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.

AB4 Wishlist: Patch/Loop/FX Catalog

As @Sebastian and the gang are preparing for the imminent success of AB3 as the new must have feature in iOS music creation apps, been thinking about this “pie in the sky” idea for cataloging effects and patches.

(Have yet to learn much about AB3 so it’s even possible that something like this is already there. But this is a weird enough idea that it’d be surprising.)

Part of this idea comes from the experience of being overwhelmed with so many choices in terms of diverse sounds associated with different apps. For instance, just adding up all the factory presets and user patches in all the Korg apps, you’d end up with a very long and very messy list, spread across dozens of different synths (including Gadget modules). When you add up all the synth and sample/loop apps on iOS, the mess gets much, much deeper.

A single iOS device can produce thousands of different sounds, yet there’s no way to keep track of them all. It’d be like going to FreeSound.org and only being to browse samples by username.

To make matters worse, many of these apps have insufficient ways to categorize patches. Some of Korg’s apps (looking at you, iWavestation) are a particularly egregious example of the mess we’re in.

My emphasis tends to be on synth apps, but it applies equally to all of those “Sound Packs” in apps like Mixvibes Remixlive, Blocs Wave, and Blocs x Novation Launchpad. Of course, it also includes our own field or session recordings, which can easily be scattered across diverse apps and difficult to find unless we use obsessively descriptive naming schemes.

What if someone wants to use this one specific oboe sound from one app, this beatbox loop from another, and a recording from her last guitar shredding session from a third app (say, FieldScraper)? She’d have to either remember these things or write them down, somewhere. We have powerful computers in our hands and these things are pretty good at keeping track of metadata, so it’s logical to have something like this in an app. And because we’re talking about sounds, having some audio cue as to what the thing sounds like would make a whole lot of sense.

In my mind, the thing could be organized both by tags and broad categories (for some reason, we all seem to agree on what’s a “lead”, a “pad”, or a “bass” sound, despite the fact that the same patch can produce all three). Of course, it’s best not to be too restrictive as to what belongs where. A given sample could work well as part of a drum kit or as a melodic instrument. Conversely, it could be fairly easy to create drum kits from “found sounds”.

Tapping on an item should produce a very short clip, as it does in SunriserXS but not in Sunrizer, for some reason. Even with complex, evolving sounds, it can be very useful to have some kind of audio reminder of what’s in it.

Obviously, the tags could include personal ratings and “playlists”, not to mention “set lists”. Imagine picking a few sounds from your sprawling library and putting them together as a cohesive set for a given piece or even a performance set? We’re not that likely to ever get MainStage on iOS but it’d be even more powerful, in some ways.

This may all sound very complicated and it would require a significant effort. But it sounds like many other people are overwhelmed by the possibilities we already have with all those apps we keep buying. Or keep not buying, in some cases. Right, @u0421793?

For effects, it could be much easier. And it might be less necessary. We only need so many delays, reverbs, compressors, chorus, and lowpass filters. But it’d still be neat to prepare AB to provide us with flanger from one AUv3-supporting app, a ring modulator from a second app using Inter-App Audio, and a bitcrusher from a third app bringing an effect directly into AB, à la AUM. Maybe that’s already part of AB3. If so, it should be pretty fun to use, as more apps adopt standards.

Comments

  • edited March 2017

    I think the ability to add tags for presets and projects would be good. I find even in Audiobus and AUM that having so many saved setups can be unwieldy after awhile. I'd also extend the tagging system to AudioShare as while it has folders, there are still times when files may fall under several different categories. A tagging system can help to filter what you're looking for from what you're not as well as encourage you to organize and reflect upon how well your work flow is working for you.

    It'd be even better to have a meta tagging system that allows you to organize all of these different levels of work flow too. Periodically you could create tag reports to evaluate how you've tagged and see if it's useful or needs to change based upon what you're trying to achieve during your time creating music with iOS. It could facilitate purging and backing up material to suit your needs. It might also be a way for iOS to bridge the gap between sandboxing and sharing information between apps to reflect how you use them in the context of work flow.

  • It's a very good idea. And it's somewhat similar to the other idea of including a means of categorizing and filtering or tagging all the different apps with all the terms that apply to them.
    AB4 surely would take another couple of years, though, so maybe something like this could happen in a 3.something update...

  • Hmm, we've improved the presets system in Audiobus and we've added a simple button to trigger synth sounds directly from the mixer. Let's talk about this again when Audiobus 3 is out and lets revisit it then.

  • @Sebastian said:
    Hmm, we've improved the presets system in Audiobus and we've added a simple button to trigger synth sounds directly from the mixer. Let's talk about this again when Audiobus 3 is out and lets revisit it then.

    Seriously! But then can we just skip AB5 and AB6 and go right to the AB7 wishlist? "AB7" is just so orthographically cool!
    :)

  • @Sebastian said:
    Hmm, we've improved the presets system in Audiobus and we've added a simple button to trigger synth sounds directly from the mixer.

    More good news!

Sign In or Register to comment.