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.
Comments
Big +1
I get so frustrated selecting, moving, and resizing zones. Better zoom would help a lot.
Double-tap with three fingers on the screen and on the second tap, drag upwards to zoom in to max. level.
Use three fingers simultaneously on screen to pan around the zoomed area.
If the accessibility shortcut is set zo zoom, you can enable zoom-in and out by triple clicking the home button.
Doesn't work with every app (listen, PPG!) but works well with AudioLayer.
Under Settings > General > Accessibility:
Zoom > Enable Zoom, Zoom region = Full screen
Optional: Accessibility Shortcut = Zoom
If I were to choose what to add to AudioLayer it would be these things atm:
Could someone inform me about how to include sustain piano samples when i record a library in another software to use in AL.
Its obvious how to allocate lets say 3 velocity layers, but how do i set it up that my sustain pedal via midi triggers sustain samples in a AL program? Do they need to be named specific, or be all the way up at the layer grid?
Also when i am trying to alter a Layers settings like Envelope or Gain i couldnt make it so that the triggered layer reflects the settings. For example i turned a layers Gain in Level all the way down and it just attenuated a bit.
Welcome to the limitations of AudioLayer. The answer is simple: There is no support for choosing a different set of samples based on sustain pedal status.
The only (bad) workaround I can imagine atm is to convert the sustain pedal messages to ModWheel min/max messages and mis-use AudioLayer's "mod wheel up/mod wheel down" layer articulation to fade in/fade out your sustained (i.e. pedal down) sample set.
Sad but true. We should all send polite requests that sustain pedal be added as an available layer modifier:)
Anyone else having problems with round robin sometimes missing note ons?
It's not that we haven't tried requesting stuff for AudioLayer like a hundred times
One idea makes me play with a thought that I had though:
When using a continuous sustain pedal that sends CC values depending on pressure level instead of a simple switch, using the mod wheel hack, we could continuously blend between pedal up and pedal down sample variations
Is there an easy way to get files into this thing?
Why don’t they just release a host of instruments that we can purchase?
Edit.. must admit it sounds great and one can really edit a sound to sound even better.. But trying to get files into it saps one creative ability..
Even if a dev doesn't respond, sending them polite supportive messages letting them know what matters to you can make a big difference as they consider what on their enormous wishlists to implement.
During 30 odd years I've been in software development, I've been involved with organizations where prompt customer feedback was a priority and those where it was non-existent -- but in both types, the communication received sometimes made a big difference in how priorities were set even if customers never heard back.
I can say for sure that VirSyn reads their email even if they rarely respond.
Good point
Exactly this!
BTW I've seen issues with note ons. Try adjusting the left start marker.
Weird: Audilayer seems to shift the input key up an octave. If open up Audiolayer and use it´s own keyboard c3 is c3. But using an external keyboard or Garagebands input C3 is C4.
Can anyone confirm this ?? My instruments felt an octave up so I ended up checking everything out and it was not the samples, it was Audio Layers interaction with external keyboards or sequencers that seems to be shifted up 12 ??
What issues?
@espiegel123 mentioned issues with round robin note-ons. And I was agreeing that I have seen those same issues. They seem to be fixed by adjusting the sample start marker.
Octave numbering has differed between devices since the first MIDI keyboards in the 80s. Disagreements about whether middle C is C3 or C4. (A few outliers use C5!)
@lukesleepwalker : this doesn't seem to be related to sample start. Turning off random or round-robin solves the issue of missing notes. I have wondered if one needs to set up the layers a certain way for round-robin or random to work right -- as the provided example seems to always work fine.
It is pretty straightforward to get sample into it. How are you going about doing it?
If you tap in an empty space in a layer, it will pop up options about where you want to pull the sounds from.
OK, I've only seen two issues with round robin missed notes. The first is when I've set up a layer with a missing zone (duh). The second is as described above--I slice up a multi-sample file and one note will mysteriously "whiff" on occasion. If I move the sample start marker it will very often clear up the issue. You might try reassembling your layers to see if there is a "ghost" layer in there?
