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.
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wotja and grooverider
Very cool!!!!
I kinda feel like I’m making headway with the learning curve, but I sure hope Intermorphic fixes the noise/buzz problem! I sent a note to their web contact form, but I understand it may not be the best way to reach them. I just now also sent a Facebook message. I’m crossing my fingers. It would be SO much easier to put Wotja into my list of go to apps for creating things. If you want to use it with anything else, you have two choices. Either you turn off the ISE (intermorphic sound engine) in Settings, or you internally create an audio rendering of a mix, export it, and put it in an AUM File Player (or your DAW of choice). It’s a shame not to be able to use their ISE as is.
P.S. this app is proving to be less daunting as I spend more time with it.
I received an email from the dev this morning that a new update will be out momentarily (it’s been approved) to correct the noise and buzz problems. I’ll leave a note here after I’ve tried it out.
The updated release is out, and it fixed the audio glitches in AUM, Audiobus3 and apeMatrix. Now that it works inside each of these apps, there’s a lot more routing can be done. AND you can capture the audio for recording OUTSIDE of Wotja which is helpful.
The setup for mixes isn’t as complicated as I first thought, and you can make some nice things with it. I found it worth the time I’ve spent learning about it, and the more I use it, the more sense the manual makes.
I just wanted to find somewhere in this forum to say that I love this app. I used Koan way back in the day, this is 1000x more useful. Spend the time on it, you can get whatever results you want if you just rtfm!
I really wanted to get into it, as i used to use one of the early versions way back when, in the days of Windows 98 so was excited to see it was on ios. I tried the demo a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, even though i quite like manuals, (!) i found the whole thing completely impenetrable, & decided life was too short! I'm sure great things can be achieved with it. I think my attention span has dwindled somewhat over the years, or maybe my mindset has changed.....not sure which...... glad to hear your enjoying it, maybe i will give it another go sometime.......
Yes, I got a reply from the developer - it seems, this was a big in the last update to Wotja 2017
I got Wotja 2018 and am quite happy with that!
No bugs.
It looks as though folks perceive Wotja and generative stuff as very complicated or intimidating, but it really isn’t. Maybe it’s because Wotja could use a little love in the UI dept. Everything is laid out in such a plain, kinda non-musical way that it’s almost like I’m changing the settings on my phone. And features that you might think are presented up front, are often hidden in a submenu or expressed in nomenclature that might be unfamiliar. But if you’re very specific about what you want, and know a very elementary amount of music theory, it’s instant Tangerine Dream.
It’s true that it takes a while to get things really going. But I think it’s time we’ll spent. I’ve been using it with the internal sound engine + sending midi & clock to my hardware + controlling other iOS synths and I haven’t experienced any glitches or hiccups that I can remember. I have a non-pro 2018 iPad, so ymmv.
Can anybody point to some good examples of Wotja-generated music? I was getting excited about buying this but I have gone off it because I was unable to find anything inspiring made with it
I nearly like everything that comes out of the App, just per click,.
I rarely change the settings at all.
But I use it on work to better concentrate and not be distracted by people speaking around me.
Actually, that's also one of my major interests in generative music. I have the Eno/Chilvers apps, although Reflection is getting a bit tiresome after a lot of listens. The only reason I don't have Scape is it doesn't run on an iPhone.
But I'm also interested in the generative thing as a basis for creating my own music. As I said, I have been woefully disappointed in trying to find anything interesting that's come out of Wotja. Certainly nothing that sounds like Tangerine Dream. Maybe it's just that nobody who's made anything interesting has put it on YouTube
Looks like this is on sale today. Are folks going to pick it up?
It’s on sale now - but won’t be updated ever again. Wotja 20 will be out in the new year.....
That’s there business model - like it or lump it.
Nope, no update and it turns to mush.
This is their regular December sale on the annual version – there's also a free version with a range of subscription tiers that you can try out to see whether it's of interest, but the sale only applies to the one-year non-expiring standalone. They do this after their final update for the year, and $7.99 is pretty good for a version that usually remains perfectly usable and feature-complete for another three years. There was one unfortunate year (2017?) when the final update introduced a showstopper sound bug that you had to buy the next year's version to get past, but otherwise I've kept all these annual versions around (useful for running multiple instances, as it's not AU) and everything from 2016 at least still works.
Wotja is still the generative app to beat. You have as much (or as little) control as you want over every element including the sound engine, and it can do everything from instant unlimited Enoesque plink-and-drone to cosmic baroque madness. The instant-gratification functions overdo the classic Eno for my taste, but once you start rolling your own you quickly find yourself bending it to your own very personal styles, and there's a magic point where you find you've built something endlessly inventive and surprising that you could happily listen to forever. (Then you can hit a button and produce an entire instant album of similarly infinite variations on it.)
It's a great tool if you can get over the terrible interface, yeah I have 2017 and looks like audio is broken....but midi still works which is all I used it for anyway. I might get it again if they ever put in Ableton Link.
I’m getting quite regular glitches when I load Wotja free version as an IAA source in AUM. It’s like a pop or crackle and CPU jumps up about 20% momentarily. I’d want to be integrating it it so AUM so this is potentially a showstopper... is this a known issue?
I have the 2017 version too. I’ve given them way too much money over all their gimmicks to try and remain sustainable. Oftentimes I don’t think they’ve been fair about it at all.
The underlying code is pretty sophisticated but I’ve never enjoyed any of their interface incarnations. Kinda done with their product and cutting bait.
I get great results from Refraktions instead for interactive generative... and Polyphase is my new darling for generative that you can interact with.
Their pricing is so confusing, so I never buy.
