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.

OT: The Size of iPhone’s Top Apps Has Increased by 1,000% in Four Years

https://sensortower.com/blog/ios-app-size-growth

First thought was retina assets but retina was already years old in 2013. Then I thought, phone + ipad assets (they're all universal apps, I think) but iPad was also already years old in 2013 too. I'm sure some of it does come down to more assets for the myriad of iOS screen sizes in the wild but damn.

Another view via Axios chart.

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Comments

  • Rest assured that Ripplemaker < 4Mb :D

  • I remember when people could program games in 1k on a ZX81.

  • @BiancaNeve said:
    I remember when people could program games in 1k on a ZX81.

    Yes, I remember those games too. Not that I miss them, though ...

  • I kinda do. Coz it was all new and exciting then even if the graphics were rubbish

  • @brambos said:
    Rest assured that Ripplemaker < 4Mb :D

    Funny. I almost called your apps out proof that this trend isn't universal. I marvel at their size. https://itunes.apple.com/us/developer/bram-bos/id325340444

  • Yes if you use FB services like Pages and Adverts, as well as Messenger, instagram and FB itself you're looking at over a gb with their respective caches. No need for that much.

    Gmail though, that jump to 200mb...what they added?

  • @Gunark said:
    Yes if you use FB services like Pages and Adverts, as well as Messenger, instagram and FB itself you're looking at over a gb with their respective caches. No need for that much.

    To be clear, these numbers do not include things like caches that build over time. It's just comparing the initial install sizes. Pretty sure FB and Gmail were wrapped web apps back in 2013. If that's true, going native would account for a lot of the jump.

  • @syrupcore said:

    @Gunark said:
    Yes if you use FB services like Pages and Adverts, as well as Messenger, instagram and FB itself you're looking at over a gb with their respective caches. No need for that much.

    To be clear, these numbers do not include things like caches that build over time. It's just comparing the initial install sizes. Pretty sure FB and Gmail were wrapped web apps back in 2013. If that's true, going native would account for a lot of the jump.

    Oh definitely, they're huge without the caches anyway. Maybe overly so. But then FB insists on having a browser in there that you're forced to use / be tracked through.

  • edited June 2017

    I know next to nothing about code writing, but I do know something about writing, and in writing there is concision, and elegance etc. A.Lincoln said something to the effect of "if I'd [taken] more time I would've written you a shorter letter"

    Sunvox comes in at 19.5 mb. Check the footprint of the many apps including DAWs that do far less than Sunvox with a much bigger footprint.

  • @BiancaNeve said:
    I kinda do. Coz it was all new and exciting then even if the graphics were rubbish

    >

    Two vertical white lines, as bats, and a square ball was the height of game tech. ;)

  • @brambos said:
    Rest assured that Ripplemaker < 4Mb :D

    lots more room to add more modules!!!

  • @midiSequencer said:

    @brambos said:
    Rest assured that Ripplemaker < 4Mb :D

    lots more room to add more modules!!!

    :yum:

  • AUM is < 4mb too. Another marvel.

  • System drive on my first Mac was 500 MB... :o that's mega bytes!

  • I've done hour long live sets on the Machinedrum-UW with only 2MB providing all the sounds. Would have killed for 200MB though :wink:

  • @anickt said:
    System drive on my first Mac was 500 MB... :o that's mega bytes!

    Mine had no system drive, the OS was on a 3.5" floppy disk, and it had less than a megabyte of ram.

  • @InfoCheck said:

    @anickt said:
    System drive on my first Mac was 500 MB... :o that's mega bytes!

    Mine had no system drive, the OS was on a 3.5" floppy disk, and it had less than a megabyte of ram.

    I remember those :D

  • Moral of the story:

    These apps are now 10% function and 90% data mining?? (Anonymous, of course. Don't be evil, right?)

    Or big companies have gotten sloppy with their code?

    I hope there is a less depressing reason for this.

  • @DeVlaeminck said:

    @BiancaNeve said:
    I remember when people could program games in 1k on a ZX81.

    Yes, I remember those games too. Not that I miss them, though ...

    Elite on the BBC was coded with a ridiculously small footprint. Especially given there was an entire universe being modelled in there. And I sort of miss it, Right On Commander!

    Spotify desperately needs a Clear Cache button unless I'm failing to see an easy way to do it. Uninstall/Reinstall cycle is tedious.

  • @Hmtx said:
    Moral of the story:

    These apps are now 10% function and 90% data mining?? (Anonymous, of course. Don't be evil, right?)

    Or big companies have gotten sloppy with their code?

    I hope there is a less depressing reason for this.

    Generally people now code with "frameworks" that add a lot of bloat. And much extra stuff like differing resolutions, screen sizes probably doesn't help.

    That and better performance of the devices means the devs don't have to count every machine cycle.

    My guilty iOS gaming pleasure, Hearthstone, is nearly two and a half Gig and that needs to be downloaded completely for every patch due to shoddy coding/framework. It includes all language sound files for each supported country, madness.

  • Why don't big apps like Hearthstone make downloading assets a separate process? Some games seem to, others do not. I've not played that one but have played a few others that seem to pack everything into the App Store download. If the sound/video/etc assets were downloaded as external resources, the core could be updated without needing to redownload all that junk. I'm assuming there's a real reason, I just don't know it.

  • I still remember bragging to my friends about my ~8mb RLL drive. It was incredible. I stored everything I had on it.

    Also remember when hard drives came down to a dollar per meg. It was mind blowing! Now you can get a 16gig thumb drive tossed at you for showing up at an event.

