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.
xpressionPad - Synth/Sampler/CoreMIDI instrument iOS Universal Music (free)
expressionPad - Synth/Sampler/CoreMIDI instrument von mode of expression, LLC
https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/expressionpad-synth-sampler-coremidi-instrument/id1198834918?mt=8
Looks nice, not tested yet!
Comments
Where did this come from? And why is it free??
I had a quick play with it just now. Nothing we haven't seen before, but it's done very nicely and appears to be extremely configurable. Simple synth built in, plus a decent enough little selection of sampled instruments, but no way to add your own that I could see.
It advertises the ability to control other iOS instruments (apps) via CoreMIDI, but mentions nothing about Audiobus, IAA, etc. I haven't tested any of this, so if anyone else has the time, please report back!
According to the website you can also use it to control instruments on your Mac via network.
Anyway it seems to think it's the bee's knees and is indeed pretty slick, but I get the impression it might be targeted at users unaware of the existing iOS music-making 'ecosystem'... but I'd love to hear from anyone more knowledgeable who can put some time into it.
Couple of other musical toys on their website...
Noteplex:
http://modeofexpression.com/portfolio/noteplex/?portorder=menu
Ratatap Drums:
http://modeofexpression.com/portfolio/ratatap-drums/?portorder=menu
Anyone heard of these before?
Ratatap druns was one of the first music things I got on my ancient (LOL) ipad2 -- thought it was a decent sounding app, but haven't checked it in a long time. That was before I found Alchemy and other good stuff and way before AudioBus, so I never recorded anything. The devs have been around a long time and I'm looking forward to playing with this new app.
@flo26 scooped this one the day it came out. Like always it seems. https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/21173/dd-you-hear-about-this
Ah, cheers.
expressionPad appears to have been removed from the App Store. A really unfortunate development since it was quite a great and useful app.
A zombie thread to alert attention to a zombie app… I thought it was the Xpad app which is still out there.
I posted the same thing about expressionPad on two other forum threads and someone posted this app, “Beat Pads.” I never would have guessed that it plays notes since the name makes it sound like it would just be drum pads, but I’ve tried it out and it seems quite good.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beat-pads/id1633882803
And here are the two threads, which have both subsequently had some interesting discussion about similar types of apps:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/34690/what-apps-can-be-good-as-grid-based-controllers
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/29998/looking-for-something-like-the-linnstrument-for-ipad