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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With some practice it will become easier. I represent myself buttons that way to help get some orientation:
@wim :I’ve been meaning to try multi track > @wim said:
@wim : I’ve been meaning to try Multi track DAW. How does it compare to Audio Evolution Mobile? Have you tried it?
They’re two different animals. MultiTrack DAW is Audio only. AEM has audio, midi sequencing, and most essential DAW features. MTD is rock solid and really slick for what it does. AEM has some awkward (IMO) design philosophy that it took quite some time for me to get my head around. I’m more comfortable with it now, and the developer has been fixing and improving things at a remarkable pace. MTD hasn’t been updated in forever, but I would argue that’s becauss it doesn’t really need to be. Like I say, it is excellent at what it does, which is capture and process multi track audio in a universal app.
I was specifically referring to using Xequence to drive apps in AB3, with the audio being captured in MTD. I’ve sort of forgotten by now why I got on this track by now. I think it was as a possible alternative to GarageBand for @Janosax use case. GarageBand, AEM, and Xequence+AB3+MTD all seem like solid alternatives to me. I kind of doubt at this point that I’ll buckle down to any useful testing any time soon.
Sorry for the OT sidetrack.
MTD is probably the most effortless and efficient multitrack recording app in the spontaneous jam domain.
Swipe a loop selection on the timeline and drag the punch in/out markers to a location inside that fits your pre/postroll taste.
Arm a new track and it will record multiple runs (keeping takes in the background)
It's practically the classic reel-to-reel operation and there's nothing in the way you might accidently touch or move.
The screen is totally non-distracting. Imho still worth having for just these tasks.
For completeness: it's mixing engine is simple (IAA only), yet very sophisticated (as the author once explained). Been around since the days of the iPad One.
Used to use it a lot, but the lack of automation and other things mentioned were frustrating. I bought Auria, and that does a better job.
Now I do everything in AUM - wish the GB Instruments wereIAA though, some good ones there.
That explains a lot and yeah I caught that about BM3 but we learned that BM2 works flawlessly w Xequence . Dang, I love Garageband for iOS . Who knows there could be a huge update for it announced Sept 12
@Wim thanks for that . I find AEM Mobile also slightly awkward as the manual is not the best a d I also find the tutorial videos a bit hard to follow .
I’m a bit lost too with AEM interface. Simple iOS apps are ok to learn, but once you know a DAW it’s much more difficult to use another one IMO. Same applies on desktop, I started in 2000 with Cubase and few years later switched to Ableton Live first version. I tried recently latest Cubase demo, and it was impossible to me to use it more than 20 mn, same thing with Bitwig. This is what I feel with AEM, its hard to learn again a whole DAW workflow. The issue now with MTD in that Xequence scenario is unfortunately its lacks of midi clock feature. That will not works for syncing audio parts with Xequence timeline. BM2 will be ok. But the other issue will be latency and cpu ressources. Recording audio live with AU effects leads you to use 128 to 256 buffers latency, while Xequence will drives some AU and fxs, all in AB with eventually AUM or apeMatrix in the game... This setup will makes things difficult to freeze/render as audio to save cpu too. I’ve tried several times and even my 7 Plus with nice cpu and ram has some audio crackles and becomes laggy in that situation. This is why for my musical needs I often have setups which allow me to render midi as audio all along my track creation. That can be done using Xequence with AB and Blocswave for example, as a light on cpu Linkable audio recorder/sequencer, which helps building materials that you can import and arrange in any DAW at later stage.
BTW another tip: instead of importing audio files one by one in GB via loop menu, you can copy all of them at once via Files app by copy paste them in « GarageBand file transfer » folder on iDevice local storage. Then in GB loop menu import, search them by name in your audio files (they can all have same song name if you use Blocswave zip export): so much quicker!!!! (If you use also audio loops/files, BM2 don’t let you import multiple files at once, this also why I don’t use it).
Stagelight is pretty interesting as it’s basically a Live « light » on iOS, but don’t have AU yet even if planned and have very limited audio edition, you can’t even reverse audio. GB is much more powerful in that regard, with non destructive audio pitch shift, timestretch and reverse.
This young lady has created some impressively atmospheric music in Garageband.
https://theothersideofwho.bandcamp.com/album/complexit
@Janosax , that’s why GB and Logic Prox are so much easier to learn, because there is such extensive video support . Lots of great step by step stuff. AEM is not so simple as you say.
