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
A small idea/request for the existing and new seq's...
Individual time signature or resolution per lane. Something simple like 1/4, 1/3, 1/2, 2x, 3x pretty please
Wow instabuy!
@brambos very nice, looking forward to the release!
@brambos will it be able to sequence external hardware too?
Where do I sign up for preorder?
Sure.. just use AUM to route the outgoing MIDI to wherever you want
The waiting is painful....
In sweden we say "den som väntar på något gott väntar aldrig för länge", which could roughly be translated "good things come to those who wait"
Please add (if not already) a kind of random value chance in % per parameter. For me it´s the simplest and best way to humanize just everything lol.
A reason why f.e. the ThumbJam arp works wonder with just the drop chance option to get out of machine gun sound pretty easy. That kind of bedlam in DrumJam is brilliant too.
This may end up being a totally different app, but it would be nice to have an AU MIDI app where you could import scala files which would then effect the options for controls based upon the number of tones in the scale. The AU MIDI app would output note and pitch changes based upon the scala file and the sequence setup in the app.
Sounds nice. I wonder just if that would works with tools which doesn´t support that themselves.
I´m the one crying for microtuning everywhere and asked for that also in Quantum but now i´m not sure if that would work.
Correct me someone if i´m wrong but if i understand it right, if you import f.e. a.tun file in tools which support it, it will define in what frequency each midi note will play. If you import such a file into a midi app and control another app with it, it just pitchbend the notes instead of using the proper frequency. So if your tuning will play f.e. something between a C4 and C4# on the midi key C2 and you app won´t support it, the midi C2 just will be pitchbend from C2 to this value which would sound not like expected (chip munk effect etc.). Or it doesn´t work at all with most tunings.
Or there have to be a clever programming which defines that always the closest "original" frequency will be used for the note and from there it will be pitchbend the shortest way.
Maybe it´s all bullshit but that is what i experienced when trying to control non-microtuned tools. F.e. .scl files imported into ThumbJam and then trying to use it as midi out for other apps.....not so good at the end.
It probably won't work since the 'tuning' has to be done on the receiving end by the app/synth you're controlling.
(ie. the synth just receives the midi-note and checks against it's internal tuning table).
At least my trusty old TX81Z had the option to create custom tunings by changing the tuning of each of the 12 notes in an octave. If I'm not mistaken the Roland Soundcanvas allows this too by sending some Voodoo SysEx dumps to it. There might be some other synths/apps capable of this too...
So you say my "theory" or what i described might be right and otherwise we only would get at best a kind of controlled pitch bend which can work but sounds terrible with higher notes and especially with samples.
Then i think there seems no other way for further crying for microtuning in each app
A bit of a bummer since that put iOS out of about 80% of my next projects since there isn´t much supporting it.
So it doesn´t make sense for midi apps yet....but maybe in the future.....
A scala file provides information about a scale .scl files. The implementation of support in a MIDI synth for the information stored in a scala file is a different story. Keyboard mapping for scala files is the other issue which needs to be addressed to most accurately utilize the scale represented in the .scl with a .kbm file.
Some approaches are to translate the scale to a MIDI note plus a pitch bend so depending upon the pitch bend settings of the synth app and the characteristics of the scale you’re using, this will severely limit how closely the tones produced will be to the scale described in the .scl file.
I don’t know all of the ins and outs of what would be needed to create an accurate chain of scale file to MIDI sequencer to synth app but I do know I want one. It may be necessary to have a synth app with built in .scl and .kbm support to work well for many scales in which case an AU MIDI sequencer would be limited to these apps/synths. These issues are discussed on this scala format page.
They cite UVI Falcon as an example of a synth that fully implements scala support (both .scl and .kbm). This is the same company that produced the BeatHawk app so hopefully they’ll be able to bring their experience to an iOS synth app that fully supports faithful scala file tone reproduction.
Perhaps @sonosaurus could enlighten us on the limits and apps which work best with ThumbJam’s scala capabilities?
(Micro)Tuning is not a meaningful MIDI feature indeed. The results would sound different with every receiving instrument and be completely unpredictable.
That´s what i thought (and tryed to explain in a weird thing). Good to know and so i can look further and not wait for an unusable feature lol.
That was what i thought (and explained really bad maybe). So it seems we all agree (if i finally get it) that it´s up to the receiving tool to handle that. Because of that i prefer tools with .tun files rather than .scl files. I had trouble with some which supports .scl but then sometimes no proper keyboard mapping and all goes weird.
.tun files seems to handle everything i need with one klick
I also own all the CSE stuff to create my own tunings etc. But i never use it really since there are already 1000´s to download. My favorite are still the ones which came with Alchemy 1.55 (or even before). Funny that Apple removed that great feature from their Alchemy because they might think people are to dumb to use other scale.
So i often prefer the old Alchemy 1.55 on my mac.
