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.

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

AB3 Battery Drain on iPhone 6S Plus

Soooo...
Maybe an effect of trying so many things on the first day but it does sound like AB3 is quite demanding in terms of processor and battery. Even just asking it to launch SP Electro in the background causes my phone to heat up and it drains the battery rather quickly.
As an experiment.

  • Rebooted my phone. Battery 67%, cool to the touch.
  • Opened AB3.
  • Attempted adding SP Electro as MIDI out (AB3 completely empty otherwise).
  • Waited for a full minute, AB3 was still attempting to launch SP Electro (with all the ZZZZ).
  • Phone was getting very warm.
  • Ejected SP Electro in both the MIDI and Audio tabs.
  • Pressed the home button.
  • Battery is now 52%.
  • Remains at 52% for a few minutes afterwards (i.e., other apps aren’t draining the battery).

Did the same thing again (including the reboot). Now the battery started at 62% and went down to 52% in 1:40. The phone still got hot within a minute.

Of course, a battery percentage doesn’t mean much (after all, it does go back up after a reboot). And there are many things which can cause battery drain. Still, it sounds like this quick decrease in battery is pretty much reproducible and the phone getting hotter is a sign that something is happening.

Might not be an issue on iPads, for whatever reason. But it can make it quite challenging to use AB3 in performance. Unless it’s just an issue when launching apps (or, at least, attempting to launch them).

This is on an iPhone 6S Plus running iOS 10.3, with 7GB of storage available (out of 64GB), about 10% brightness.

Comments

  • i have an iPhone 7 plus and i too cannot get Soundprism Link nor Soundprism Electro to launch in the midi in page. It attempts to load them then says Port unavailable and does not launch the app in the background. Maybe this is a bug on the Plus model phones. @Sebastian please help. They launch fine as audio inputs but not midi.

  • Hi,
    I confirm-my iphone 6s plus goes down quickly after AB3 is shut down.one reason are "zombie apps" that stay in memory when I close AB3 and apps- clearing ab3 does not always help. Less of a problem on ipad air2, both have ios 10.3.3-with diverse apps tested a dozen apps. May be the way i close ab3, apps and aum is the key-anyway, once zombie apps are in memory, i barely get rid of them-need to reboot (reopening often doesn't work, also not network reset. Dear ab3 devs,Please investigate this. Also not sure, how big the impact of the midi options are, I had them always on ( of course, they are so cool).
    It happens also without aum and just one single synth used (a.e alchemy,thor, nave, thumbjam etc)

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