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
As the owner of an Electribe 2 Sampler i can say they are a lot of fun. And there is great performance potential. But getting samples on and off is a pain tbh. And the 24mb may or may not be limiting to you, depending on what you intend to use it for. I'd say it excels at one shots - drum or melodic.
Personally i'm using BM3 mostly now but if that doesn't fit for you i'd say look hardware as there aren't any other good sampler options on ios at the moment (for the record i do think BM3 is one of the best apps out though).
syrup and Hosh, just reminded me that the mpc 500 runs cf cards and also that it connects to your puter via usb and shows up as a class compliant hard drive.
I am disappointed with AB3 still not having midi clock sync, only link, a sampler without midi sync
Batteries, cards and USB is a lot going for it. Minimal hardware controls and that tiny screen though...
Huh? It's not a sampler. I appreciate the LINK when I use it, and a solid midi clock source is always welcome but I'm not sure an app entirely devoted to connecting other apps "needs" any sort of sync at all.
So, if I do go the hardware route then current favourites are the SDP (because I can hit it) and the MPC500 because it would also give me a nice 16 track sequencer. The electribe sampler is still shouting Me Me Me, but MIDI wierdness and difficulty in getting samples onto it are making it shout quieter.
Looks like Nanostudio and BM3 are the only serious contenders iOS wise, with Nanostudio ruled out because I am already on iOS 11.
@kobomoto MPC Shows up as class compliant drive....on iOS ?
Sorry I meant BM3
Sorry, not read through the whole thread but what exactly are using the sampler for ?
Mainly for creating and playing vocal stabs and phrases, the main reason I started looking at a hardware sampler was to be able to play vocal samples through my mininova and then record the result as my interface will not allow me to do this purely on the ipad....
My options are to play the samples on something else or get a multi channel interface or ignore the mininova and use purely iOS...
The sampler route seems to offer most in terms of 'other' added value depending on what I eventually go for...
This!
Read this twice.
Might be wide of the mark .. korg microsampler ?
https://reverb.com/uk/item/6766843-korg-microsampler-sampling-keyboard?gclid=Cj0KCQjw4eXPBRCtARIsADvOjY2H07IjCXb-5Wza84UTxG4o6YPMqHbqwOvO_TFim9wTEYve0GanUZ8aAnMMEALw_wcB&pla=1
Great machine, but @ £400 it is in the same bracket as an Electribe, which also acts as a sequencer. If I could find one in the £250-£300 region I'd be tempted.
Microsampler has small capacity ,plus only 8 banks... (and no attack envelop)
I agree with this wholeheartedly. I'm not at all an expert or power user, so I don't want to compare my experiences to people who are. But I'm part of a decreasingly rare class of consumers for this stuff whose first exposure to synths, drum machines, and samplers, was on iOS, and then that led to my interest in some hardware later on. If you come at it from that backwards direction, the value and capabilities of most entry-level hardware seems totally inadequate compared to what you can do iOS.
I find that I still have interest in hardware synths (like the Korg Minilogue) because you have physical knobs and switches, and you can tell yourself that analog sounds better than the digital processing on iOS synths. I also find that while the entry level hardware drum machines are more limited than iOS versions, it can be a lot of fun to program on physical piece of hardware, and they all of their own character so it's fun to try different ones.
But samplers are basically just file players with editing/mangling capabilities. A 10-year-old hardware effort at that can seem incredibly archaic due to processing power, storage mediums, etc. Just think about the fact that the Motorola RAZR (flip) was kind of the "it" phone in 2005, and a "smart" device for most people was something like a Palm Pilot PDA.
I have the Volca Sample, and I don't think I'm going beyond that in terms of hardware samplers. It's extremely limited, but you can load some longer samplers if you're willing to give up some of the 100 storage slots. If I were truly interested in doing more complex sampling, I think I would rather use a $50 MIDI controller and either a good sampling app or one of the built-in samplers in iOS DAW's. File management just makes it so much easier to do it on an iDevice or computer. I set up my Volca Sample to have about 6 or 7 different "racks" with 10 instruments in each one, and then the remainder filled out with some middle-C pitched synth or bass notes.
Wow, really? I didn't realize that. Thanks for giving me another reason to wait for NS2 instead of buying BM3.