@Cib I edited the post you responded to with the addition of perhaps UVI could create an iOS synth that supports .scl and that the developer of ThumbJam might be able to offer some guidance on how to get the most out of it’s scala capabilities.
Maybe. I use .scl files within Falcon but it also doesn´t work proper with any instrument which is made for Falcon.
Omnisphere and most U-he synths are brilliant here since they use .tun files which do all the necessary mappings and you even can use several different tunings in one file etc.
Synthmaster One support .scl files too so it might be a good candidate for iOS as well.
So Sunrizer seems the only iOS app with .tun file import....sad that Zeeon doesn´t use it.
In any case and getting extremely OT it would be nice to have iOS synths that fully supported .scl along with the ability to create a playing surface that reflects the tonal structure of the imported scala file in a playing surface rather than having every synth app be based on 12 tone scales. The unique properties of a touch surface means that you can easily map different tone structures whereas this is hard to do with traditional instruments or hardware.
Here a .scl to .tun conversion site which suggests it shouldn’t be too difficult to have synth apps which support one format to support the other as well so we could import either .scl or .tun files.
True, the Wilsonic app f.e. is good for this (for me even the best example, you also can create .scl files and export them). Using this as midi out for tools which support it would be great. But it also works good on any normal keyboard for me since i´m used to play on it and while the scales are very different, the muscle memory still works.
Of course like you said a multi-touch screen is great for these things (minus tactile feedback).
Back to topic. I will cry anyway once a month for these features
@brambos will it work with aum only or will it work with bm3 and cubasis?
@brambos sorry I should have read your description. It will work with Auv3 midi hosts and currently only aum supports that.
After I've been using Ruismaker's and Patterning's sequencer for some time I find it hard to use any other drum sequencers on iOS. These 2 sequencers makes drum programming so fun and easy and it's so fast to come up with a nice drum beat.
The euclidean sequencer spreads the beats evenly but sometimes I want to override the evenly distribution of beats. I wish there was a radio button to check/uncheck the evenly distribution.
A very nice feature in Patterning is the probabilty that a beat will occur. These are the 2 feature request I have for Odessa. Thank you for your great products
I just wish Patterning would accept MIDI input from other MIDI sources. Unusually I like Patterning more for the ease of auditioning and loading the huge and fun - wacky - variety of its drum machine samples and sounds than the GUI for programming patterns.
I'm not convinced it is in the end any easier for on-the-fly programming of drum patterns than other more conventional GUIs. Maybe if i was someone who spent more time making my own than using pre-made ones by and large i'd change my mind... I prefer to tweak patterns other drum-machine geniuses have made - and then tweak them than roll my own from scratch. I'm not a drummer. Or beat maker.
I so on the other hand - love the Euclidean sequencer in RM.
As BBC sitcom's Miranda would say: "Such Fun!"
@brambos
If you haven't already done so - and I know it might be considered boring or dull - but i'd love it for one of the pattern-sequencer options just to be a plain-old Piano-Roll editor type thing. Albeit one which can optionally (like GrooveBox) have the notes in it conformed to a certain GLOBAL key-scale or key-chord combination. And maybe optionally "varied" in some other fancy manner.
Because mostly i'm happy to come up with a pattern or melodic motif myself from scratch - but what I really want is to be able to reuse that same pattern on-the-fly in different key-scale combinations - for example for a chord-progression I want - either pre-defined in advance - or even - and I dream about this - ON-THE-FLY in a live performance situation -
where - for example my Keith McMillen 12-step can "launch" the next ROOT-CHORD to be played in Ableton fashion. ( or - more challenging still - set-upSeveral chord-changes up-front on the fly - which then loop until I want something different..
And of course this gives you the opportunity to draw on all the best GUI approaches out there for piano-roll editors and rejecting the worst. No-one yet has come up with a really perfect implementation of PR editing yet. Maybe you're the one to finally do it
........... oh............. and the Moon On A Stick.
The beauty and utility of the Patterning GUI reveals itself with sequence lengths above 16. The RuisMaker sequencers are the only other ones I can think of off the top of my head that elegantly handle variable length track sequences above 16.
I need to spend maybe a bit more time "programming" in Patterning. But I have a very low attention-span "focus" threshold before I give up doing stuff in "tekkie-mode" musically.
Awesome.
Doesn't need to be too techie to get something interesting out of it. Try setting your hi-hat track length to 18 steps and enter a note on every other step except for the last four: enter notes on all 4. When you hit play, that little clutch of four faster notes will land at a different time each time the pattern loops (relative to your other 16 step tracks that is). Bring down the probability a bit and you'll wind up with a more interesting loop.
It would be really hard for a traditional 808 style drum app (say DM1 or one of the drum gadgets) to visually represent the extra steps on the hi-hat track without introducing a second screen.
I think the GUI does start to get a bit fidgetty when one of the inner track circles has more than 16 steps. Would be great if we could 'zoom' or something.