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.
Can AB learn anything from Tabletop or fabfilter?
First off I'm not criticizing anything about Audiobus. I'm not even offering any advice. I'm just throwing a brief commentary into the wind that might or might not make any sense.
I'm about as right-brained as it's possible to be and still function in the world. Even though I love iPad apps I sometimes have a hard time dealing with their technical details. I love to wander through the music features of the apps and I can resent having to pull my head out of the clouds to constantly fiddle with multi-stepped settings.
So far I'm not a huge fan of Tabletop, but I love their system of connecting the modules. It's sort of similar to the way that the fabfilter apps can connect their various controls. I'm definitely a huge fan of pretty much everything fabfilter. I connect what I want to connect through drag and drop. It takes about zero time to learn, but it's still possible to do a lot.
Maybe audiobus can use that type of drag and drop setup to connect chains of apps to each other. Maybe not. I'm way too stupid technically to know if I'm being helpful.
Comments
Ha!
Tabletop can teach us some things about how not to do things, but yeah, in general, the potential for Audiobus is infinite. Since Cubasis adopted IAA last week, I have finally understood what it is but I don't like it compared to Audiobus. However, this is more of an interface and convenience issue. Although Audiobus would be better if it had more in-app options, by which I mean you could open Filtatron and not have to go back to the main Audiobus to enable it, like streaming the workflow more intuitively, that would be better, the way IAA can be opened as an insert without having to bounce around in a central interface is a good idea. But it isn't an idea they've followed through yet.
Drag and drop is intuitive. In an ideal world it seems the perfect set-up: one could arrange a sequence of apps that could feed off each other, and at app level you could specify its relationship to the output. Pretty much like a modern Cubase or Logic setup then, but this is probably where the whole thing is headed anyway. I'd like to see it transcend what we know though - boundaries are ready to be pushed here!