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.

"The Playstation Paradox" - thoughts about the iOS hardware upgrade ratrace...

I wrote my first guest blog on MusicAppBlog, to share some thoughts I had on the incessant upgrade rat race of our iOS hardware. How could we possibly break the cycle, and would we want to...?

http://musicappblog.com/playstation-paradox/

Perhaps some of you find it interesting food for thought too seeing some of the recent discussions :)

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Comments

  • Interesting thoughts, but it's never going to happen unless you can get ALL the phone hardware manufacturers to do it and most of them don't make any money out of software.

    I read that iphone sales are falling in china mainly because the iphone 7 and 8 look pretty much identical to the iPhone 6 (though price and government preference for the local companies probably play a part).

  • edited September 2017

    "Lately I keep hearing how the iPad Air 2 (essentially ‘last year’s iPad’) is becoming too slow for serious music work. How can that be?"

    I don't think this is an issue directly associated with apps, but the iOS itself. My iPad 2 is in great nick, but barely works because the iOS it runs is now completely inappropriate for the hardware. Similarly my 2012 MacBook Pro runs a tenth of the speed it used to thanks to OSX updates.

    The decent thing would be to provide a separate iOS and OSX for older devices, kept up to date with security patches and optimised to cope with older hardware (as Windows machines do), or a 'lite' version with fewer whistles and bells. Then it's up to software developers to decide whether they want to restrict their products for newer machines, or support older devices as well.

    That way the less affluent of us can use our hardware for longer, and those with bigger budgets can keep up to date with the latest shiny thing.

  • edited September 2017

    Thanks for the read. I have never had the newest idevices. I buy them used and keep them as long as possible. So now I have an iPad mini 2 and an iPhone 5s.
    Everything takes a bit longer in the game console world I'd imagine. From console design to game development and even to user experience per software. It may take someone a year to get through a game like skyrim for example.
    The consumer is in charge. The gaming community also seem to be more enthusiastic about change? So the iPhone in comparison does not need to change much model to model for people to gobble it up. If a console looks too much like its predecessor sales will suffer no?
    Any good points in there? :))

  • GREAT JOB! STRONG JOURNALISTIC PROSE.

    Here is my response with 2 solutions included.

    SOLUTION 1

    thought·ful
    ˈTHôtfəl/
    adjective
    1. absorbed in or involving thought.
    "brows drawn together in thoughtful consideration"

    synonyms: pensive, reflective, contemplative, musing, meditative, introspective, philosophical, ruminative, absorbed, engrossed, rapt, preoccupied, lost in thought, deep in thought, in a brown study, brooding; formalcogitative
    "a thoughtful expression"

    1. showing consideration for the needs of other people.
      "he was attentive and thoughtful"

    synonyms: considerate, caring, attentive, understanding, sympathetic, solicitous, concerned, helpful, obliging, neighborly, unselfish, kind, compassionate, charitable
    "how very thoughtful of you!"
    showing careful consideration or attention.
    "her work is thoughtful and provocative"

    So, I am sure some people read this post and go, huh?

    Let me explain. Apple shareholders will not forego dividends for the stability and financial prosperity of developers.

    FEELING GOOD ABOUT THEMSELVES and HELPING OTHERS motivate people. The company needs to show a COMPASSIONATE reason for your proposal. If it contains ideas that are for the under privileged or disenfranchised, that motivate them. Come up with a way to do in introducing your policies and you will see action.

    Or, make it some how a "green" or "sustainability" issue. Link the manufacturing or consumerism to climate change and how hardware retention helps that cause, and bam. Apple shareholders will be down.

    1. APP "change"

    Apple can create a unique "stockmarket" in which developers offer shares to brokers. The brokers are nothing more than people like myself. A university educated professional with a strong business or entrepreneurial background. More clearly, NOT DEVELOPERS.

    Create a universe in which investors can personally invest in apps of their interest.

    Transpose the Stock Exchange and Markets like any where in the world but a contained universe for apps.

    Kickstarter meets ETRADE meets Apple meets the Developers.

    The motivation for this is individual profits for the shareholders to enjoy OUTSIDE their shares. Allow them to compile "portfolios" of developer and apps that are behind.

    Let the brokers be Apple employees.