@lukesleepwalker : I am having the round robin issue with a piano that I have imported. There are 10 layers total. Each layer has 88 samples (one piano sample per key) and covers one velocity range. For each velocity range, there are two layers. The instrument was intended to randomly select which sample gets played. When either round robin or random is chosen, there end up being silent notes.
As I am writing this, it occurs to me that AudioLayer might be round-robining with layers that are out of the velocity range resulting in unsounded notes. If there were a way to merge layers, I would do a test to see if I merged all the velocity layers to one if that changed things.
@espiegel123 Interesting theory--you might be on to something!
If that was the case, every second note would have to be silent when repeatedly played at the same velocity. Is it?
@rs2000: it isn't working as neatly as that which is probably why it didn't occur to me earlier.
Just tested out my theory. If more than two layers are marked round-robin then the problems kick in. But it isn't that every other one doesn't sound. The problem for me is that if there are just two layers (that cover the identical velocity range), the feature works. If I add another pair of layers (where the pair cover identical velocity ranges as each other but don't overlap the others) than only the first note struck sounds at all -- until notes in other velocity ranges are struck.
If there were a way to merge layers, I could merge the sets into layers with multiple velocity zones but that doesn't seem possible.
What you describe sounds like a bug indeed. Are you sure you have enabled Round Robin only in the layers you want to participate in RR?
Apart from that, wanna to know how I'm getting more variation?
I just use enough velocity levels inside one layer, expecting that live playing has enough variation in velocity which ends up in triggering enough different samples anyway.
If you prefer to "hack" notes into a piano roll (I do it myself quite often) then you have to vary the velocities manually, but you have to do that anyway and with a fixed sample set per velocity you have 100% control over the slight sample variations - you can tweak velocities until the phrase sounds good.
The instrument (as I explained above) has 5 pairs of non-overlapping velocity layers. So, ten layers total. There are two layers for each velocity zone. For examples layers 0 and layers 1 cover velocity 0-23. Layers 1 and 2 cover velocities 23-46 and so on.
I imagine that this would all work fine if there were just two layers -- and I would happily set it up that way but there is no copy/paste between layers or merge layers option. So, getting all these samples (880) into two layers would be a lot of work.
I just realized that merging the layers would work quite right either as some of the velocity layers need the volume tweaked to get the right gradient.
I can only repeat that by naming the samples appropriately, they will "place themselves" correctly when auto-mapping by file name during import. No need for copy/paste. That's the way I've always done it. Use one folder of samples for each sample set (i.e. layer).
Well, that depends on your sample levels. Some are normalized by RMS level of specified file portions, some are left as sampled.
The bigger issues I have with AudioLayer are incomplete release sample support and missing sustain pedal support. And missing destinations for the mod wheel and other MIDI CC, but ok ok, I'll stop here
Unfortunately, the way that the samples were named originally (there are 880 of them) is such that renaming them would be more work than it may be worth to me. I'd need to write a messy script to rename them into an AL compliant form. And this sample set isn't so great that I want to jump through those hoops.
I am speaking of this particular sample set. In this set, the relative loudness of some of the layers is problematic. I can see that the people that made the set were aware of it as they set up the velocity tracking and gain differently for some of the layers.
What you just described is two overlapping layers. Velocity 23 is in both layers. If that isn’t a typo, then maybe that could be a possible cause. I figure it’s a typo though, right?
That was a typo. The different velocity layers have no overlap. I now think AL needs there to be only two total layers with random or round robin set.
So why be needs to load the ESX file then import samples..,
Sorry... I meant EXS instruments.. Looked at AudioDabbler's video.... But.. I will keep trying..
You can build your own instrument without an EXS file. AudioLayer has many import options if you want build your instrument from samples yourself. Just tap in a blank area in a layer window and Audio Layer pops up a window that explains the sample import options and lets you choose one. And then it will ask how to map them.