Indeed. "Files should be named with a qwerty keyboard, not a jog wheel and arrows" – Winston Churchill
I did the same. 6 drum machines, 10 extra kicks, 10 extra snares and 20 synth/noise/blip samples. Took a while and I'm finding the sounds aren't really balanced well so I wind up futzing with the volumes a lot, usually bringing everything down to the level of the sample that isn't loud enough. I could jump back on the computer to fix it but I never seem to want to—I bought it to get away from the screen!
Fun as using you as an excuse to feed my GAS is, maybe we should get to the bottom of this. I don't own a UCA202 but seems to me that you should be able to do this. Can you describe your setup in a little more detail?
the thing about hardware samplers that usually isn't mentioned on a forum like this albeit rightly so... is the muscle memory, there isn't anything in software anywhere that has emulated the muscle memory that is utilized when mastering these hardware samplers.... people simply fly around the samplers becoming one with them in a way that you can't do on software. The experience can't even be duplicated or at least hasn't yet even with hybrid controllers + lappy although that does Come close to the experience. This is why if you look up videos on youtube of something like the mpc 500 which is the least user friendly of the mpc series or something like the Yamaha su-700 videos, or even the Yamaha Qy-20, qy-70, etc.. which aren't samplers but sequencers.......... still people are flying around these machines like you rarely see or experience on software. So once your muscle memory has developed you essentially have two minds working on your music for you, one on navigation and the other on creativity and it just flows. This is why these workflows hold value.
that's a good question, I don't know, I didn't know that external hard drives could show up on the iPad, is it just plug and play or you gotta jump through hoops?
Well, I tried by using both AUM and Cubasis as host......I have uca connected via CCK, tried to get the iPad to play a sample out through the left out channel, which is connected to audio in on the Mininova, the audio out on the mininova is connected to the right in on the UCA....then the right out on the uca is connected to speakers for monitoring.....there is no signal reaching the right out...
I have come to the conclusion that I cannot split the left/right as separate channels and that they are treated as a stereo pair.
Very much this....since having circuit for a while I can rattle stuff out really quick thanks to the muscle memory, i just do it without thinking.
under iOS 10 it probably will show up but not be supported for wav files (iExpander).....I think this is what happens if you connect a camera ? Although there are those devices that can be used as external drives with specific support in an app (Cubasis/Auria can use these I think)
Not sure if anything changed on this front with iOS11.
Easy transfer of samples from the iPad to the device is really important....don't want to have to use a PC every time I transfer anything to/from it
I dunno if this is really a hardware-only thing. Isn't it more a 'use the shit out of something' thing? I can fly around Nanostudio pretty quickly after years of using it a lot. I'm like a slug using Cubasis though.
That's a bummer. So it can send and capture audio to and from the mininova but you can't monitor at the same time is the issue? Wonder if a separate UCA202 thread might be worth it, just to verify your findings. Lots of people here use them. Maybe someone has a work around.
Is it possible to use the headphone out and the UCA202 at the same time?
I second this - if you have decided for a hardware device then you can't escape - and no more excuses waiting for the next big thing or release of I-dunno-what.
Reminds me on my desktop DAW (Sawstudio) that's likely perceived as the most non-intuitive approach at first glance.
But it quickly turns out to be the most productive tool for my personal needs.
No bells&whistles, no fancy graphic distracting the key, clever keyboard assignments.
I agree with Syrupcore's point as well, I used to zip around Ptools, cakewalk, and early fruityloops like that however tactility gets big points imo. I just got a digitakt last night and I was hating on it from the go for all of the little things that they omitted that are such unnecessary headaches and I notice all the while in the midst of my hating how much I was enjoying it lol
@andy plankton.
Which did you choose in the end ?
I have mpc5000 and have decided to sell it because bm3 just works better. I like the mpc workflow, but bm3 is just so much more flexible and cant justify keeping the mpc
good point - the MPC5000 sounds very 'modern' - hard to tell any difference firing up samples from a(ny) currrent device, be it IOS, PC or Mac.
The old Akais and in particular EMUs are way different with their specifically tuned and tweaked sample sets for their own native hardware.
You can easily tell by EMUs 'Proto...' series of sample sets released on desktop (free downloadble) with their software Proteus. They sound pretty lame and lifeless in comparison to the original.
Peeking at those programs on such a sampler reveals an amount of details hardly anyone will want to apply today - you may count times in days to tweak just a single instrument that way, let alone a bank