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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LOL 😂
Is that a onesie?
http://livingmemorysoftware.com/downloads/LayR_Manual.pdf
I have a feeling that this next Audiobus Creator Pack is going to be HUGE, can’t wait to demo this one
Guys does creating custom presets from already made instruments count?
I’ve been concentating on creating instruments so far, because that’s what I mostly want (for my own selfish uses). Last night I worked on some Performances using some of my own Instruments but also some that were included in Layr. Do any of you plan on submitting Performance patches that are assembled from included Instruments? Is that okay? Am I looking for rules where there are none... I’m not sure.
I think it makes more sense to create new custom instruments, rather than cobble together performances from existing instruments in the app - after all anyone can create performances from existing instruments, so creating new instruments would be much more useful to the community at large IMO.
I think it counts
I’m going to submit Instruments and Performances then, but I’ll use original Instruments in the Performances so no one ends up with things they already have.
I think I would find value in how others put together Performances, even using pre-existing instruments to do it, now that I’ve had time to think on it.
Layers are a sub-set of instruments, and instruments a sub-set of performances. I know it's all a bit confusing, because this synth is super complex, but it goes like this:
You have layers, which can be combined to make instruments.
Then you have instruments which can be combined to make performances.
I think creating new instruments would be the most useful thing to do here. Stealing layers is OK I guess, but the more new sounds we can make the better.
I don’t think I’m going to be flush in time for getting LayR this month, so I’m going to look forward to Dougs video instead
This is interesting. I feel the need to push myself to create my own instruments and performances, even if they’re not up to par with the presets already available. It would force me to be more creative and learn. But I also wouldn’t want to exclude anyone from participating if starting from scratch felt like too high a barrier. Would be awesome if everyone tried to build at least one instrument or performance on their own maybe after experimenting with some of the presets. There’s really no judgment here on the forums so it feels like a great opportunity to dig in on these synths and synthesis in general without worrying about ‘success’ or ‘failure.’
Vamos...
(:
edit: 141bpm
Better to get it now before the price goes up! Saw something on FB yesterday that it's going up to $26-27.99 US in a few weeks...
Totally worth it! It’s like getting unlimited Synths for a singl low price.
This new feature might’ve gone unnoticed for some. But it can be very useful in the sound design process so it’s worth mentioning here I think. If you want to grab a specific layer(s) out of an existing instrument it’s easy to do so.
For example: I want to create an entirely new instrument from this one layer called “Tone -/+” because it’s magic and I can’t handle burying it with the commoners (or whatever your specific reason is) then all I have to do is long press anywhere on the volume fader for “Tone -/+” and it breaks free. Now I just drag and drop that layer to the black background of the performance arena and a new instrument is created. Independence prevails.
Additionally, and also very useful, you can do the same maneuver but this time dragging your layer into an instrument that already exists in your performance. Same steps. And a green divider line will even help you find a place to drop your layer, keeping you free from violating any no touch zones that might exist. How cool is that? It’s pretty cool.
Also you can long press and drag layers to reorder them within an instrument now (no visual, you get the gist).
OMFG. Okay...hmm. Definitely need to read the manual now!!
Thanks for pointing out! I'm about to get lost for several hours now though.
@Brice – thanks a ton for the screenshot walkthrough of audio routing. This opens up a universe of possibilities. Immediately useful to further shape or balance each individual nuance of a performance – like if you keep all your percussive, synth, noise, plucked elements on separate instruments. Or go deep deep down the rabbit hole..whatever your feeling ;-)
These next couple of weeks before pay day will be nail biting then lol
Wip them sounds out people!
/unzip/open-in/import-program/load
edit: 51bpm
...just sharing this:
Only getting started though.
@ZenLizard
Cool beats, ZenLiz, cheers!
opened in Audioshare, unzipped and saved to files/icloud drive/layr, in Layr tapped on the up arrow, selected an empty bank, and on the cloud symbol/import program (had to restart the device to refresh files in iclouddrive, though). Load w/ down arrow. 👍
Thank you, @ccs2 . I’ll try out NextGoodBye on this end.
Edit: I downloaded NextGoodBye to winzip, chose “open in...” and picked Layr. It saved in the next open Performance slot without my input because I forgot to save it to files first. It did work though and sounds good.
It's definitely not as immediate as something like Model D where you can just dive in and make sounds, I'm finding my progress in Layr much slower, I've been fiddling for about a week and have two usable sounds so far.
I do find the dials quite fiddly to adjust, I'm not mad on them. The coarse tuning dial is horrible, impossible to get any kind of precise value from it, so you have to enter the value numerically, and even that isn't a great user experience. IMO the coarse tuning dial should default to integer note values, you can always shift in cents with the fine tuning dial so what's the point having a coarse tuning dial that is essentially not functional?
On the plus side it is very powerful as a synth, since you can have so many oscillators each with their own envelopes, filter settings and modulation etc... But at this point in time I'm still trying to coax basic sounds from it.
Don’t know if you are aware of this
Tuning: The outer ring of this dual dial is used to set oscillator fine tuning. Double tap to set nearest semitone.
(7a) - The inner dial is used to set coarse tuning. Double tap to set nearest octave.
The UI takes a bit of getting used to but it kind of makes sense when you figure it out. I found turning down the dial sensitivity in the settings better for me. And I didn’t realise for ages that up/down swipes on a dial for course movement and horizontal for fine.
Here's a couple of feature tips that might be helpful...
Don't try to tune to the nearest cent or semitone using the coarse tuning dial, you wouldn't do this on a real physical modular. Get near to where you want to be using the coarse tuner and then use the fine tuner to finish.
Double tapping on the coarse dial sets it to the nearest octave, then use the fine tuning dial.
Double tapping on the fine tuning dial sets it to the nearest semi-tone.
You can zoom in on dials to get more control by double tapping on the background near it or by pinching.
Swiping left or right on a dial gives finer control than vertical swipes.
I understand that there's a lot of controls in LayR and on the smaller devices they can be quite fiddly but the zoom function pretty much has that covered. Having these dials quantise by themselves would only serve to reduce their functionality hence the shortcuts that allow you to quantise using double taps.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give them a go. I would say though that on many synths, Moog ones for example, the coarse tuning does quantize (to octaves in fact), and IMO it's pretty useful. Usually I'm trying to set the oscillator to a specific octave, and comparing LAyr to Model D this is pretty much instant on the Moog and pretty slow in Layr.
Adding a “reference” layer and then tuning by ear to that layer works fast and well. You could maybe try that, @richardyot . Also, numerically transposing up or down by increments of 12 is another way to change octave on just a layer or an entire instrument.
Here are 20 instruments inside one ‘performance’. Only one instrument has the vollume up (to preview one at a time). It seemed like a good way to export them all at once. Let me know if I should do something else with them instead.