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.
Manual/automatic labelling for MIDI/Mixer page instruments from multitimbral apps
Since trying out the latest AB3 compatible ThumbJam in the MIDI page, its become clear that when using several instruments on separate MIDI tracks in the MIDI or mixer page - that it would be extremely helpful if we were able to give each "track" a name corresponding to the instrument being used on each instrument channel.
Or better still if the AB3 API standard were able to query the AB3 app for this information.
For example ThumbJam can support up to 8 separate instruments - which can be controlled via separate MIDI sources in the MIDI page and then each channel mixed separately in the mixer page.
So if i am using a double bass on channel 1, a Hang on channel 2 and say their mellotron strings on channel 3 - all from ThumbJam - currently theres no indication of which instrument is on which channel.
So if one is saving the entire state for an AB3 session - it would be useful to be able to manually label each source/track - or better still - encourage developers of multitimbral AB3 compliant apps which are able to present their audio channels on separate audio channels - for the developer to modify their app so that it can dynamically publish the name of the instrument used internally - ( double bass/hang/ mellotron etc ) and publish those names - rather than what happens at the moment which is just
Instrument 1
Instrument 2
Instrument 3
and so on
Clearly the developer needs to handle their end - dynamically publishing any on-the-fly changes to names - which AB3 needs to then be able to display these names in each AB3 page.
I believe that some standards ( AUv3 etc ) also support a long-name as well as a short-name for such attributes - as often there is limited space - so a shorter abbreviated name - is useful.