    Drive history with costs:
    http://www.pcworld.com/article/127105/article.html

  • @BiancaNeve said:
    I remember when people could program games in 1k on a ZX81.

    Or, color programs in Commodore VIC-20 with just 3.5Kb...!

  • Or, the amazing photo editing/painting app Affinity Photo for iPad is a 1.3 GB download :-(

    The coders must have stocks into the memory/storage manufacturing plants...

  • @Tarekith said:
    I've done hour long live sets on the Machinedrum-UW with only 2MB providing all the sounds. Would have killed for 200MB though :wink:

    Impossible to know but it'd be interesting to know how 200MB would have changed the set, for better and worse. I really love limited sample time as an artistic motivator.

    Something tells me that the best possible version of those sets might have been if you'd been given an extra 4MB of storage as a complete surprise just a few days before you were going to perform it. Just enough time to add some special sauce to the set you created but not enough time to get lost in all that space! :)

  • @TheVimFuego said:

    @Hmtx said:
    Moral of the story:

    These apps are now 10% function and 90% data mining?? (Anonymous, of course. Don't be evil, right?)

    Or big companies have gotten sloppy with their code?

    I hope there is a less depressing reason for this.

    Generally people now code with "frameworks" that add a lot of bloat. And much extra stuff like differing resolutions, screen sizes probably doesn't help.

    That and better performance of the devices means the devs don't have to count every machine cycle.

    This is the real reason. Hardware is relatively cheap. And A9, A9X, and A10 chips are beasts. Cheap beasts when you compare value for money. Developing software is not cheap and testing new code is lengthy and expensive.

    For the most part, developing today is built on layers and layers of abstraction, like lego bricks, where you focus on core logic for your function and don't worry about writing "bricks" that handle problems already solved by others, like memory management or user interface logic.

    If you have used Audulus or Analog Kit modular synth you get the concept. Why rebuild from scratch an envelope when I can use one from the Audulus built in envelope? And if I edit an envelope control, I can see how complex it is. All that sublogic....

    Differently from Audulus, however, these frameworks for app development are many and contain all of the different functions a developer might call on. They are vast, and very very useful to anyone programing their vision. It is not easy to tear the "bricks" apart without introducing the possibility of bugs, because they depend on and relate to each other.

    There are three ways you can call on these "modules" :
    1. call them over the Web : saves local space but your app won't work offline and is lower performance.
    2. Pack them all in : application bloat and potentially performance problems : but just throw hardware at it
    3. Ensure apps share the same modules : requires planning and coordination not only across development teams. Works for opensource, but not for Apple. Apple would have to approve the local shared library in their OS release. To a great extent they do, but not at the pace of iOS app innovation.

    Once upon a recent time, companies would use the frameworks, and test their fat app, but then go through a code optimisation, recompilation, and retest before release. That's just not necessary when hardware is so powerful. People are expensive.

    Option 2 is the rational choice in our decade. Most people have way more space than needed in their iPad and iPhone and only run into space problems when they have too many selfies.

    I am sure, like me, when you show your iDevice to someone they are shocked by how many apps you have. Who would need that many apps? ;-)

    But we are a rare minority, uninstalling one IAP or another to make room for that shiny new drum machine.

    Companies market to the 99%, as well they should, and the careful choice to go to 128 or 256 as the standard storage size, but provide a 500 option for "lunatics" like us at a premium, well it's just good business ;)

    All of this still does not explain how @brambos packs so much goodness into so little space. Artist coder? 1970s code jockey? Zencoder? Who knows? Let's make music.

  • @Pavel said:
    All of this still does not explain how @brambos packs so much goodness into so little space. Artist coder? 1970s code jockey? Zencoder?

    :D

    • No 3rd party frameworks, just Apple's native low-level APIs (which are built into the OS, so are for the most part not linked into the binary)
    • I try to keep as much of my code portable, which means I avoid using proprietary features and functions which in turn also results in fewer linked libraries beyond the standard C[++] stuff. The only libraries I add are Audiobus, Ableton Link and something to [un]compress Zip files.
    • Avoid using bitmapped graphics. Just a background and a handful of button icons; all PNG optimized as much as possible. I prefer to draw things for flexibility reasons.
    • I used to do lots of assembler, but these days compilers and profile-based optimizations are so good that there is barely any advantage over using plain C anymore, and it's just a boatload of hassle
  • This doesn't bother me in the least, because I just calculated that the storage space of my iPad has increased by 1500% in a similar time period, so it's all good. :#

    My first iPad was 16 GB, and my current one is 256 GB, and that's an increase of 1500%.

    As long as an app is good, then I don't really care about the size. If it needs to be big, then so be it.

  • @syrupcore said:
    Why don't big apps like Hearthstone make downloading assets a separate process? Some games seem to, others do not. I've not played that one but have played a few others that seem to pack everything into the App Store download. If the sound/video/etc assets were downloaded as external resources, the core could be updated without needing to redownload all that junk. I'm assuming there's a real reason, I just don't know it.

    This is how it works on the Android version, much saner.

    Apparently the all or nothing for iOS is driven by the engine they've used and some Apple BS.

  • I guess it might be tempting to chalk it up to a bit of Moore's Law but as some have stated when email apps & shopping sites still feature nearly the exact same GUI & functionality from a few years back it seems something else is at play.

    I'm fine with professional level music production apps being several hundred MB if not over a Gig, but ebay or some note app being that large seems out of line.

    I applaud the ingenuity of some of the ios music production devs putting out extraordinary synths, FX, etc with sizes like 6MB...

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