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
It easy to look back at how things were better, but there are just as many if not more that will tell you the music being made right now is much much better.
As for them having less, that has nothing at all to do with musicality or even song arranging and simply technicality, they layered and dubbed probably more than a hundred times, but people think there is some how less going on in those songs, there isnt, they just didnt have full recall, which is probably the number one reason for having so much separation in tracks.
A lot of this "we never had so good" stuff is pure silliness, we have what we have, if you want to use just four tracks you can, it still wont make you the beatles.
It would be a brave or very foolish man who claimed that anything made now is much better than The Beatles, Motown and Phil Spector.
As for using 4 tracks not making anyone The Beatles, nobody even suggested that it would. The point was that immense creativity was achieved using at most 8 tracks. So to reverse your own logic, anyone can choose to use 100 tracks, but it won’t make them great songwriters. That, my friend, is the crux of the argument, and what is missing in the majority of the highly polished turds promoted by the music industry as it stands today.
If you cant see that todays music is better and more important than yesterdays music for a lot of people without calling them foolish, you are completely closed minded, I will just wish you the best of luck with that.
Imagine There’s no tape machine,
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the Tracks,
Recording for today... aha-ah...
Imagine there's no hiss
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no overcompression, too
Imagine all the channels
Mixing nice and clean... You-huhu ...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Good lord, 5 pages... I'm with a few others who've stated this has been gone over since the first serious synth apps showed up on iOS and each side seems to have dug in with their take.
I've waffled on about this a lot in putting over Auria Pro or some other app, pointing out how the tools on iOS today are miles better than the four track cassette recorder & hardware reverb I started on in the early '90's.
But I can see how people can doubt the efficacy of iOS, I sure did before I got my Air 2 in 2015. My only point of reference was Android music apps which were certainly NOT ready for prime-time, so before I was surprised by my wife with the iPad I admit I lumped iOS music apps & music production capability right next to Androids, I thought it was just gonna be more shit.
But when I got my Air 2, went through the App Store and saw what available I was blow away, then after I did my research and bought some bedrock apps (Auria, Audio Share, etc), used them, I bought in 100%. iOS is all I use now in my home studio, my old desktop set up is in the closet.
But I do remember what my first thoughts were re: recording with iOS, so I get if someone can't get into it.
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You are confusing personal taste with creativity. Whether a given song today is more important to an individual is not the point of the discussion. Have a nice day.
How is the CPU power of IOS specifically A11 or such? Say I decide to bounce my tracks, or instead of midi record a rompler keyboard into it, and have the max count of Auria Pro, or say alot of tracks of audio like 19. It's all audio so the only ram is being used by the waveforms, and I want to MIX my song with the included VST and addons, would it easily run 19 to 50 tracks of AUDIO with plugins like flanger / delay / reverb / harmonizer EQ Compressor? Plugins use CPU, audio uses ram lol
Basically, I still want to get into it, what's the best videos showcasing workflows for iOs?
Like, recording vocals, could I record 10 takes into Ios, delete the takes I don't want
fix em up, then have 4 audios routed to a harmonization track, and main VO routed to main ? lol I have no idea how ios works besides playing with FL on android along time ago
I think there's a lot of distractions with new tech, which although a wonderful thing for talentless tweakers like myself, might be diluting the focus of real talent.
Jim Morrison - in his apartment with a new iPad and all the top apps - creating crazy psych techno beats and never trying out that voice.....John Lennon and Paul McCartney, in their separate houses creating tracks in Komplete as solo projects and never writing songs together or honing their craft in Hamburg. Ringo who?
You win some you lose some.
It's not just about cpu it's more about screen size. iPad screens aren't big enough for comfortable viewing and manipulation of lots of DAW tracks. And touch screens aren't as effective for editing, so it's a slower experience. However for step sequencers and other instruments more designed for touch iPads work really well.so it's more about finding a pattern of workflow which works for you.
That should all work just fine in Auria. You can comfortably run 60 or more tracks of audio, with plugins running on 25 of those tracks without needing to freeze, on an iPad Air 2 - it should be even better on one of the latest iPad Pros or even the base model iPad 2017. Audio is streamed from disk in Auria so RAM is not a limitation for audio tracks. Also it has very flexible routing so you can have AUX sends, busses, and subgroups to your heart's content.
The caveat being that the plugins would need to be native Auria plugins - which are among the best on iOS anyway, including the entire FabFilter collection as well as some great options from PSP. If you want to run AUv3 plugins as well, or instead, you won't be able to run as many instances.
I've done a ton of tracks in Auria over the years, so I'm very familiar with it's limitations. Trying to run a bunch of MIDI tracks with live instruments is not a great workflow, but running a bunch of audio tracks work very well. To make life easier I avoid adding too many plugins while I'm recording and tracking, so that I can keep the project latency down at 128. Once I've finished the recording phase I will bounce all the MIDI tracks to audio, set the latency to 4096, and start adding plugins and mixing. Working this way it really doesn't feel like a limited environment, you can create very complex layered tracks.
