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.

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

Standardizing the BPM for all apps

Hi,

I think the most immediate upgrade or enhancement to push the tool for all users (including noobs), is to offer an option that will standardize the BPM for apps included in the particular session (to a bpm number set in Audiobus). Of course, users could turn this feature off, and use the tool as they do now (incase they want one app to use another bpm). But for a whole, I think we all could benefit from this, and save alot of time. We could set the BPM, and select play, for all apps, through a "masters" option in Audiobus. Please tell me what you think.

Thanks!

Comments

  • edited January 2013

    Seconded. Also, some kind of general Virtual Midi controls would be nice. I still get confused when trying to make Sunrizer work with various apps which can control it (ie. Musix Pro or Gestrument). Having something standardised for that would be amazing.

  • It makes a lot of sense to me for Audiobus to provide the master clock seeing as it's become the 'linchpin' to our workflows. However the difficulty I foresee with this is that every app developer that that builds Audiobus compatibility into their app will need to allow this (if they respond to midi that is). Easy enough at the moment, with the SDK only being available on request but could be problematic once the SDK is made public - witness the mess that is Audio/Copy/Paste and the myriad of sloppy implementations.

    jm

    http://soundcloud.com/leftside-wobble

  • I agree - it has to be done right, and not some half @$$ job. Sebastian, you said "Yes." Is this at the top of our list, and if so, when do you plan to release?

  • Currently it's at around #3. We're still in the design phase.

  • """ witness the mess that is Audio/Copy/Paste and the myriad of sloppy implementations.

    Indeed. But witness the uniform loveliness of audiobus implementations. I have faith in these two!

    It will be interesting to see how this goes considering lots of these apps already work (and will need to continue to work) with other apps via MIDI. Perhaps Audiobus will just become another clock source and existing virtual midi implementations will reference it like it would any other app. Maybe they will sneak in some magic that gets apps on the bus to auto select it as the source. Or it might be interesting to have audiobus act as a kind of broker instead - you tell audiobus which app is the clock source (say loopy) and it tells other apps on the bus to obey, automatically. Or something.

  • edited January 2013

    Ok, who are you and how did you install that surveillance software for my Skype account?

    Just kidding. But I have to admit it's almost creepy of how much of the content of conversations that I am currently having with other developers you are 'guessing' . I guess it's pretty obvious what has to be done, in the end.

    MIDI Sync is broken. We'll see if we can fix it. Since Audiobus creates some sort of 'controlled environment' that we as developers can kind of understand and which reduces complexity for us as well we might just have a chance to do it.

  • @syrupcore

    "Or it might be interesting to have audiobus act as a kind of broker instead - you tell audiobus which app is the clock source (say loopy) and it tells other apps on the bus to obey, automatically"

    Now that sounds slick, and very workable too. :)

  • :) I have some old pals in the Estonian mafia.

  • One big Appy family ;)

  • I'd really love to see it in action!!! I must say is the only possible lack audiobus might have (if I had to look for one I mean lol)

  • personally I have no problem if Audiobus doesn't have a MIDI clock feature. I use Loopy as multitrack recorder. For the first track, Funkbox is the clock master and sets the length for the first track, and from then on Loopy is the master for the following tracks to be recorded.
    But when Auria gets MIDI clock, the workflow will be different I guess. Although for beat/loop based stuff I probably continue using Loopy as recorder app.

  • edited January 2013

    "Or it might be interesting to have audiobus act as a kind of broker instead - you tell audiobus which app is the clock source (say loopy) and it tells other apps on the bus to obey, automatically"

    That would be one way to do it. But expecting an audio recording app to sync to an external clock source in iOS as things currently stand is ridiculous, so audio recording apps should never be allowed to be externally clocked... at least until iOS devices get a very serious hardware upgrade. So actually, as far as the user front end is concerned, Audiobus would only need to automatically make the recording app the clock source and transport controller for all upstream devices. That would be both simple and elegant.

  • it is like this already. But I'm sure I'm missing the point, you guys mean something different.

  • Excellent.

    Glad to hear it's on the way!

    ( As a recent adapter to this tech, the MIDI was the most difficult thing to learn. )

    Could have moving arrows of a different color to show MIDI, and / or one glorious giant tempo number at the top of the AB screen.

    Of course, hardware device MIDI doesn't always behave itself either ;-) Nor does VST, Rewire, IAC...

  • edited April 2013

    Interestingly it's now 4 months since Audiobus launched, and aside from the latency switch, there hasn't been a feature update yet!

    Sebastian, is anything around the corner for shiny new stuff? From various things you've posted over the months I'm assuming yes, but are new Audiobus features weeks or months away, do you think?

  • I would love an update too, its probably the best thing that could happen to IOS music production since Audiobus.

  • Sebastian, is anything around the corner for shiny new stuff? From various things you've posted over the months I'm assuming yes, but are new Audiobus features weeks or months away, do you think?

    I'd rather say months, not weeks. But there's lots of stuff that we're working on. Some of the features have intersecting requirements/solutions so it's tricky what to do/launch/solve first.

    There's a lot of stuff that we've been working on behind the scenes (we're at version 1.0.1.3 of the SDK) but that is not obvious to users, only to developers.

    But for you as users I can say: I'm actually very excited for what we're about to do.

  • Isn't that kind of the omega here? That audiobus could be like Rewire except with solid clocking abilities?
    It could end up being the most powerful "host" digital audio has ever seen possibly?
    This is such an amazing app that its almost as if we always had it..

  • It kind of is. But only kind of. We're approaching things from a slightly different angle. Anyone can make something that seasoned veterans of audio/midi routing can use. It's the translation of those things to a platform that has a lot of new users who don't know what MIDI/latency/syncing is where things become interesting.

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