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.
Mutually Assured Disruption: Music App Development = ios Device Power
Speaking totally for myself. I have an issue. Well, I have many issues.
Let's stay on ios music making, apps, and device processing power.
I feel we are on the verge of the balance being upset as of late. I have never seen such quick move in which apps are bigger and/or needed more CPU than prior and my devices aren't handling it all that well.
Exhibit A Layer
Exhibit B Kasbar
I don't know about you, but I am not particularly fond of going back to the day I only can run one of 2 music making apps at a time. As of late, I am finding myself more and more often needing to shut this, close that, freeze this, freeze that. It is bad eough to always be haggling with myself over memory and what I choose to leave on devices, but now I am starting to feel squeezed on the "computing horsepower" of my Air1, Air2, and iPhone7. Kaspar, LayR, and to some degree Model 15 are kicking my devices proverbial ass. I am really starting to get irritated by it.
These apps and devices are too expensive to play with one at a time and record individual tracks. So, what, I will need one device for this app, one midi controller for that, and like 3 other devices and MIDI controllers?
Bad enoug I can have NO emails, NO pictures, and Apple manages to use a near Gig for such meaningless factory apps and whatever they say is using memory.
I hope Apple is ready for once to do something that is needed and wanted by a particular market, ios musicians. I know we are gamers or other such groups.
Being that Apple seems to be slipping in the back door to compete music with NOIISE and ROLI.
What is next?
APPS GET BIGGER or MORE POWERFUL AND OUR DEVICES STRUGGLE. WILL WE SEE UPGRADES OF ios DEVICES that ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING TO MAKE THEM FUNCTION BETTER NOT JUST GIVE ME A NEW WAY TO MONITOR MY CALORIE USE OF HOURS SITTING?
What say you?
Comments
It's also a responsibility of developers to keep software efficient and optimized. It's too easy to pull a Microsoft and just assume people will upgrade their hardware to run your app.
Spending a day or two with a profiler and implementing some clever optimizations go a long way to keeping your app also accessible to last year's iPads...
This has been 'a thing' since personal computers were a thing. Imagine how many concurrent instances of, say, the original DOOM you could run on a $200 junk PC today.
I am so happy you posted.
I wasn't sure of this.
That is why I did the thread as well.
To get how this can be resolved.
Interesting take from a pro of pros.
No doubt.
But, I feel as though the rate of change in ios music apps vs. pc/mac DAWS are quite extrodinary.
However, point taken.
I am a big believer in market forces, don't get me wrong. i just of course take this topic a little more "personal"......LOL
Market forces, I fear, will lay waste to our beautiful planet.
Every time I want to use Beatmaker 3 with a 64 sample buffer on my iPad Air 2, I need to
A) Close every app I have running
Clear the memory
C) Load BM3 and manually go into settings and change it to 64 samples - it always reverts to 128 when opening the app
I can't imagine running it a larger setup witha bunch of other apps running...
By the way, I'm not saying the Layr and Kaspar devs haven't optimized their code -these are pretty complex synths so you're never going to pull that off without your cpu breaking a sweat. But in general, I feel no dev should release an app without doing some thorough profiling. It's just good etiquette, like not farting in public.
Looks like we'll need more groovebox type all in ones that take advantage of the touch screen. Wouldn't be a bad thing in my book. There's been a decent number of those this year anyway
What say I? I say... Excuse me? 128 to 256 voices, 100+ synth instances, 9 audio outputs and an arpeggiator, reverb and delay, iPad and iPhone support, plus more, and you're wondering if I profiled and optimized? This post is a little disingenuous if you don't mind me saying so. An iPad Air 2 is an old device now, ( and I still use and develop with one too) it will be history soon. I make a big point about the fact LayR is designed for modern 64 bit devices. Sadly Apple do not give us much choice when it comes to choosing which devices our apps must support. I and many other users regularly run LayR with 3 or 4 other apps in a live setup, I say that's pretty good going for an Air 2. Newer devices are almost twice as powerful. Next year they'll be 3 times. I had to chop a lot of power out of LayR to make it able to run on the lowliest devices. Basically if you want the power of new apps you need to keep your hardware up to date or accept that slowly you will be left behind as new apps take advantage of new hardware. It's always been that way and ever will be
I agree with what @LivingMemorySoftware says above, except for one thing: the Air 2 should not be considered an 'old device'. Any software released for at least the coming 2 years should be able to run on it. That's where our responsibility as developers comes in.
If a device is so crammed with apps that it's running out storage space it can adversely affect performance. If one has apps that are hardly ever used why keep them around? It's so easy to download them again, it's unlikely another event like the 32 bit purge will happen again on the App store in the near future. If storage is stuffed full of audio data, move some of it to external storage. Although I know that's not so easy on iOS and that's my own biggest gripe/issue with the system. Apple need to build in a proper filing system and sadly it looks like the files app on iOS 11 is not going to be a great as I was hoping when it was announced.
I agree to a point, it's a case of horses for courses perhaps, but this time next year let's have this discussion again!
Apple really don't give us much choice do they though? LayR had to run on an iPhone 5s and that was hard work! I'm thankful I haven't had too many complaints there... Yet...
I feel your pain, although I feel the 5S screen is a bigger handicap than its processing power (I guess that's because I grew up coding on Z80s and 8088 processors).
I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's to a large extent up to us, developers, whether an Air2 will feel old or not. It's still a ridiculously fast machine and pretty similar in power to the 2017 iPad model.
It's a lovely device, I'm typing this on one now, I use it on stage too
I develop on an 2012 MBPro which is only just beginning to feel a bit tired. Perhaps I overstressed the 'old' but the general point l'm making is valid.
On the desktop we get to specify a minimum spec which we can't do on iOS. Devs should be able to issue refunds IMHO.
And... Z80... My first software I was proud of was a Z80 disassembler, with help from a book...
( the whole thing came in at just over 1k of code)...