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.
DifferentDrummer updated. All IAPs are now free.
DD just updated and it states that all previous IAPs are now included in the app. If you were curious about this one, now would be a good time to check it out.
(Or wait for a sale. 
)
Comments
How the fuck do you get to the IAPs? Each and every button that I think should logically, by the way it looks, lead to an IAP shop or suchlike, brings up some batshit random bizarre page to do with who knows what.
I can’t fucking remember that shit, man. I can’t even remember what the IAPs were exactly, but I think there were 2, the Zenharmonic interface (that flower thing in the upper left), and inside the Zen interface, toward the upper right, there is a whirly looking icon. That access controls for a Phaser, which is similar to auto-rotate in Patterning. If these work for you, then you are probably all good.
Have fun with this crazy interface. I am still trying to figure it all out after about 2 years!
I don’t recall either, but I’m guessing there is no IAP store, since they're included.
I think it may have been the IAP type where you see the function, but when you try to use it, it tells you it is locked and offers you the IAP. It doesn’t ask for purchase anymore. There may never have been a store interface, such is the case with apps offering IAP soundpacks.
Anyway, they are free now.
DD is one of ‘those’ apps that I’ve had for ages, occasionally dabble with, but have never come close to understanding with any clarity.
I suppose if I made the effort, I could wrangle more productive use. But to be honest, it’s too much trouble, when there are a good half dozen drum apps that don’t require a PhD to use.
DD is probably the smartest, most versatile drum type app available for IOS. But to get much out if it you really have to put much in.
I use it more as an all purpose composition app than a drum app, so for me it is worth the effort.
yeah the iap appeared when you pressed the features which were previously locked out. So I think the store is now removed completely from the app.
Does anybody have sync problems and constant crashes?
Different Drummer got unstable and unusable especially since last update.
For example using a powered USB hub=instant crash. Midi inputs are not recognised.
Sluggish...on iPad Air 2, latest iOS
I’ll admit I never found the patience to do anything with it. It’s like translating runes and being cursed with blindness.
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Yes, this was the frustration. The app was/ and is clearly an impressive thing, capable of so much more than the average drum app. But getting anything interesting from it required so much more effort.
Not something I could be bothered with when I found the likes of Patterning, which was also a brilliant app, but by comparison, very easy to understand.
Different Drummer, SunVox and Audulus 3 are the three apps I've used the least since purchasing, other than to toy around for a few minutes here and there before they start hurting my brain. I'm not the type that requires instant gratification and results with everything I do either -- I like a decent challenge, but I feel like I could master Reason, Ableton, get decent at guitar, etc in the same amount of time I could achieve fruitful results from the former, so I keep putting them off for a rainy day in the future when I have a solid grasp of everything else I'm currently trying to learn.
Hopefully I'll get around to at least one of them eventually -- they're immensely powerful tools.
I would agree with that, but of the three DD is the only one that makes sense to me. Once I understood the logic, it all became clear. Still waiting for that moment with SunVox, Audulus and even BM3
Different Drummer doesn’t seem that difficult to figure out to me. You have 8 color coded tracks that can send out MIDI and/or audio. You can set the wave form shape and their frequencies by combining them together using the wave settings and other wave types (e.g. accent or pan).
The app may be confusing because there are a lot of options for how to modify the waves for each track. Playing with the controls will give you a sense of what they do via both color coded visual feedback and audio feedback in response to the control changes.
Switching between the sin wave and windmill icon in the upper left of the app toggles between the main and circular based GUI. You can use the circular GUI to add variation to the waves you’ve setup using the main GUI.
If you create ambient music, this app is well worth learning, if you have a more traditional approach, less so.
You don’t need to learn everything about the app in order to use it (e.g. there’s a grid mode I haven’t discussed).
This is a good breakdown. Could you discuss the grid mode? I think it would be helpful.
There is nothing like DD anywhere else. It is truly a unique beast.
Oscilab has a similar concept, but is simpler and a little more user friendly. Can still be weird on first use if you are more used to traditional thinking regarding pattern composition.
But I agree with you, DD takes the concept and goes much further with it into the realm of unique.
In grid mode you can set the quantization level for notes up to 1/64, the number of measures, insert/delete measures, shift notes, loop measures as well as import MIDI files.
So basically, hidden beneath the strangeness of the wave sculpting interface, there is a plain ol’ sequencer? That would make this a lot easier to use, for sure.
But maybe a little less interesting...
So true.
Really, I am just trying to help people find a way to break through the initial overwhelming confusion one is confronted with when first attempting to use this amazing app.
secret weapon
I’ve got several DD videos on YT. This one is more focused on grid mode...
I keep this app on my iPad because I understand what a clever thing it is, and because I hope one day something will click into place. Magically.
Yes, I get the buttons and the huge array of other controls to affect them, and that the Zenterface - which I bought when it was an IAP - was supposed to make it easier. But I still find the app overwhelming, and get frustrated when I do something wrong and can’t seem to get back to where I was, or make any real progress.
If DD had the complex stuff under the hood, so to speak, and a much more intuitive control surface, like Patterning, I’d probably be using it much more. Obviously, the easier an app is to get something going with, the more encouraged users will be to dig deeper into its workings.
Not one single tiny hieroglyph does what I want it to from my understanding of what that picture means. It invariably does something quite different instead. Not only that, the thing I want to do next is invariably not where I expect to locate it, given normal expectations of where things should be in a sequence of actions, which means I can never get back out of an unexpected result of touching a hieroglyph. It is always easier to leave the program at that stage, and come back in afresh until I get tired of doing that.
Audulus has a shed load of user patches just waiting to be tweaked and inserted into a signal chain. It would be worth it for me if I did nothing more than that. And to be honest right now I don’t.
Just checked it out and was pleased to see that the amount of built in dev and user made patches have drastically increased since the last time I opened it. Everything is much better organized now as well -- much easier to jump in and get something immediately usable out of it. ... I'd love to be able to program my own, but it's definitely fun to just tweak pre-existing.
I gave it another chance yesterday and though I haven't had that "aha" eureka moment where I understand everything yet, it is starting to feel quite a bit less cryptic to me. A year ago even Korg Gadget or BM3 was like a foreign language to me , when I was starting fresh with digital music production. Between trial by error, manuals and helpful tutorial software like "syntorial" - everything is starting to click. The learning process is half the fun
Congratulations! It sounds like you have come a long way, in relatively little time.