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.
Virtual instrument Shootout
Which has the best and largest usable collection of virtual Instruments (including IAP)?
1) Sampletank for iOS
2) Gadget
3) Beathawk?
My vote is for Sampletank closely followed by BH
Comments
ThumbJam
Yes to all three of those plus Thumbjam. When it comes to Gadget, you also need to purchase the external apps that function as Gadgets as I've done, not just the IAPs alone. This gives you the full experience. Thumbjam is a freakin classic. So, onto my suggestions.
Xewton Music Studio - Another classic, and it had one of the first orchestral sound libraries in the iOS environment back in the day. Was also easy to create custom-built instruments even without live time stretching. I LOVE this classic app.
Cubasis has some nice built-in sampled instruments and a nice synth, although that's a DAW.
That might be overkill, but Cubasis has nice things to offer.
FL Studio Mobile 3 - A few great built-in synths, and many mini versions of their Directwave libraries available as IAPs is pretty slick too. Now if only we could get that s.o.b. to not crash so much.
Sure, it's a DAW, but yeah, whatever.
OH YEAH, AU apps by Crudebytes. That's iSymphonic, Colossus Piano, Oriental Strings, Heavy Brass, etc. Shit's gonna cost you a pretty penny (or roughly 50,000-100,00 pennies ($500-$1000 accumulatively)), but you pay the professional's price for professional sounds.
If I think of more, I'll let you know.
@jwmmakerofmusic Wow, thanks .. that was great! I plunked down the $50 for Colossus piano and haven't looked back.
Roland Sound Canvas is another one...
Gadget out of those 3, but im not a fan of any of these.
Its weird when people say that thumbjam has a lot of useable sounds. For me nearly all the sounds in it seem pretty average stuff that comes with most apps nowadays. Not bad, but nothing spectacular and most of its sound i wouldnt use at all(so basic preset stuff to my ears). Havent really even had much use for it, because i could find better similar sounds elsewhere. Which is pretty disappointing, as i bought for the "tons of great sounds".
What about bsi16. Especially if Samu is right and it does go AU. Theres
And there is SynthMaster Player, but that seems not to be on par with SampleTank.
Accidentally loaded Alchemy into BM3.... and searched for this thread...
This has got to.be perfection in sound...
Auxy with IAPs. Maybe not largest, but high up on usability. Why I dont mind paying.
When you say 'Virtual Instruments', do you mean virtual "real world" instruments? If so, then it depends on how much work you want to do vs money you're willing to spend.
Low work, more money: Sampletank, easily. Metric ton of IAP libraries. Well, to be fair, I haven't really compared this to beathawk's library. But it would be one of these two, for sure. They've both been in the business of selling these libraries for a long long time.
Low money, more work: BS-16i, easily. BS-16i can load most of the entire universe of SoundFonts floating around on the internet. And you can make your own with the right tools on the desktop.
Of the three offered for consideration, it is certainly SampleTank.
However, I also have bsi16, SoundFont Pro, and Gestrument packed with some incredible soundfonts (and I never had to pay a penny for any of those hundreds of soundfonts)
I really like the acoustic pianos IAP, but I have not bit for any others.
What else do you recommend?
Oh if you like the acoustic pianos then definitely get vintage keys (electric piano tones). It's the same deal, 10 different, but similar ballpark sounds. The future bass pack is nice for really funky textures. And there's one out tomorrow but I have not heard what it is.
Thanks!
bs-16i loaded with free soundfonts from my site goes a long way to satisfy most needs for real or acoustic sounding intstruments. Includes 15 velocity layer piano, EPs, pads, strings, guitars, organs and synth. Enjoy.
https://sites.google.com/site/soundfonts4u/
Wowwwwwwww
I am deeply impressed!
Thanks for the link and all that work and love!
I cannot download from https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3zFERJ2rMQpYnlHQ2tOUVBfeXc as it seems.
Any tricks?
I tried Safari and Chrome on iPad
iSymphonic has fantastic orchestral sounds.
Love Beathawk
Sampletank is a monster
I'm not much of a synth guy, but Animoog and Model 15 seem pretty darn fine.
Yeah - iOS is not the easiest when it comes to file downloading and opening.
The simplest solution would be to download via PC or Mac. Otherwise you might need an iOS file manager app.
I find the best way to install a new soundfont in bs-16i is to use iTunes, app, document import. Alternatively if you can get the file to dropbox you should be able to use the Open in..function.
I got:
Nice-Keys-Plus-Sal-V2.0 for the Salamander
Nice-Keys-PlusSteinway-JNv2.0 for the Steinway
and then
Nice-Keys-B-Plus-JN1.4 with, i think the same stuff but only small Pianos
My plan was to get the best Pianos, but seperate from anything else.
I read, those have 6 layer fonts.
But it seems, the Nice Keys are contained everywhere.
And then i noticed, that the bigger files contains even 15 layer fonts!
:-O
But i think this file will be too big for my 2 GB model.
I then continued ;-)
Acoustic Guitars JNv2.4
Electric-Guitars-JNV4.4
Then
SGMv2.01-GuitsPlusBass-V1.4
And then i noticed the Piano section
Man, that webpage is quite a bit confusing
Will look again and read better
Yeah - I need to take classes in web design. Just go to the piano section and download the first one Sal-Stein-Uprights-Detailed-V3 - it has the most detailed versions of the pianos alone. The reason for so many options is the limited Ram available on older devices so there are smaller set options. Your 2gb will be fine for any of them.