I would argue that one of the main things that defines creativity is not constantly referring to the past, but looking to (and trying to shape) the future.
Recording artists in the 60s were using what was the latest technology available to them at the time, and pushed it to the limits of what it could do. Of course they would have taken the opportunity of using more tracks if that technology had been available to them.
I think you're arguing that the limitations they faced made them more creative, but I don't agree - they didn't see them as limitations at the time, multitrack recording was a big breakthrough and would have felt liberating: suddenly you can layer your music and record overdubs. Having more tracks just gives you additional freedom and options, but the original (and most important) benefits were already there.
The point is that modern recordings undeniably sound better than ones from the 1960s in a technical sense: more bass, better defined instruments, clearer treble. 60s recordings have a certain charm from their comparably lo-fi character (and from tape compression etc), but on an objective level the sound quality is no match for modern recordings. That is of course a completely separate issue from the artistic merit of the artists involved.
The caveat to the above paragraph being the loudness war, which has seen a lot of the potential of modern recording tech go down the toilet, but luckily the loudness war is almost certainly over now that streaming platforms actually make overcompressed recordings sound quieter than there more dynamic counterparts.
Can’t recall if I posted this in the past, but my favourite Beatles quote is Ringo being asked what it was like to work with Lennon & McCartney. Something like...
Ringo: “I’d turn up at the studio and play them my new song, Octopus’s Garden. They’d say, that’s nice, Ringo, we’ve got this, and play me Yesterday.”
The many SoundTestRoom videos on YouTube are great for seeing both individual apps in action, and how these work in Cubasis, AUM and AudioBus.
lol, I love Ringo's drumming though - his work on Strawberry Fields and a lot of the rockier White Album tracks is superb. I can't see Helter Skelter sounding as good with ElasticDrums.
I never considered this point of view before....It rings true with me.
Not at all. Allow me to clarify. What I’m saying is, working with the limitations of the day still resulted in music that has been playing and selling ever since. Sure, if more tech including more tracks had been available, they’d have been used. But the point I’m trying to make is that the most extraordinary music was created using far less than we all have available on our iPads today. Would ‘A Day in the Life’ have sounded any better if spread over 100 tracks?
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I didn’t know that. Good news.
And while Paul McCartney is writing Yesterday, in a parallel universe he's instead spent most of the day on the phone to Apple support, trying to sort out the latency and sound quality issues on his iPad Pro.
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Yeah, he is seriously underrated.
I suppose what made his son, Zak, so sought after was being taught drums, first by Ringo then Keith Moon. All he needed for the full set was Bonzo.
I completely get your point, which applies to a studio place with acoustic treatment.
But even 8 mics at home will cause more havoc than benefit
(that ever recurring question about '... we want to record our band. Which interface, 8 channels for drum, 2 vocal, git, bass etc...')
I listened to a lot of such tracking - and it was frankly unusable in 95% of cases.
Right - I misunderstood. What you're saying is essentially "stop complaining and get on with it". That's a point of view I can definitely get on board with
The tech we have at our disposal is a miracle really. In previous decades you would have needed access to a studio to do what we can do relatively cheaply at home now. A condenser mic, an interface, an iPad and some apps, maybe a guitar or a keyboard, and you've got everything you need.
One thing I really appreciate is that you can take your damn time and not feel the pressure. If I want to sit and do 20 takes of a vocal I can - I'm not paying for studio time so the clock isn't ticking. If I decide it's all a pile of crap and start again, I'm not paying the engineer so there's no pressure. That's a luxury in itself.
And while @MonzoPro has a point about some of the potential issues, I still think you can do extraordinary things with what we have.
Yes. Better voice clarity, better snare, better orchestra definition, better stereo sound and so on
All technicalities. What I meant was, would it be a better song?
Yesterday
I pressed a key still waiting for the sound to play
Until a patch latency's here to stay
Oh I believe in insta play.
Oh, I love a good complain.
But seriously, as you say, what we have available is miraculous. In particular, having a studio in an iPad is something I could not have imagined, far back in the day.
I’m also in full agreement with you as to us being able to do extraordinary things with what we have. For me and my crew, using those options in a deliberately sparring way gets results that are best for us.
Latency,
All I hear is fucking latency
like a shadow hanging over me
I really hate, that latency.
Why, my iPad Pro
had to go:
I couldn't play
It just, sounded wrong
with that long
drawn-out delay-ay-ay-ay
My ex went to school with Zak and used to play in his ‘garden’ (Tittenhurst Park), and when the Lennon’s had it before, her dad used to make and deliver shoes for them. Right ole mess he said it was. But I’m veering drastically off topic again....
Stop it, I’m going to have to think one up now...