    This would be an entirely new work force for Apple and provide tens of thousands of jobs for around the world. And not to unskilled factory workers in third world countries. But rather the actual people WHO BUY their products. Unemployment and workforce participation in the modern industrialized world is at an all time low. People are clamoring for opportunities. People so desperate they elect people who at one time would never be considered for political office.

    If APPLE were to create an ecosystem like this, it would give a more human side to the app store and the company as a whole.

    Lets face it, this roll out screams of "ELITISM".

    THESE ARE MY SOLUTIONS FOR THE PROBLEMS YOU DEFINED IN YOUR ARTICLE.

  • edited September 2017

    I'm basically with you, but have seen your 'future picture' pass decades ago with the original MacOS - in both economic and technological ways.
    For a couple of years I've been in Apple sales, too (beside my main goals in developement).

    Bottomline was that we had the most satisfied and loyal customers, but they only aquired machines when a department was extended. No support problems whatsoever.
    Of course there were sales of more powerful machines because new applications required it. In such cases the outdated boxes were usually shifted to workplaces whith lower demands. All pretty much like you describe a considerate use of gear.

    Apple themselves got into severe financial trouble during thise years - which eventually lead to cease MacOS in favor of OSX. They knew about the overlong periods of use with OS7/8 and turned OS 9 into a deliberate mess with Unix already in mind.
    They even could make their original OS run on an iPhone today in a much improved form, featuring function instead of bliss.
    But watching Microsoft's success based on simply 'not ready' releases and their very own experience lead to what we're facing now.

    People buy on numbers, not on function and even less on code quality.
    The latest and greatest CPU is hailed year after year, delivering 30-50% improvements, while just optimizing some code segments might result in 300-500% increase rates.
    (which doesn't even include assemly language that may score another 10 times higher)

    My personal 'main product' is in custom asset management and builds a full application with GUI and database 'kernel' from just 200 kB of source code using a 2 MB runtime system. Admittedly it's built for specific customer solutions and I leave all the standard stuff to Oracle or whatever RDBMS is already present.
    Yet it prooves how bloated current developement system are - and in fact I wonder time and again what the .Net debugger reports about traversing it's object/method path.
    A conceptual piece of shit, considered the 'cutting edge' of todays technology >:)

  • Yes, very interesting. While stating that I'm mostly in agreement with your ideas, I will add my thoughts:

    1. The iPad Air 2 is not strictly speaking 'last years model'. It came out in 2014 I do believe. Picky maybe, but important due to the closed nature of the unit itself. Which brings me to my next point:

    2. iPads are closed boxes and have little to no upgrade possibilities. Hence my Air2 64gb will always have that damned 64gb. While I have deleted many apps that I no longer use, I also have deleted apps that I can no longer fit in that space. Yes, I use my iPad for multiple uses and while I really wished I would have gone bigger on storage, that is no longer an option.
      My battery is lasting less and less. While I can have it replaced, this is not cheap, easy or convenient. The whole lack of upgrade possibilities or replacement of worn parts is grating.

    3. While I would love to see a much longer suggested life span for devices, I would also like to see some form of upgrade possibilities. My Air2 is up to most tasks, but I do think it's quite early days for iPads and we've only just got to a point where they are even making models with reasonable size storage!

    4. I think many people actually are keeping their iPads in use for longer now. Watch those prices rise, as the greed of Capitalism demands either growth or sustained margins!

    5. Music makers are such a niche interest group, that I doubt we could bring in even a tenth of what most shitty birds titles do. Bearing the whole market in mind, I can not see Apple changing their ways until market forces make them. This brings us back to app prices:

    6. Rise app prices to what they need to be and many of us will go back to laptops, where the devices themselves are more adaptable (at this time).

    I don't want to sound negative, but I'm pretty down on Capitalism as it is, but I think if changes don't come soon, there won't be many people with any money left (or enough resources) to worry about iPad sales lol.

  • Thanks for the feedback, people. Obviously I don't see this happening any time soon (or, realistically, at all). It would be like trying to turn around an oil tanker going at full velocity.

    However, the thought experiment was about hypothesizing a viable model that would involve less "hardware obsolescence" and still result in continually-improving experience for the end user.

    Mind you, this is not about music apps per se... the same would apply to mobile games (a huge part of Apple's software revenue) and other app categories. So I'm not sure the "music is a niche" argument is necessarily an obstacle in this case.

