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
Is this serious? Auria’s mixer, cluttered?! 😂 I can easily agree about all other UX shortcomings of Auria, but this one... c’mon! Plus, just turn the iPad to portrait and you have fully automatable 10 cm faders!
If you don’t have Auria, if there’s really one thing you’re missing, is this: the only accurate, serious iOS mixing environment (there’s no comparable other, simple as that).
Visual clutter, noise; extraneous lines and visual elements. That sort of thing. It could be simplified (as in: reducing cognitive load) quite a bit by leaving unneccessary details out and using a less contrasty color palette. Not showing unused lanes, etc.
The fact that there’s room for improvement doesn’t mean it’s cluttered. Meaning: it’s not excellent, but saying it’s bad is laughable IMO, sorry. (then again, there’s no mixer comparable on iOS and, I dare to say, on any platform if you consider portrait mode)
We’re strictly talking UX here, not functionality.
Correct. At least that was my point, stated as a non-user.
Just to add this, I can work with AUM, Cubasis, Auria Pro, Gadget, modstep, Caustic, nanostudio and Audio Evolution Mobile.
They differ and need time to adjust.
But the one thing that I still cannot grasp, is BeatMaker 3.
In fact, strictly about the mixer part of the UX. It’s not perfect, but again, and again IMO, saying it stands out as cluttered or plainly bad is laughable.> @kinkujin said:
It’s complicated to talk about user experience (UX) not having used it at least once. Not calling you out, just clarifying this particular point.
Visual clutter. There's a lot of it, and every second you're looking at it your mind is unconsciously processing all of it to separate the information from the noise. Which causes an unnecessary mental load.
Not sure what sort of clutter you are talking about, but I get the feeling there's a bit of a miscommunication here.
Yes! And about a cluttered, fatigung mixer UX, BM3 (which I still try to use from time to time) is the one that could be singled out, despite the non-skeuomorphic, “modern” design. Thanks for reminding me, @tja.
My point is, the noise-to-info ratio in Auria mixer is really low. There is indeed what you called “visual noise”, but it’s inaccurate (did I say laughable?) to use “cluttered” as a defining adjective for what’s otherwise a very thoughtful, well designed touchscreen mixer. Albeit there is room for improvement.
And yes, I’m an advocate for skeuomorphism and totally oppose this all-flat design bs, based btw on a current fad led by Apple and also rather sketchy “logical deductions” about ergonomy than real science of it.
This thread is already totally derailed, so I'll just add my 2c
I sent a mockup for a less "visually cluttered" mixer to Rim (Wavemachine Labs) back in January 2015... FWIW 
That looks a LOT cleaner and easier on the eyes
I’d like have Rim improve some other annoyances (the lack of type-to-value, the small name size limit for tracks) and real improvements in function (move tracks in the mixed, add folder/track stacks) than making rather minor design improvements on what’s already great.
But that’s a really cool mockup anyway, @SevenSystems - Bravo! 👏🏻
@theconnactic @Samu thanks, and @Telefunky is of course right, the repeating labels could be replaced by a single label rotated by 90 degrees to the left of ALL channels. Didn't think of that in the mockup. Or maybe it was lazyness
EDIT: I would also go as far as saying that the dB scales on the faders are completely unnecessary -- the fader value could just be displayed in a central location while being touched.
I like this, although it’s missing the inserts etc.
I stick with a very (!) oldfashioned DAW under Windoze which is (in)famous for it's stale look and can confirm this effect from my own experience. Cut/move snippets around without at sample accuracy (without grid support activated) for hours, without any eyestrain at all.
While this is quite obvious, the influence of udate/redraw time on screen surprised me.
Normally I wouldn't give a damn on such features, but in real world a snappy response was much more convenient than expected.
If there is movement in screen refresh, your eyes wil start tracking that event automatically. All that adds up over time...
Can you point us to the science behind the value of skeumorphism ?
Ugh, so this is a real, known bug? I assumed it was the way things were, not the way things are for a few, "lucky" people like myself!
I definitely have experienced sessions where everything is humming along around 40-ish % and then spikes and crackles when simply scrolling channels.
I wonder if iOS 12 will make things better or worse. The talk is of improved performance and responsiveness, but I wonder if for Apple that means even higher priority to the UI to make everything feel slick, at the expense of background performance....
So is the subject line of this thread incorrect and it is actually comparing Auria Pro with AUM? Confusing thread.
Subject is correct but i admit to being confusing.
It just so happens that i have been using aum to run au’s...making loops for use elsewhere or to house my jams and i find that i can have more processing power avoiding au’s and using native and fabfilters in auria pro and will probably never rebuy these as au’s.
Got it. Thanks for clarifying.
The same behind flat design advocacy: no science, just personal preference.
TBF AUs are more convenient, the only issue I have is people expecting too much from them and going on about not buying anything that isn’t AU. You get a synth that makes some nice noise, just record it and arrange the audio. Having a dozen instances of different apps going in real-time is a hassle to set up and then you get latency and crashes etc. That’s why we record to audio people. Now back to derailing the thread.
For your current working workflow with Auria Pro you certainly get along with the native versions of the plugins - but your statement (highlighted above) is proven wrong, as you can see in my recent AU vs Native CPU Benchmark.
Yeah, I've been in contact with Apple software engineers about this since quite a while back, on their initiative so it's absolutely something they know about, and working on.
Since I haven't seen those performance issues myself, I can't test it. But overall, I think the latest iOS 12 beta feels great and a lot better than iOS 11, and they fixed a couple of AUv3 related bugs!
No worries! I just wanted to point out that according to my tests there is no significant difference in CPU usage (actual CPU usage, not looking at the in-app DSP% meters) between Auria and AUM by themselves. I don't want users to think that AUM is some kind of CPU hog, because it isn't
Regarding workflow, that is of course highly subjective and what fits one individual might not fit the other! Stability of walled gardens like Gadget vs flexible approaches of AU plugins, etc..
...
Yes, if the crackling is affected by UI activity such as scrolling, then I'm quite sure it's the known "UI vs DSP" audio performance bug in iOS that shows on some devices.
This known "UI vs DSP" audio performance bug in iOS you mentioned, does it happen to affect ipad pro 9,7 2017 model?
It's not known (as far as I know) which models it affects, or if it's even bound to models or something else. All we know is it happens for a few users. If any one affected by this is up for restoring their device (restore to factory iOS and/or restore from backup) it would be interesting to hear if it helps. We don't know if it's a software corruption or hardware related.