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.
TF7 Synth is on the bus!
TF7 is a polyphonic FM synthesiser with an interface that is built around touch. Make wonderful music by playing shapes on the iPad!
Price is free, with a $2-99 Pro upgrade IAP:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id718101734?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo=4
Comments
I'm liking the demo sounds. But at medium quality setting a lot of the demo presets overloaded the iPad 2 CPU, and I can't change the quality to low (as it suggests if you're on iPad 2) without the app hanging. I'm on iOS 7. It's definitely tempting at this low price, but I do wanna be able to use it on the iPad 2 before a purchase, and since I can't switch to low quality I think I'll hold of a bit. If I can...:)
ChrisG you have to restart it to change quality.
AB on upgrade? I thought that wasn't allowed.
@mgmg4871 It completely hangs when I press any of the "tab" buttons above the various settings, so I have to kill it and restart, but the settings are always at default when I start it up again. Seems it's in need of a patch/fix update.
But, I couldn't help myself so I bought it. And this thing suddenly got a lot deeper then I thought, it's pretty awesome. 7 algorithms, all with different "setups" with various OSCs, LFOs, filters, ADSRs, VCOs etc. A wee bit over my head, gonna need to dig up a manual somewhere, although I managed to make some decent wobbly pad not really knowing what I was doing. And worth mentioning are the effects, I think there's 10 or so effects that can all be used and tweaked however you want, reverb, stereo delay, pitch shift delay, rotary effect, flanger, compressor, auto filter sweep, EQ, auto whammy. Also comes with over 100 preset sounds. And at only $2.99 it's a bargain. (But as mentioned, it eats the CPU and battery for breakfast on my iPad 2 iOS 7)
There are two sliders under settings, one says velocity something and the other pitch bend. But I don't notice anything different using them? I thought at first they would let you slide your finger(s) around inside a cube to change velocity, pitch bends etc? Anyone know what they do?
@funjunkie27 AB is available in the demo, I had to have it open before I opened Audiobus for it to register.
@flo26 Ok that might be it,
It would be really great to be able to assign some modulations to the pads though, like pitch bend, LFO/mod, volume, filter.
Edit: gotta say the cube/pads thing is really neat, and one of those things that helps you finding new melodies and chords. But It would be nice to have a ordinary keyboard that you can switch between for those moment when u just wanna lay down something really fast
Here's the official site http://tenaciousfrog.com/tf7-synth/
I contacted Dev. It seems any changes in settings freezes app. I tried midi also and it froze up.
@ChrisG, you can set the modulations for the XY pad in Settings->Controls, or do you mean the key pads themselves? That would be cool.
Haven't tried the full version yet, but this does have some nice clear sounds...
@mmp yea I meant the pads. But yea I think I saw pitch being one of the options available for the big XY. But using the XY pad for various expression mods while playing is a bit awkward , and it's not available in full screen mode.
From Dev
Hi Morris
I see the issue now, will fix it. Probably something to do with Xcode optimizations as the debug version I tested on my ipad before I submitted was working fine.
Thanks so much for alerting me to this!
Pier.
Hi there,
I'm the developer and someone has alerted me to the bug in settings.
It is probably due to some code optimizations introduced by Xcode in release mode. Will check it out and fix it soon.
Thanks so much for checking out the app!!
Pier.
Haha hi Morris we posted at the same time!
Interesting! We need a video demo and some sound samples! :-) I want to hear how this thing sounds. :-)
More info from Dev.
Hi Morris,
Right now TF7 doesn't send midi output to other apps.
It's receives midi from midi capable devices and apps.
As for inter app audio, it's in the pipeline.
Thanks.
Pier.
Welcome to the forum Lppier. TF7 is a pleasant surprise.
@ChrisG I get no overload on medium in AB. Must be buffer size.
It depends a lot on what presets and how many voices are playing etc. But in AB I seem to be able to squeeze a few more notes out of it before it starts to break up, it's not a huge jump in performance as with Cotracks that went from 256 to 512 on iPad 2 in the latest update. One weird thing I noticed on the CPU meter inside TF7 is that without AB, it's hovering quite low while idle, and with AB it's hovering around 50% or so when idle, but without having a negative impact on the nr of voices I can trigger.
Anyone know what the "!" button next to the lock icon on the topbar above the pads is? Well I guess @lppier knows.
Is it some on screen help or a panic button (I can't get it to do anything)?
I'm guessing MIDI Panic
Maybe. It doesn't stop/interrupt incoming midi tho from what I heard.
OK, I picked it up tonight. It might have some new character and sounds that I didn't have with my previous sonic palette. :-) It's not advanced, and yet it sounds better than other FM synths available for the iOS. The price is right--I'd say it was a worthy purchase. :-)
Just like to update that the Settings bug mentioned here has been fixed.
Thanks all for your patience!
Big update coming to this one. Assignable modulations to the pads (check out the preset video it demos the new pad mods and it looks/sounds great!), saw a new preset pack, the morph XY now have popup menus on the x and y axis where you can choose destinations (was tucked away under settings before I believe). Really looking forward to this update, and the preset pack is an insta purchase, Pier makes some really awesome presets. Dunno any release date yet tho ?
New preset pack demo and the new assignable mod behaviors for the pads:
Pro upgrade - What you get demo:
Very nice! Already anxious.
Wow, the new mod features looks sweeeeeet! What a great, well-thought-out app. Thanks!
Hi,
Did anyone managed to control TF7 from Thesys or Pattern Midi Sequencer?
I couldn't find TF7 in any of these apps midi out settings.
Animoog or iSEM work fine with them.
If you succeeded please let me know how.
Thanks
@Shay Thesys and TF7, couldn't get em to work. Thesys shows up in TF7, but that's about it..But there are always certain app combinations that won't work w. virtual midi, I think the respective devs needs to look into each issue since virtual midi is a bit of a mess as I understood it all
I really like TF7 but I suspect that its MIDI implementation is flawed. It offers the user a list of MIDI source devices but doesn't seem to allow any of them to be selected. It doesn't advertise itself. MidiBridge doesn't see it.
OK, so I've no idea how VirtualMIDI and CoreMIDI are supposed to appear to users but TF7 isn't intuitive, as far as MIDI config is concerned.
@Lppier: Any comments? Advice would be welcome.
This is where we need Audeonic's Midibus implementation. Since it is known for sure that Audiobus will not be including anything with MIDI, I think it would be really beneficial for developers to use this kit:
http://audeonic.com/midibus.shtml
We need to show the developer that we are interested! He seemed to lose interest after there was a lot of speculation that Audiobus would include solutions for this.....
Midibridge is the most powerful and proper implementation of MIDI we have on the iOS format--developers ought to be making use of it!
Thanks guys for your help.
This is what I suspected.
At least I know it is not a problem with my hardware/OS