This is why I don't prefer to use GB (there are other reasons - see my bug list to Apple posted on this forum):
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/28422/christmas-canon-on-garageband
Just find two magic features: use 3D Touch press on any audio/midi part in arrangement and you will automatically hear this part in solo mode. Don’t know if holding part on iPad do the same.
Also: hold an audio/midi part’s end, GB will go to max zoom so you can easily set part end position, remove your finger and it will go back to last zoom level. Do a 3D Touch press while holding part’s end, and it will stay at max zoom level even after removing your finger.
This is really good creative stuff, huge sound. I will explore Alchemy synth further, it has nice sounds and gyro controlers
Steve Spacek seems to use GB a quite a bit if you check out his IG :
https://instagram.com/beatspacek?utm_source=ig_profile_share&igshid=uyak9iiuxm2c
Love Steve Spacek!
Thanks for sharing that, just listening to Space Invadas Wild World love that music!!
OH MY DAYS..... comfortably numb on GarageBand guitar! My first thought was “oh God this is going to be very cringy”......HOW WRONG WAS I!!!!! I sat open mouthed throughout the whole Video. This is one of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed in my 43 years. I cannot believe how brilliant it is.
I always thought the GarageBand guitars sounded hideous but this guy somehow makes it sound fantastic! One thing I guess is......that the 2 and a half tone bends are easier to do on GB than on a real guitar. The time and effort that went into this must is unfathomable.....
Thank you so much for posting this chandroji!!!
Love the instruments. Really dislike how navigation between the apps "pages" work. I inevitably boot myself out to the "open up a song" page when I just intended to go to the timeline or the editor page. I admittedly have not invested a tremendous amount of time learning the app, but this clunky experience is a buzz kill and makes me shun the program.
If/When Apple nails the editing of the recorded automation things will get way more fun!
Currently it's not even possible to edit the recorded pitch-bend and mod-wheel data and automating pan is tedious having to create two tracks and do fades in opposite direction etc. etc.
On the other hand it's one of the few apps on the iPhone 8 that has a 'usable' GUI with properly sized controllers and I actually enjoy using it.
But anyways, if some 'revolutionary' Audio things are announced at WWDC'19 I'm pretty sure GarageBand will be used to demo them...
Happy you like these Pink Floyd Covers by Firmin @Tronlady ! 😊
Thanks a lot for bringing this thread on top again. I also enjoyed to seeing the videos again , I love the work of Dan Baker as well.
Always good to remember what talented musicians can do with the (mostly underrated) GarageBand. 😎
I want a proper mixer page/tab
Worldwide GB iOS is the most used, it’s not even close — However it’s not reflected much in tool focused forums such as this.
It doesn’t have everything I need and I don’t really like the workflow on it. It also takes up a lot of space and I really like all my synthesizers so they get the real estate
I don't use gb because it feels like a toy to me. And somehow it's more complicated than it needs to be.
Feels like it's geared for people to make music without any knowhow, which is fine if you want to go that route.
I see those ugly icons of guitars and drumsets and I get a little queasy. Plus the workflow has always felt clunky - much moreso now that NS2 and Cubasis have set the bar much higher.
I’d use it more if it had midi export
That’s the dealbreaker for me. I can’t invest time into a program that keeps my work walled away from the vast, beautiful, interoperable world of MIDI.
Yeah I like to transcribe my ideas to sheet music nowadays so the only reason to use GarageBand for me is to make backing tracks or parts. Can’t be the main daw until such time.
Loopy HD!
I've stopped recommending BM2 as a sync slave because when using for a longer time, it drifts away. Have you tried it for a few minutes?
It seems like Bm2 does not evaluate MIDI Clock pulses at all, but rather only STATUS Start/Stop messages and then runs on the bpm it has measured once.
An ugly workaround would be to filter out clock messages and use the 2-decimals bpm adjustment in BM2, but at 90 bpm, .01 bpm precision means 13 milliseconds difference after one minute already. Still not fine enough, apart from the fact that BM2 can "hiccup" from time to time, adding even more drift.
That's good to know. I was actually considering BM2 for sync'd audio.
I've been using LoopyHD a bit lately for that purpose, it has it's limitations.
I really like GB for what it is. If you make a point of counting how many swipes each option takes to get to in the instrument selection view it becomes second nature.
I'd love "pro" routing for audio/MIDI and of course more automation options.