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.
Comments
@Sebastian Actually I think you and the team deserve extra credit for not building in nagging screens - well done Sir
I already see some 5 star ratings and at least one 1 star rating. Again sadly this 1 or just 5 stars thingie.
The 1 star rating looks stupid because for the reason i see it´s def. not Audiobus fault.
Most of the 5-star ratings sounds of course great but doesn´t offer real info in depth of course. Maybe some deeper review/ratings could help a lot. I also see nearly no responses of developers in the app store. Shouldn´t it be possible right now?
But because of this (and i see it often in the app store) i find it very important to have deep tutorials, manual pdf and more demos before the official release.
Another thing is of course that on Nr.1 i see a ring-tone app...ouch!
Audiobus is at Nr. 42 at the moment here (Germany). It seems that a "few" sales can change that extreme in some categories in general to rise up or down. Not sure how Apple handles this.
The app store must really a hard place for independent developers who deliver apps for a niche inside a niche.
I think if an app goes to the spotlight it can rise up a lot in sales. Vice versa i could imagine that a lot people buy these stuff and give bad ratings because of user fault or missing info about these apps.
I appreciate the pain developers have to handle and sometime even wonder why they go trough this.
So a thank you for this. I will try to go in depth with it and it will take some weeks to really judge it and to write a bit more about it.
And i have to ask this again. Why can´t we demo apps for a limited time. Didn´t the DRC synth app had a 7 days demo? Maybe i´m just confused.
Brilliantly conceived and implemented - the developers deserve 5 stars for their efforts and achievement. However, the experience of using it, in reality, will depend very much on when and how well all the other AB compatible app developers implement AB3 fully and properly. Currently, only a handful of instrument apps are actually AB3 optimised and work correctly with the Midi pipes in AB3. I sincerely hope that more will come onboard soon.
I just noticed this thread, so I wanted to chime in and say, "DONE"!! I'm very happy to give Audiobus 3 a 5 star rating!!! (and I have always been happy to do so since the beginning!)
Audiobus 3 it's not even in the top 150 in my country. WTF!!!!!!
This Audiobus update is so awesome guys. Never before I could do this with out crackles or audio glitches:
Two Instances of Addictive Pro Synth AU
Drum Session
iSEM synth AU
Midi effects
Animoog-iPad
All running at once!!!
Super amazing. All this on my old IPad Air 1.
My goal is trying to create a one man band type of setup where I have drums, bass, pads and melody all playing at once. I could not get bass going cause I'm trying to figure out how best to do it. I wish there was an auto bass generating app like in GarageBand but that could be tweaked or randomized to come up with Bass notes that could sync up like an arp to the BPM that I'm playing at. This would truly be a one man band and allow to lay down a song from start to finish all in realtime.
Right now I'm using KRFT in that regard but midi out is still in the oven. Can't wait for that.
But I'm really blown away at the power of AB3 guys it's amazing!
Wish I could record myself to better explain what I'm trying to achieve.
Just a few honest words from a long time user.
I have been using Audiobus since day one and it opened up a vast theatre of possibilities what was until then a bunch of scattered apps. We've made a quantum leap since then and we have now AB3 with midi etc. I have to admit that I'm not really interested in midi side of things at this point other than the midi learn of various controls.
Anyhow. I've been very excited about the v3 but also rather disappointed how things have rolled since launch. I am still using AB2 for live work but occasionally test new versions of AB3 to see how things are going and I'm noting a slow but positive progress. Today I've opened an old session and seems like most things are working fine. A couple of glitches I've experience were the old suspects like turnado but I've kind of got used to that.
So yeah, I've finally started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I know this is a massive project and while AUM works better for some things the sidebar on audiobus is an absolute miracle and definitely worth sticking around for. I'm personally still waiting for multiple outs for multioutput interfaces to be implemented but other than that and a few minor buggers here and there I think we're on the home stretch.
Thanks Audiobus team for your good work!
So, excited by the vision I've created for myself I updated my 'other' air 2 to the latest, took AB3 to my man shed and plugged it to my live rig.
