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.
Comments
This is a cool lil guide but trying to make this thing listen to start/stop transport messages I’ve got to say I’m not very successful. I’m trying to assign the start stop button to my beatstep but so far I’m not getting there.
While I’m doing my own searching has anyone here managed to start/stop Circuit via a midi controller?
This is what the guide says but I’m not sure what it means. Standard Mackie protocol MMT or whatever. I’ve heard of this but never had to use it.
Shit I'm slowly realising that 5pin midi and usb midi don't communicate with each other. So the remaining option would be to plug the usb cable and see if I can get it to listen to Beatstep's MMC transport messages
From a random internet search result (http://www.lim.di.unimi.it/IEEE/MIDI/SOT3.HTM)...but maybe this is a clue as to what is happening...
When a receiver is synchronized to incoming Real Time messages (MIDI Sync mode), the receipt of a Start (FAH) or Continue (FBH) message does not start the sequence until the next Timing Clock (F8H) is received. The FA and F8 should be sent with at least 1 millisecond time between them so the receiver has time to respond. However, a receiver should be able to respond immediately to the first F8H after receiving the Start or Continue. Neither the transmitter nor the receiver advances during the interval between FA and F8. When the receiver is operating off of its internal clock, it may or may not start or stop when it receives an FA or FB.
I have seen other mentions of circuit going into external sync mode when it receives just a Start message and no clock ticks, so the Start message seems to be intended for slaving and not starting as a master...as in, the Start message tells the unit to start listening for clock and to playback at the tempo of that clock.
Just tried it hooked up via both 5pin and usb and indeed I had no response to an MMC from beatstep. I’ll try it again later as it might be user error programming beatstep as it's been a while since I’ve last used it.
But yes, seems like this might be the case, so the importance of the start button triggering correctly each and every time increases in importance
If Circuit is set to receive MIDI clock - then the Start message should be received, which should be followed by Clock, if no clock messages arrive, it should revert to its internal clock. @supadom If you've got the Circuit set up to receive Clock, and the BSP Sync set to "Int" you should be good to go for Transport Controls ~ Start/Stop/Continue. In the Control Center, make sure you've got clock set to 24ppqn (I guess that's what Circuit uses). For super fun you can use Shift + Triplet on Seq1, 2, or Drums for Triplets... or Shift + (pads 13-16) for 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 (default is 1/16). The Roller Looper will also output Triplets if in that mode, or base its divisions on default (1/16), or whatever you selected with Shift+ 13-16.
If you get it working - one function I'm curious about, if you press Shift+Session on Circuit, it will Switch Sessions immediately, rather than at the end of the Pattern - I'm wondering if this Command can be done over MIDI as well? That might be a use for Song Position Pointer... dunno. GL!
Wow, of course, I completely forgot about the midi out on beatstep (non Pro). I will definitely give it a go. One thing is that so far I’ve only used it as a midi controller and to be honest in my set up I don’t need more that 2 synths which Circuit already covers.
I don’t know much about beatstep’s sequencer side but if I press start on it with circuit connected that will surely start triggering notes in Circuit as well, especially because I have all of the pads mapped to loopy’s loops and will end up pressing them at one point or another.
The triplets idea sound great. You meant press shift + triplets on the beatstep not Circuit right?
Ok, fail.
I’ve tried several different combos but Circuit would not respond to the start command. It does play notes sequenced on beatstep but that wasn’t the point. I’ve even tried a usb to 5 pin midi cable but same thing.
No big deal. My idea was to have a global start button for the whole session. As is I have to remember to start loopy as well and not to get the beginning of the bar wrong. It will need a lot of practice to get all the steps right for it to work. In the past I’d start loopy and Everything would follow suit. Now there’s one more thing to remember and possibly to go wrong. Muscle memory again I suppose.
I’ll also have to start using the key and scales more often as at the mo all of my jams are in C! So much for gear not influencing once creative output!
Darn, wonder if it’s a BSP thing only, I glossed right over that you were using Beatstep. If you happened to have the MCC opened, I don’t think transport controls work when connected to the MCC... I get annoyed frequently as I’ll hit play on the BSP and the Circuit plays right along.
A neat trick here if you own a Keystep and a circuit.
Neat. My ER-1 is a box I’ll never sell! So much fun!
Question for Circuit users: does it have a fixed/default drum key mapping (e.g. For including as a template in Odessa)?
Well this is kinda interesting
The 4 basic drums are fixed mapped...C3, D3, E3, F3 which is the trigger for each of the 4 drum tracks on channel 10.