Really love the drone and piano being generated at 8:13 in this video:
It's really worth giving them another shot while the 2019 unexpiring version is at £7.99. The 2019 version has been absolutely phenomenal, and that monthly sub (99p for my grandfathered sub, £1.49 for new starters) has been repaid a dozen times over by an incredible cascade of killer new features. For top-down old-Wotja users in search of instant gratification, there's now a radio feature ("Flow") which auto-generates new compositions endlessly on the fly to your own saveable set of parameters ("Schemes"). For bottom-up old Noatikl users, there's now JavaScript (mindblowing possibilities I still haven't begun to explore), a port of Mutable Instruments' Macro Oscillator in the sound engine, and I already forget what else. You get more updates in a year of Wotja than in a lifetime of many other apps, and the chaos of the 2017–18 consolidation, with its mad proliferation and revision of subscription tiers and versions, has settled into a really cool, well-integrated set of options for all tastes. (OK, Wotja Go! and WotjaBox are still a thing, but ignore them.) You get three days' free trial of all features free, then it's still free for 10 minutes' playtime (in 2017 it was one) and £1.49 a month for the 8-hour sub version with the all updates, £3.49 to lift the play limit to infinity, and £8.99 for commercial use. And uniquely, if you don't like subscriptions, they not only offer an alternative fullgrade version for only a little more than a year's sub, but discount it once it's finished with upgrades.
Refraktions and Polyphase are two of my favourite apps, and I mean no dissing to either when I say they can't and don't aspire to hold a candle to Wotja. Refraktions is an absolutely exquisite generative looper and Polyphase a stunning Fugue Machine-type sequencer, but they're hedgehogs rather than foxes, and I always have a feeling that I'm basically just tweaking someone else's music. Wotja gives you complete control over everything (if you want it, which you don't have to); they have this idea of what they call reflective music, which I wasn't originally sold on but now seems complete genius to me, where you incrementally iterate algorithms Eno-style to home gradually in on what speaks most deeply to you. The Schemes are the major, if untrumpeted, new development here, because they let you gradually refine templates (including variations on your own creations) to your taste, saving as you go. But for even the casual user, the fact that it's literally one touch – one touch! – to create an instant album or infinite radio of generative tracks seems like magic. I gifted the sale version to a non-muso friend the other day and she messaged me the next morning with a screenshot of the timeout message captioned "Achievement unlocked?": she'd been listening to one of my mixes for 8 hours solid.
Downsides (these are real): still no AUv3, and it's not a priority; IAA is extremely and I think increasingly flaky, though usually massageable with some patient tweaking of audio buffer settings (which have improved); Open In… disappeared in the 2019 version (I'm promised it's back in 2020) and file transfer currently has to go clumsily through Files, iCloud, or (frankly better than either) jailbreak; still way too much fixation on eighties Enoesque plinking and thin wispy drones for my taste, and could really use some more diverse demoes. (I realise I'm as guilty as anyone in not putting stuff out there where my mouth is.) But my god, this app is amazing and keeps getting better; it's the only app I've ever been happy to have on a subscription model, and frankly it's outrageous how little of my money I'm able to give them for the value I get from it. Big things supposedly in store for 1 Jan, but at the sale price the 2019 Pro version is already well worth it if it's dropped off your radar lately or if you've never taken it for a spin, and then you can always check out the new version for free and see whether it's for you (as of course you can with the free version now). In the first instance, go to the Flow tab and tap either the Ambient Strings or Ambient Mixes Box 2 schemes; I think these show off the current template set and sound presets the best.
Wow amazing explanation!❤️ So there’s no Open In the current pro app?
So how do we export the recording?
There’s no question these devs have made some very impressive generative code that gives the user an amazing amount of control over the sound.
I was paying for Miktkl for years. I actually wouldn’t have minded that they kept making new versions that you had to buy all over again... if they’d been significantly improved with new features. That wasn’t the case though. Most of the time you were buying the same app again but with bug fixes introduced with new iOS versions.
Then they went the Wotja route with subscriptions. I’m not signing up for a subscription... period.
I wrote a scathing review and they gave me Wotja 2017 basically to get me to edit my review.
I liked Wotja 2017 but I didn’t end up using it much. I simply don’t like their interface aesthetics and consequently don’t end up using it much.
Just checked and my Wotja 2017 is still working fine. If I used it more I might be tempted by the Wotja 2019 sale, but the fact you say they removed open in for the 2019 version, that’s a bit of a deal breaker.
I thought my Wotja 2017 audio was broken too, but noticed the app audio had been turned off. Turned it back on and it seems like it’s working fine via ios 13.3
oh great thanks
yeah I think I just turned that off as standard and forgot that setting
Wow downloaded the free version and already recorded some amazing stuff thru AB3 to AUM!!❤️❤️❤️❤️ 10 minutes limit though.
Same here... I turned it off some time ago when I was playing with just using it's midi out
Files app and iCloud still work, as do iTunes file sharing (or whatever's replaced it in Catalina), iFunBox, and iMazing, so it's only an issue in certain use cases such as sending files remotely. I managed to get through most of 2019 without even noticing it had gone, though it was really annoying when I wanted to send a file by e-mail. As recently as three years ago you could share an entire file as a URL or tweet, though the files (while still tiny) have got more complex since then as new features have been added.
Yes, that would be a reason not to be tempted by the current sale and maybe to hold off and see whether it's reinstated as promised in the next version in a fortnight's time. Don't forget that the subscription version does work for free with the 10-minute play limit, so if you're curious in the meantime you can have a look at what's changed since 2017 and see whether there's anything to tempt you. My own feeling is that 2018 was a fairly skippable year and 2019's been a pretty compelling one, but so much depends on whether the new features have a useful place in your life and workflow.