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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Multi-Channel routing?

Hi,

now that we have a decent Audio Engine (Auria), a decent MIDI sequencer (insert favorite app here), a million decent synth apps, and a decent way to route Audio in realtime (Audiobus), we are pretty close to a decent DAW environment on the iPad.

BUT: For example: Sampletank has 4 seperate sounds (Multimode), however it is not possible to route these through 4 seperate stereo channels through Audiobus into the host app, so all 4 sounds can only be processed or recorded all mixed, which of course doesn't make sense...

Will it ever be possible to route MULTIPLE seperate stereo channels from ONE single app through AB? Or is that already possible, and the app (in this case, Sampletank) just doesn't support it?

Thanks

Comments

  • @instinctive patience is what's needed !
    At this moment in time all your apps in the input slots of Audiobus will be effected by apps in the effects slot and then recorded by apps in the output slot.
    A lot of us here on this forum are waiting for the next update of Audiobus which should arrive very soon now,that may change a lot of things about the way we currently route signals around in the bus.
    I think I have just had a sneak preview when my Ipad 4 offered to connect its Audibus to the Audiobus running on my IPhone 5S.

  • yep, AB is still single channel. You can of course do 4 passes to get the audio out of sampletank.

  • @syrupcore: Hey, cheers from the NanoStudio forums ;-) Well, I prefer to never record anything and always work in realtime as to being able to always modify notes / automation after the fact... so that's not an option... anyway, thanks.

  • Helloha @instinctive! Yep, I often prefer the same. Hopefully NS2 with a new Audiobus or a killer IAA implementation will save us all. :)

  • Actually Audiobus already supports multiple ports (stereo channels). Loopy supports that already but other apps haven't yet picked up on it.

    About single channel: that's something we're addressing in the next update.

  • Yeah!! thanks Sebastian.

    also, the bigger news in this thread may be from @multitouch, do you care to elaborate on :

     I think I have just had a sneak preview when my Ipad 4 offered to connect its Audibus to the Audiobus running on my IPhone 5S
    

    ??? What!!?? Multi-channel and multi-iOS device?

    This is going to be huge.

  • @Hmtx I would love to elaborate
    I was running Audiobus with my beloved LoopyHD in output and Sunrizer and SPA in inputs on my Ipad 4 {my first ever Idevice} and sat next to me on the sofa was my IPhone 5S {my first ever smart phone} switched on but no audio apps running.

    I had Sunrizer in front of me on the Ipad and was starting and stopping SPA using the Audiobus
    Tab {BTW Sunrizer was using the new Audibus tab with loopy loop indicator which it doesn't anymore strange ! } Then all of a sudden a message appeared saying " would you like to connect to Audiobus on IPhone ? and I was like WOW is this new or is it old but has never been mentioned on the forum before anyway Hell yes was my answere as I clicked the yes option then I quickly checked both Audiobus Apps to see if any new connecting nodes had appeared but no nothing on either so I'm just going to wait to see if this really was a premonition.

  • edited October 2013

    I think I have just had a sneak preview when my Ipad 4 offered to connect its Audibus to the Audiobus running on my IPhone 5S
    ??? What!!?? Multi-channel and multi-iOS device?

    Audiobus was always planned as inter-device audio. It's a network protocol and initially we wanted to launch it as such. But the quality of the connection wasn't reliable, at least it wasn't in our tests a year ago in places with dozens of other active wifi-networks. It's a cool feature though and we're still thinking about how to best deliver it to you guys.

    The reason why @Multitouch saw it is because iOS 7 did away with devices showing their MAC address to other iOS devices. In an older version of the SDK we used the MAC address to figure out if an app was running on the local device or another one on the network. You've probably used the same app (with an older SDK in it) on two different devices which triggers this bug and which shows you a buggy version of this capability.

    TL;DR: Audiobus can do inter-device audio (and triggers). We just decided against making it public because we weren't sure if it's reliable enough for iOS musicians.

  • Oh and btw: congrats, you just found a super secret bug :)

  • edited October 2013

    @multitouch, wow. So, correct me if this could be anything else, but I think we're very close to gaining audio over wi-fi! :) :-) =)
    your 5s is obviously iOS 7. What about the iPad 4? I don't have any compelling reason to upgrade my iPads to iOS 7, but this might change my mind.

    edit: thanks for the info Sebastian. but... still so many questions. Can we use this super -secret bug within Audiobus if we follow the right steps to exploit it? Is it being developed further?

  • @Hmtx both my devices are running IOS 7.0.2
    @Sebastian Thanks it was really exciting discovering it.

  • Interesting! :-)

  • Can we use this super -secret bug within Audiobus if we follow the right steps to exploit it?

    As far as I know there's no way to get it working without us enabling it in the Audiobus app (and maybe releasing a new SDK).

    Is it being developed further?

    Yes, it will be. We're currently working on delivering the most requested features but audio over wifi is something that we'd really like to have.
    The problem with it is that it might be quite a lot of work to support it and educate users about how to use it the right way. There also need to be a few UI improvements/new features that are coming with the new Audiobus update before we can do device-to-device stuff.

    Our main problem was and is that inter-device Audiobus is prone to crappy wifi-networks and neighbours running their microwaves next to the room you're trying to make music in.

    The reason for that is that it's uncompressed low-latency audio. So it needs a flawless, fast wifi connection, ideally without any encryption going on. I'm talking about a separate WiFi network dedicated to just Audiobus devices.

    In the end we'd actually like to charge for it in form of an in-app purchase because it's definitely going to be a lot of work to support it and it's been a lot of work to make it (even though we decided against putting it in Audiobus 1.x so far).

  • edited October 2013

    IAP for Inter-Device Audiobus capability sounds like a perfectly fair way to go with this! :-)

    By the way, since we are talking about features, and since you posted last week that we are only a few weeks away from release of the next version, AND since you just stated that "We're currently working on delivering the most requested features...", could you PLEASE tell us what features that we most requested will be in the upcoming version of Audiobus? PLEASE? (not yelling, just begging and wheedling) :-)

  • I'm not going to spoil everything here. :)

  • How about a fresh shiny new thread then? ;-)

  • @Audiojunkie Stop begging,you are killing me with laughter !!!

  • Regarding inter-device Audiobus, in the long run you might be able to benefit from an Apple type approach where if you had control of the HW (i.e., you manufacture or OEM a micro network device). You would then have the ability (within FCC and similar limits) to control the environment in a really powerful manner. This is certainly not something that would be viable in a near term timeframe, but it seems like it could be a really unique and evolving "Premium" solution. For less complex scenarios the existing solution might be "good enough" for those not demanding a premium experience. Just thinking out loud...

  • I would buy the Audiobus IAP and a second WIFI hub without a second thought for this nextgen technology.

  • Was thinking exactly what @adamstu was thinking. Consider making a sweet little audiobus WIFI device. Make it bone simple to connect our devices to it.

  • Why go through the trouble of making a new wifi device, when Audiobus could just use Bluetooth 4?

    I've downloaded Bluemidi on my iOS devices, and for wireless MIDI, Bluetooth destroys WIFI. Literally no latency problems transmitting through Bluemidi to my Mac.

    Can Bluetooth support audio streams equally well?

  • Can Bluetooth support audio streams equally well?

    That's the question...

  • @Multitouch

    I would buy the Audiobus IAP and a second WIFI hub without a second thought for this nextgen technology.

    I actually did buy an extra Airport Express for this and it's... kind of cool :D

  • I found the iUSBPort device; it's intended for streaming media during a trip, but turns out to also act as a generic hub for NetworkMIDI. Works great between instances of MidiBridge.

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