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.
16 bit & 24 bit?
If I have done the majority of my music in GarageBand iOS and want to toss the vocals on in Auria pro, does this mix the bit rates since GB is 16 bit and Auria is 24? Will there be a loss in quality? If so, how much? Noticeable or negligible?
Comments
For hobby music making it doesn't make much difference to me. I have many projects in Cubasis that have 16/24 material and I doubt I would be able to tell if they were all 16 or 24. I think recording 24 bit is for recording super super quiet things so they can normalise better or for super advanced sound mangling. Like if you want to take a cats sneeze and warp/stretch process it in to a T-Rex roar or something.
your upsampled 16 bit recording will sound exactly the same in 24 bit
Yes, the software just adds 8 zero bits to the end and that's about it.
You'd loose everything below -90db, which might matter for cats indeed...
but wasn't on the 16bit track anyway
That's an important point when RECORDING a quiet source like an acoustic guitar or speach.
A part of the signal is below the -90db mark that 16bit would cover.
With a 24bit converter you may add (say) 18dB of digital gain afterwards, which effectively just shifts the signal to the left for 3 bits (1bit represents 6dB loudness).
While the result depends on conversion quality, 12dB are pretty safe, but 18 or even 24 dB may work as well, given the preamp isn't to noisy.
In fact you can compensate some preamp noise (which often increases significantly in the final gain area), by cranking the gain dial less and instead add digital gain.
Don't mess this with digital zoom, which is a completely different process (!)
The other apect is a loud source with high dynamic - classical sopranos can easily exceed 110 dB when adressing a mic directly. You'd need a hardware compressor, if you want to capture such a voice in 16bit - with 24bits the range is covered.
Thanks for the info. I'll tell them sopranos to pack up then. They won't be needed anymore
So.. If it transports in as is from GarageBand, should I take all the basic cheesy GB effects off of it to mix it better in Auria? Is there a risk of the tracks importing too hot if the volume level is too high in GB?
never used GB, but it's always a good idea to mix from plain files
'inferior' fx can have a horrible impact on the result
I tend to export two versions from an app, one with the baked in cheese fx and a dry version. Sometimes, the shit version can still win. Sometimes i will also save out a completely wet 100% fx version to mix in too because you can sometimes either recreate and surpass it easier that way or even 'fix' the shittyness.
Thanks