies. Replace it with DM1 and all three produce sound, but DM1 won't receive MIDI from Cubasis.
I wanna be making sick synth wave on my couch. But stuff like this just makes me wanna go back to my desk and use my real setup. Sigh.
To my use DM1 and Funkbox are far too way unstable...Only usable if you export some beats as sample, but that's it...
Is there anything else out there with solid vintage drum presets? I really like the drum kits in these apps and their interfaces (well certainly DM1's) more than others I've tried.
I don't own it, but Vatanator seems to have lots of kits, don't know if they are vintage and if it's more stable...
Modrum emulate an 808, and it's stable, but only one kit.
Best sound will be Ruismaker so far, but not really vintage, but you can work on it...It also needs a midi sequencer to play with it.
Yeah I've got Ruismaker as well
I think I have most things at this point haha. Still can't find any substitute for the solid thwack that DM1 and Funkbox provide, and if I can, then there'll be something else wrong with it like no state saving. Maddening. Maybe I'm just being impatient but it would be nice to see a little standardisation now in the way apps communicate. This is like the bad old days of PC plugins haha.
Model 15 bombed out an Aum/IAA session I was having last night, first time it's done this though
@chimp_spanner, @crony which host?
@MonzoPro mentions AUM...
This is exactly the frustration that had me delete/give up on several hosts and zero in on 1 or 2, (and then the synths in question stabilized and played nice...)
One other piece, in Model 15 and iMini its not necessary to select the host in the midi drop down...not even "iMini Virtual in". Just the channels - IAA isn't supposed to require one to select the host, but of course midi in iOS can be a muddle. Host for me, Modstep, running iMini next to Laplace and Model 15, all good.
In Cubasis the set up is slightly different of course, a different combination of selections in the various drop downs. For example in iMini with Cubasis you do need to select Cubasis in, and not virtual midi in, and in Cubasis you don't select iMini as a destination but rather "virtual midi". Model 15 with Cubasis is the same, select a channel in but no need to select host...the same drill Might help in other hosts, might not. Oy vey.
Well, I tried iMini again...What a mess...
Midi parameters like channel, in/out are not saved , it sends midi messages everywhere even if you cut the midi outputs...(new lights on some of my external midi controllers...)
Output level ridiculously high.
It will crash 10 times before the end of your track anyway...
Stupidest synth ever.
It's been like that for years.
This is the promise of AU
I have most of the toys too, but I don't dare use them together when attempting anything intentional. It's a hot mess right now on iOS.
Hopefully more musicians will align together and encourage the rest of the developers into AU-land.
I contacted Arturia support about 2 weeks ago with a bug report for iMini not playing nicely with AB/IAA under 9. They are aware of the issue - and did respond. Also, one of the folks from Retronyms who make iMini is also now in the iPad Musician FB group and is also equally aware of the problem and has said that an update is in the works.
iMini is a great app. The sounds are comparable with the original Minimoog D (sound-tested by SonicState) for a fraction of the cost and if they sort out these and the other issues mentioned here it will go from being a great app to a fantastic app
If you contact Arturia support (you have to go through their web page) and let them know what issues you are having, it will, perhaps, jostle them along a bit. They've been a bit slow in the past to get fixes out with the Retronyms-coded synths, but they do come.
With Model 15 - not heard of any issues with that as described above but Geert is very quick to sort things out. Contact the support email describing the problem. It'll be fixed.
Ok, did send a support request...
Slow is the word...yes...
At a fraction of the cost something that runs more than 15 seconds without crash would be useful also...
I can't help but to wonder what iMini would be like if it was made with the same attention to detail as Animoog and Model-15...
What hosts...? The reason I ask is that the frustration of some apps working with/in some apps, but not others is the central, ultimate, ongoing, madness of iOS music. And that is simply iOS music as it is now. It is exactly like the bad old days of early PC plugs, or early anything, because it's only been since AB that apps could even work together at all...this is the (bad old) early days of this platform.
With that in mind, and because I want to use this infant platform (Allah have mercy), and having put in 100+ hrs of fighting to get the synths I love working together in hosts, I finally (along with emailing devs, and emailing them again, and again etc) shitcan hosts. This meant shitcanning hosts with features I really really wanted, and paid top dollar for...but the feature that comes for me ahead of all others is whether I can use the instruments I want to use. A collateral shitcanning, often as painful, is when a synth that I love doesn't work in any host at all, or only with struggle and extra helping apps...but note that this happens far less frequently than any host centered frustration....
(the foregoing screed explains for me the central reason for Gadgets deserved popularity, Gadget has a broad scope of solid - some super cool - instruments that work in a host, hassle free. If you want all your as-good-or-better-than-Gadget's freestanding synths to work in the host of your choice - a DAW, with the DAW stuff that Gadget doesn't have - you'll either shitcan some otherwise lovely hosts, give up lovely synths or change platforms. Let my 100s of hours of frustration save you a few)
"Madness of iOS music" is about right! It's madness because the potential is huge, and so many synths are so awesome on their own. But outside of a host all they are is toys (or in fairness, they make good "outboard" synths if you've got a dock or other interface with MIDI). Soon as you try and put things together, things get squiffy.