    And indeed... it may be that your iPad won't last the full lifecycle (although I think 5 years should be possible), but as seen in the Playstation realm: Sony typically introduces a cheaper "slim" version of its console thalfway through its lifecycle. Component prices will have decimated by then, so they can be sold cheaper yet with the same (or even higher) margins.

  • @brambos would love to have seen a cheaper Air2. While I can push my Air2 with some setups bringing it to its knees, I still consider that it was excellent value. Now I have a choice between a much higher price Pro model or a model that is lesser in spec in some ways than my Air2 and better in others, for very little less money.

    I was so close to biting the bullet on a big upgrade 12" with 256gb and pencil, then the prices went up again. But back to topic.

    The Sony market may yet be a strange comparison, as they at times have tried to break into the 'throw away app' market and seemingly are looking at more upgrades per cycle! Seems they want the riches we presume Apple are making.

  • @MonzoPro said:
    The decent thing would be to provide a separate iOS and OSX for older devices, kept up to date with security patches and optimised to cope with older hardware (as Windows machines do), or a 'lite' version with fewer whistles and bells.

    Sounds good to me.

    But sadly, those making decisions at Apple seem not to be interested in decency, and are primarily focussed on selling more iPhones for ever increasing prices. The most recent figures I can find with a quick look suggest that Apple has a net worth in the order of 1.4 trillion dollars. Yet the country in which it is based is reportedly 26 trillion dollars in debt, much of it owned by the Chinese....whose workers are paid peanuts to make £1000+ iPhones.

    It's a crazy old world.

  • @Zen210507 said:

    @MonzoPro said:
    The decent thing would be to provide a separate iOS and OSX for older devices, kept up to date with security patches and optimised to cope with older hardware (as Windows machines do), or a 'lite' version with fewer whistles and bells.

    Sounds good to me.

    But sadly, those making decisions at Apple seem not to be interested in decency, and are primarily focussed on selling more iPhones for ever increasing prices. The most recent figures I can find with a quick look suggest that Apple has a net worth in the order of 1.4 trillion dollars. Yet the country in which it is based is reportedly 26 trillion dollars in debt, much of it owned by the Chinese....whose workers are paid peanuts to make £1000+ iPhones.

    It's a crazy old world.

    Built-in obsolescence pays it seems.

  • edited September 2017

    @Fruitbat1919 said:
    iPads are closed boxes and have little to no upgrade possibilities.

    >

    Yet, every Apple Store, or for that matter most computer stores could, with very little outlay, include a service to upgrade the storage and RAM of iPads.

    Except, Apple do not want this, and with desktop hardware have resorted to gluing cases shut and soldering in RAM specifically to prevent owners performing their own upgrades.

    This is the world's biggest tech company under Tim Cook; unable to innovate, unwilling to provide value for money, and mean-spirited.

  • @MonzoPro said:
    Built-in obsolescence pays it seems.

    Oh, for sure. Nothing is built to last, these days. We are considered to be a disposable society.

  • @Zen210507 said:

    @Fruitbat1919 said:
    iPads are closed boxes and have little to no upgrade possibilities.

    >

    Yet, every Apple Store, or for that matter most computer stores could, with very little outlay, include a service to upgrade the storage and RAM of iPads.

    Except, Apple do not want this, and with desktop hardware have resorted to gluing cases shut and soldering in RAM specifically to prevent owners performing their own upgrades.

    This is the world's biggest tech company under Tim Cook; unable to innovate, unwilling to provide value for money, and mean-spirited.

    Yes, with very little outlay. It is as you say, just 'mean-spirited'. The argument that they are a business out to make money is (imo) just short sighted. They make lots of money. They would make even more long term if they had long term vision for their products. It's the Capitalists that fuck it up for us. They are short term thinkers and have little care for the product or business. Once the business runs its course, they will move on to the next money making thing.

    So, until we can get rid of Capitalists, we won't ever have long term thinking in products.

  • @Zen210507 said:

    @MonzoPro said:
    Built-in obsolescence pays it seems.

    Oh, for sure. Nothing is built to last, these days. We are considered to be a disposable society.

    It's in order to be Green....or that's what they'll tell you anyway ;)

  • @Fruitbat1919 said:
    So, until we can get rid of Capitalists, we won't ever have long term thinking in products.

