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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Can a competent person make an AUv3 midi plugin with no coding experience?

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Comments

  • wimwim

    @Norbert said:
    Coding is not really your main problem here. Unless you have a good mathematics and physics background, the complexity of the algorithms involved in audio effects would be too overwhelming. It's not rocket science but still it's not your basic task when learning a coding language either.

    Swift in itself, the new language for apple apps, is not that difficult though. It's some homebrewed javascript basically. You can still have a try for fun.

    Talkin’ midi effects, not audio here. Still daunting, but arguably orders of magnitude less complex.

  • legsmechanicallegsmechanical

    @wim said:
    I got lucky! I made a thorough nuisance of myself describing what I envisioned in every appropriate thread, while I dived to learning what I need to develop it on my own if needed. Before I had to get in to the really hard stuff @midiSequencer picked up the ball and is close to releasing what would probably have taken me a year to accomplish, only 1000% better. I couldn’t be happier! B)

    I'm quite keen on that approach now that I"m wondering whether reports of my competence may have been greatly exaggerated. :)

    For me, a robust suite of midi effects is really the holy grail of ios music making, especially given the modular paradigm that's taken hold with AUM/AB3/ape. With Rozeta and StepPoly, I feel like I'm 80% there -- but I want my other 20%, dammit.... and also an sp-404 clone. :p I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and see how quickly I burn out on this lest I go full Veruca Salt.

  • palmpalm

    @legsmechanical said:

    @wim said:
    I got lucky! I made a thorough nuisance of myself describing what I envisioned in every appropriate thread, while I dived to learning what I need to develop it on my own if needed. Before I had to get in to the really hard stuff @midiSequencer picked up the ball and is close to releasing what would probably have taken me a year to accomplish, only 1000% better. I couldn’t be happier! B)

    I'm quite keen on that approach now that I"m wondering whether reports of my competence may have been greatly exaggerated. :)

    For me, a robust suite of midi effects is really the holy grail of ios music making, especially given the modular paradigm that's taken hold with AUM/AB3/ape. With Rozeta and StepPoly, I feel like I'm 80% there -- but I want my other 20%, dammit.... and also an sp-404 clone. :p I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and see how quickly I burn out on this lest I go full Veruca Salt.

    If you can make this happen it would be a big hit. As someone with no knowledge of the subject, I'll happily cheer you on from the sidelines.

  • midiSequencermidiSequencer

    @wim said:
    I got lucky! I made a thorough nuisance of myself describing what I envisioned in every appropriate thread, while I dived to learning what I need to develop it on my own if needed. Before I had to get in to the really hard stuff @midiSequencer picked up the ball and is close to releasing what would probably have taken me a year to accomplish, only 1000% better. I couldn’t be happier! B)

    Thats another side of development, listening to what you folks want so we can deliver something useful rather than just pretty! Thx for raising the request here on the AB forums, its going to be useful for me too as I dont use DAWs much.

  • rs2000rs2000

    I was just about to recommend trying Lemur as well, but I've found that while it can slave to MIDI clock, it cannot send it so you would have to process the MIDI data itself inside Lemur, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
    I think that once you've built your monster MIDI app inside Lemur, it'll be easier to code it natively for iOS, considering the featuritis syndrome we all know very well :#

  • NorbertNorbert

    @wim said:

    @Norbert said:
    Coding is not really your main problem here. Unless you have a good mathematics and physics background, the complexity of the algorithms involved in audio effects would be too overwhelming. It's not rocket science but still it's not your basic task when learning a coding language either.

    Swift in itself, the new language for apple apps, is not that difficult though. It's some homebrewed javascript basically. You can still have a try for fun.

    Talkin’ midi effects, not audio here. Still daunting, but arguably orders of magnitude less complex.

    Ok. so midi effects. You will have to understand how I/0 works in the ios environment then use third party APIs to interface your app with others, meaning learning how they behave and choose the best ones for the purpose. Then code with care cause you don't want to have memory leaks, hard crashes or loadings taking forever. It will take time of course if you have no coding background but manageable. Good luck :)

  • Mark BMark B

    @Norbert said:

    Ok. so midi effects. You will have to understand how I/0 works in the ios environment then use third party APIs to interface your app with others, meaning learning how they behave and choose the best ones for the purpose. Then code with care cause you don't want to have memory leaks, hard crashes or loadings taking forever. It will take time of course if you have no coding background but manageable. Good luck :)

    I don’t think you need quite all that stuff with auv3 as the host manages it. It would be a case of receiving the event block, processing it and passing it back (I think). Has to be done in C so agree with having to take care.

  • NorbertNorbert
    edited September 2018

    @Mark B said:

    @Norbert said:

    Ok. so midi effects. You will have to understand how I/0 works in the ios environment then use third party APIs to interface your app with others, meaning learning how they behave and choose the best ones for the purpose. Then code with care cause you don't want to have memory leaks, hard crashes or loadings taking forever. It will take time of course if you have no coding background but manageable. Good luck :)

    I don’t think you need quite all that stuff with auv3 as the host manages it. It would be a case of receiving the event block, processing it and passing it back (I think). Has to be done in C so agree with having to take care.

    I don't know exactly how auv3 works, to be honest. But still, we are not talking about a self contained app here. In any environment, I/O can be quite a pain to manage properly, whether it is in industry, web or embed in mobile devices. To some degree, you still have to process the midi flux, if I am not mistaken. Even though the APIs docs tell you this function does this or that, error management and unit testing is not something you come up with right out of the bat. And if you want to make quality software, it's something you should consider as essential. UI design is easy though in ios. It's one thing not to worry about, thankfully.

    EDIT: Talking about this, I wonder if audiobus or AUM provide a MIDI buffer to the auv3s so they can anticipate their effects and do some realtime chaining.

  • brambosbrambos

    Quick tip re: what languages to use.

    Since the MIDI processing is happening inside the realtime system thread you must use a non-locking language at least for that part of the plugin. Which only leaves C and C++.

    For the rest of the plugin you can use Swift if you want to make your life hard, or use Objective-C if you want to make your life slightly less hard.

    Prepare to do lots of header-diving since Apple has no documentation for AU MIDI (or AUv3 in general).

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