Having this would be really nice
Now the interesting part, and something I am currently doing manually in cubasis is using CC to enable sampleflip (using more than 1 sample on each track)
CC8 for track 1 (C3)
CC18 for track 2 (D3)
CC44 for track 3 (E3)
CC50 for track 4 (F3)
So you can send CC8 val 0(sample 1) then C3 to play the sample1....then CC8 val 1 (sample 2) then C3 to play sample 2
the CC's accept values from 0-63 to select one of the 64 available samples.
Being able to do this would be absolutely awesome
UPDATE
So I was happily plodding along with midi link sync app and everything slaved to circuit. The timing was good to decent and jamming on my own was fun and refreshing albeit very digital sounding and always in C because of course every jam would start with circuit and I’m a lazy brat.
So last night a drummer friend popped in and we had a jam. I tried to make it look casual and in control but soon everything started falling apart. To put it simply, while the clock sync was fine, the timeline sync was all over the place. It was close to impossible to fix it on the fly so I just moved onto more traditional instrumentation.
Today with my head cooler I fired up the rig and instead of using midi link sync app I turned link off on Loopy and slaved it to circuit directly. Well. I have to say I should have done that last night as it all syncs as expected without the added hassle of running another app for sync and timeline. Now everything ticks nicely together and stops and starts with that funny button on Circuit. I’m glad I’ve cut the middle man out and don’t have to worry about the messed up timeline sync anymore. The issues were most likely due to the fact that I normally count in to four so if the bar in Loopy was longer bits would end up in wrong places. Long story.
Anyway, thought I’d share. I think Link was and still is a revolutionary thing for IOS and beyond but personally if I’m not hearing an app playing my brain automatically assumes that there’s something wrong while it is simply that I’ve missed the 1 and have to wait for the bar to go around. Horses for courses I suppose
Just to make sure, you know that Link only provides clock sync, and there's no concept at all of timeline sync or MTC, right?
Yes this can be done, you just send Program Change... 0-31 is instant change(Shift+Session) , 64-95 is for queued change (Session)
There’s an app called Midi Link Sync by Coding Cod that syncs the timeline by which they mean syncing to a bar or multiples or fractions of a bar. I know it is confusing but that’s the terminology they use in the app. Before Circuit’s sequencer is started you get sync only, when you start it it tries to sync to the bar so 1 is 1 in the master as well as the slave.
It generally works well but I think because Loopy, at least in my case uses multiples of a bar it is very easy to end up mid loop rather than at the beginning. So if by any chance I stop and restart one of the apps in a multi chord loop things end up n wrong places.
Got it, just making sure as some people don’t realize that.
Yep. So much fun. I’m really getting into the audio in. I’m feeding in iDensity and then gating it with different patterns and messing with the decay and stuff.
That’s good news! Found a fix for the M4l issue, and just finished painting my desk.. and that Four Tet tweet got to me! Being able to put instant and regular PC’s on a timeline pretty much enables more song possibilities for me.
It is pretty awesome being able to sequence session switching.
Just a lil something I’ve done yesterday. Still trying to get my way around Circuit. I realise it is so boring to watch the finger dance around Circuit and so entertaining to watch Samplr action. It’s also not easy to film Circuit so it doesn’t just appear like a wall of light. I see if I can get the exposure down.
Nice ! Those make a great combo
True that. In my case loopy, turnado and Impaktor complete the picture.
Synth /percussion = circuit
Sampling/granular/percussion = Samplr
Guitar/voxals looping = loopy
Wackiness/ cream = turnado
Percussion/bells and bleeps = Impaktor
All together freakin heaven
@supadom I need to get into loopy a bit more for my guitar loops I think, I tried it a while back, but just couldn't properly fathom how to make it work and kinda gave up. That was when i was also trying to use AB + Tonestack...now that I have my Line 6 Amplifi I could get away with just using loopy, so it's maybe time to try it again.
It’s a tricky problem, the LED’s use PWM with a (I think) 50/50 duty cycle. So the camera captures the Led’s Flicking on/off. Side view helps a bit as camera isn’t looking directly at the Led’s. There’s also been some studies about how using these frequencies is unhealthy, especially in low-lit rooms. The solution is to use Led’s that flicker up over 160k frequency. Another solution is to, instead of using a 50/50 duty cycle, to smooth the light cycle such that it doesn’t go on/off, it just approaches the upper and lower bounds.I sent an email about this some time back...I don’t know if firmware could help with smoothing...
Great news
Ok, I managed to slave everything to circuit and.....got that infamous Mpk mini arp triggering Circuit!