    I think that should have been typed like this
    So, until we can get rid of capitalists, we won't ever have long term thinking in products.

    Does that make me one ? :P

  • @Telefunky said:
    Apple themselves got into severe financial trouble during thise years - which eventually lead to cease MacOS in favor of OSX. They knew about the overlong periods of use with OS7/8 and turned OS 9 into a deliberate mess with Unix already in mind.

    That's not what happened. MacOS was horribly outdated by the time OS9 was released. The attempt to create a successor (Copland) had failed horribly. Steve Jobs was brought in to port the (actually superior to OSX) NextOS to Apple's computers. And then when big software companies said no - he was hired as CEO and formulated (the hugely successful) plan to build an OS on Next's technology, but with Mac API compatible libraries (Carbon).

    OS9 was basically the last kludge of the dying regime. The only thing that really connected it to OSX was that they added some transitional libraries to help with the porting to the new OS.

    People buy on numbers, not on function and even less on code quality.
    The latest and greatest CPU is hailed year after year, delivering 30-50% improvements, while just optimizing some code segments might result in 300-500% increase rates.
    (which doesn't even include assemly language that may score another 10 times higher)

    These days, except for some narrow uses, hand-crafted assembler is typically slower than well written C/C++ (modern compilers are very smart). And on modern processors its very hard to write efficient Assembler. Can it be done? Sure. At scale? Questionable. Also, writing efficient code is very expensive, so it's questionable whether it's always worth it. And highly optimized code is usually much harder to maintain.

  • @Zen210507 said:

    @Fruitbat1919 said:
    iPads are closed boxes and have little to no upgrade possibilities.

    >

    Yet, every Apple Store, or for that matter most computer stores could, with very little outlay, include a service to upgrade the storage and RAM of iPads.

    Except, Apple do not want this, and with desktop hardware have resorted to gluing cases shut and soldering in RAM specifically to prevent owners performing their own upgrades.

    This is the world's biggest tech company under Tim Cook; unable to innovate, unwilling to provide value for money, and mean-spirited.

    I do feel that Apple have entered the John Scully years of their renaissance. Though it's a tough transition. Phones are rapidly becoming commodities, iPads sell less and have a longer upgrade cycle, while the iWatch... Talk about a limited market.

    Meanwhile computers have long since become an essentially flat market, hardware innovation has slowed to a crawl and the newer computers don't really offer much that most people care about.

  • I can see myself switching to a Surface Pro at some point in the future, and keeping my iPads as essentially legacy items with the synths/controllers.

  • @AndyPlankton said:

    @Fruitbat1919 said:
    So, until we can get rid of Capitalists, we won't ever have long term thinking in products.

    I think that should have been typed like this
    So, until we can get rid of capitalists, we won't ever have long term thinking in products.

    Does that make me one ? :P

    Yes you bloody Cap stealer! Now go back to making music!

  • @brambos
    Great article, I bought my 6s from the lease 2 days ago, intend to keep it for a few more years, and still using air1 and 2011 air (bought used last year), all working fine. Limits? Sure, but workarounds are possible - printing reverb instead of keeping it live, etc.

  • edited September 2017

    The game console race has had some weird ass economics at play. Sony initialy lost 300$ dollars on every PS3 sold as a long term strategy to get their install base up. It was like that for years, making money mainly off of licensing development rights and subscription services.

    https://www.cnet.com/news/report-ps3-design-cost-finally-nearing-break-even/
    https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/11/8239/

    I am curious what the Apple profit margins are for hardware vs app store sales.

  • One thing i will throw in too is that the jump in visual fidelity on a game like Uncharted has a lot to do with the advancements of not just the creatives who work on the console but also that of the advancement of the desktop development systems. 3d sculpting tools (Zbrush, Mudbox) and baking normal maps, light baking etc etc. are all tethered majorly to advancing PC hardware.

  • @cian said:
    I can see myself switching to a Surface Pro at some point in the future, and keeping my iPads as essentially legacy items >

    with the synths/controllers.
    >

    Surface Pro has the right idea, but the wrong software. :) If someone were to invent a way to make and run an image of an iPad, on the SP hardware, I'd get more interested.

    Unfortunately Microsoft are as bad or worse than Apple for trying to push people down a path they choose, and enforce this by not making drivers available for running Windows 7 64-bit on new hardware.