It all worked fine at first but on the second restart of the whole session (I was checking how apps would reload) I started to get heavy crackles especially when switching between apps. I went back to AB2 and everything worked as expected. I seemed to remember hearing that AB3 might be potentially more streamlined. Maybe it isn't. Anyway, I guess people's success will be different depending on what apps they're using
I also thought that AUM was updated to the latest Audiobus SDK so it should launch when session is loaded. Not so. I'll sit on AB3 for a while still
NB. I haven't been using audiobus midi at all.
Thanks for the feedback, @supadom - is that something you can reproduce? Would love to be able to get that happening over here
Do you mean the crackling or AUM not launching. I don’t know if this is a common occurrence but I never had AUM launching. I always get tap to launch. iOS 11.0.1 all apps updated to latest.
The crackling, I mean - the AUM thing’s out of my control I’m afraid
Ah ok, well the glitch fest seems to have been caused by the addition of zeeon to my already app heavy preset running at 126 frames.
However my experience with ab2 is definitely more smooth than AB3. I get more unresponsive apps on startup. I'll try to gather more specifics as I go. Thanks
I have not DL'ed the latest version but will give it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ nonetheless because of the exemplary work that has gone into previous versions.
Same here. I left 5 stars to AB3 but for those of us unable to freely upgrade hardware, I’d really like the AB3 mixer to be optional in the settings page. I hardly use it since I always use AB3 with AUM. So the extra cpu wasted on the mixer is Hurting performance on my Air 1.
When I use AUM alone I can run the apps no problem. But when I add AB3 things get hairy. So having the ability to trim things not used would be great in an update please?
It's weird why some apps auto launch and some don't, seems unrelated to Ab3 SDK. Korg imono/poly does and it's not AB3 compatible yet...
Interesting, would be good to hear more specifics. @Michael?
Maybe we can start bugging the developers of specific apps rather than AB team if it’s not of their doing.
Brambos posted some really great tips on how to optimize your iPad iPhone settings which have so far really helped with cpu spikes going down and iPad Air 1 feels a lot faster.
The apps which don’t auto launch are running an old version of the Audiobus SDK - you can tell which ones are running a up-to-date version by looking for the “AB 3 Optimized” badge on the app directory
So is there some kind of certification going on? Can an app loose it's badge?
Nah it’s just tied to the SDK version in the app
So the badge is for the Audio part of AB3. Is there a way of telling which apps are compatible with AB3 MIDI before purcasing? As far as I can see, thats a seperate issue, and can only be verified by trying?
Done. Gave it 5 stars. Quick question tho @Michael or @Sebastian. Magellan JR works fine in ab2 but in audiobus 3 the midi is really screwed up. So weird. The midi notes are all out of tune and glissando doesn't work properly either. Dunno why audiobus 2 still seems fine tho
Well, that’s the thing. AUM has recently updated to the latest SDK but it still doesn’t auto launch.. In a stark contrast ToneStack almost never fails to show up. I’ve even tested a fresh simple AB preset with mic on the input and AUM on the out and still no go. Maybe I should just contact mr @Ljlila whom I cannot even tag as can’t remember the spelling.
@j_liljedahl
Ah, that underscore fooled me. Thanks
When using AUM in the input slot in AB3, it does auto-launch (since AB3 is then hosting one of the IAA output ports of AUM). When using AUM in the output slot of AB3, I specifically asked them to not auto-launch it - since auto-launching would require AB3 to host one of AUM's IAA ports and thus occupying it from use by other hosts (perhaps you'd like to host all 8 ports in Auria or Cubasis). So, if it would auto-launch you would see one of AUMs output ports as "Connected to Audiobus" when listing the available IAA outputs inside AUM, even though the port is not visually connected at all in AB3.
Thanks for the explanation. It helps a lot because now I just added a lane with AUM in the input and voila, it loads up no problem. I know it’s only one more click but it counts in a multiapp situation.
Ah by the way, Audiobus 3 has been very stable of late, thanks for your great work AB team!
Thanks for saying @supadom!
Right now, yeah – technically speaking you could do it by using the search filter on the compatible apps directory and then scrolling through the list to see if the app’s in there. I intend to add additional badges that report the full capabilities (audio, midi, input, effect, output for each), but I’ve not done it yet as I’ve been flat out with other projects.