I tried making a song in AB and Cubasis using only Arturia stuff thinking that might help. Found out that only iSEM has state saving. Changing presets in iProphet silences iSEM until I switch back to it and go up then down a preset (even with all MIDI sources disabled), and iSpark crashed after five minutes. If apps from one developer don't work well together, what hope do we have of mixing and matching?
I do get that it's all in its infancy, but ya know, taking a look at my app folders I've spent a lot of money on this setup. And it's hard to know which developers are in it for the long haul and which will simply abandon it.
But hey, at least I'm not alone. I might try and get on that iPad music Facebook page and start engaging a bit more with the developers.
If you have time to waste you might wanna read this...
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/14039/open-letter-to-novation-akai-retronym-arturia-a-method-to-be-heard#latest
I must disagree here, sorry. Yes, iMini does offer some great sounds, and I do use it a lot. Some of those sounds do come close to a Model D, but there is no comparison when it comes to the richness, fullness of a real Minimoog Model D, and the amount and types of controls offered. I don't know how to describe, but it seems to me there could have been considerably more attention to detail by the devs. I can always find my way to the sound I'm going for on a real Mini, but the iMini just never quite gets there.
Yes true, that's why in another recent thread I expressed hope that the Moog company will eventually put out a true Minimoog emulation, as meticulous and true as the work they did on Model 15. Arturia came close with iMini, but it's not quite there, and it does not play nice with others apps. MIDI implementation is sorely lacking....
I'm "lucky" in that I haven't experienced the real thing! So to my ears it's great. But it's just sad that it sits unused because it's such a big buggy mess. I'm gonna email Arturia now and see what's happening.
Many here have been producing music on the iPad and mixing things in the manner you describe since the iPad 1 days. Yes, Audiobus ran on an iPad 1 too (not in its current form, but it did run there).
Yes, the infrastructure is still developing and Apple don't always help by breaking things. You appear to have missed the halcyon days of iOS 7.1.2 where things were playing together very nicely - including iMini and iSEM etc.
iOS 8 was a step back in performance and Apple changed things under the hood that affected Audiobus. Developers had to scramble to catch up to make things work more or less as well as they had been under 7.1.2. They didn't actually fix some of the performance issues until 9.3. We are now just beginning to get back to the stability that things had under 7.1.2.
There are a few developers who haven't caught up yet and their apps likewise. iMIni is one such app, so is iProphet. Both developed by Retronyms for Arturia. They have been, sadly, slow working together to get updates out. iSEM is developed by Tempo Rubato for Arturia and the dev there is quick to get updates out.
There are a couple of other apps that haven't caught up with the changes that bring things back into line in 9.3
And, don't forget, iOS 10 is just around the corner in a month.
Stable... things aren't. They were - it was an 18 month rollercoaster after iOS 8 was released until 9.3 until they settled down again. I'm glad to read from Sebastian in another thread that AB seems to be working well on 10 beta.
BUT, don't rush to update to 10 when it hits the streets.
I've always hated the sound of the iMini, though I love the UI. The high output level is probably the culprit, and sounds nothing like a real Moog to my old ears.
It's probably the only synth never to end up on one of my tracks. I hang on to it though, in the hope that one day it gets a fix....
The things mentioned in this thread are the reason I have gone back to Gadget (since the recent update), BeatHawk and Caustic. It's nice to be able to get something done rather than set a bunch of stuff up expecting it to work the way it should and come away with nothing.
Yeah @MusicInclusive - I hear ya. I didn't get a more capable iPad until quite recently so I missed that whole period! Like, I gotta say, I am using my iPad in my music a lot. With the iTrack Dock it's a drum machine, a YouTube sampler, an outboard processor, a guitar amp emulator. It is amazing, really. But I'm aware that between various developers working (or not) together and Apple, well, being Apple, perfection is always likely to be just out of reach. And being a "mobile" platform I can't see it getting much better because they're gonna flip things on their head every couple of years to coincide with new hardware.
I dunno. Just frustrating I guess. All the pieces are there, but they're all scattered across various apps. So many different workarounds and technologies and standards. Link, iOS MIDI, AB, AUM. Some things use audiocopy, some use audio share, some only use iTunes (bleugh), some use Dropbox. The fact we even need apps to serve as virtual storage spaces instead of just having a file system is...maddening.
Maybe I want iOS to be something it isn't. We'll see
meantime I can establish which things definitely do work together, and try and be productive with those. And if all else fails, always got my laptop!!
True. Gadget is an example of it being done right, with some great updates recently too. But then it's Korg. They've got the resources. I'd love multi-out on Gadget so I could mix the instruments separately in Cubasis but since they added all those IFX I guess I can do the mix in Gadget and just use Cubasis as a sequencer!
I hear what you're saying - I had a run through with a bunch of apps through Aum last night - sounded great, hit record and a minute or so later Model 15 bombed out making a loud buzz, which didn't stop until I'd closed every app. Recording and setup lost, inspiration pissed on.
Thing is I like using Geoshred, Model 15, Moebus etc. and they don't work in Gadget...