  • @AndyPlankton said:
    It's in order to be Green....or that's what they'll tell you anyway ;)

    Yeah, there's a lot of it about. Not much making sense to anyone who questions.

  • @AudioGus said:
    One thing i will throw in too is that the jump in visual fidelity on a game like Uncharted has a lot to do with the advancements of not just the creatives who work on the console but also that of the advancement of the desktop development systems.

    But that's more or less the point I'm making: the development tools and methodologies improve, so the end user gets a better experience without needing to upgrade their device, right?

    Just thinking out loud: while our CPUs are churning out lots of calculations for a nice analog filter model, our GPUs are mostly picking their noses. We could invest a ton of R&D into offloading calculations to the GPU, but that's complex business - and why bother? By the time you've figured it out as a dev and are finished moving over your code half your market has already moved on to a faster CPU and another type of GPU. All that effort for nothing. If we'd know for sure that this exact GPU will be around for another 3 or 4 years, it suddenly pays off to invest R&D time into letting the GPU do the bazillion times oversampled filter routines for you!

    There is very little incentive for developers to take the responsibility of optimizing and vectorizing their code today. It's also a tough decision: do you take an "inclusive approach", making sure that even people with an iPad 4 can fully enjoy your app, or do you develop for the awesome new possibilities of latest iPad Pro and do all sorts of advanced voodoo magic? Can't have it both ways (apart from some crude mechanisms like scaling down the oversampling, etc.). When everyone's on the same hardware, there is much more focus for developers to come up with meaningful innovation.

  • @brambos said:

    @AudioGus said:
    One thing i will throw in too is that the jump in visual fidelity on a game like Uncharted has a lot to do with the advancements of not just the creatives who work on the console but also that of the advancement of the desktop development systems.

    But that's more or less the point I'm making: the development tools and methodologies improve, so the end user gets a better experience without needing to upgrade their device, right?

    For sure, I wasn't disagreeing. To simplify it even further (into a gross exageration), you don't have to buy the latest TV to see how much better CG in general has become over the past seven years.

  • edited September 2017

    Bram I think there is a chance that Apple will evolve to this type of structure. It is certainly more profitable for them (and more sustainable for them) to make increased profits and revenues based off of software upgrades rather than the continued cranking out of hardware materials directly tied in sales and profit to a physical item in someone's hands. Software products that use less physical resources for them to obtain dollars for.
    If Apple could structure things so that they had increased profits based off of your PlayStation model, the return on investment would be obviously better because they would have less physical investment.

  • The problem that Apple has is that the competition (in particular Samsung) are literally competing on features.

  • @cian said:
    The problem that Apple has is that the competition (in particular Samsung) are literally competing on features.

    And since that's not a clever competition (you don't want to compete on price/features with an Asian manufacturer, especially when they actually produce everyone's components themselves) it's a cycle you want to escape, lest you become a commodity. Just specs are not going to be enough of a meaningful differentiation with a Galaxy Something 9.

  • @cian said:

    @Zen210507 said:

    @Fruitbat1919 said:
    iPads are closed boxes and have little to no upgrade possibilities.

    >

    Yet, every Apple Store, or for that matter most computer stores could, with very little outlay, include a service to upgrade the storage and RAM of iPads.

    Except, Apple do not want this, and with desktop hardware have resorted to gluing cases shut and soldering in RAM specifically to prevent owners performing their own upgrades.

    This is the world's biggest tech company under Tim Cook; unable to innovate, unwilling to provide value for money, and mean-spirited.


    I do feel that Apple have entered the John Scully years of their renaissance. Though it's a tough transition. Phones are rapidly becoming commodities, iPads sell less and have a longer upgrade cycle, while the iWatch... Talk about a limited market.

    Meanwhile computers have long since become an essentially flat market, hardware innovation has slowed to a crawl and the newer computers don't really offer much that most people care about.

    Hardware innovation has slowed to a crawl? Isn’t this precisely what some people are asking for? So... stop the hardware innovation and fire all the engineers and instead focus on new software optimization. No new features of course. People will just buy the faster version of the software. So fire the new feature guys and just keep a small core of rock star assembly language programmers who will refine the code till the end of Time.

    Sounds like a plan.

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