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.
Free stuff! (sort of iPad related, and may be old news to some)
I was aware that Computer Music offered free stuff with their magazine, but did not know to what extent. Turns out you can get a nice little collection of desktop VST synths! Albeit they are truncated versions. Still, there are some true gems of the industry that can deliver some nice sounds, such as:
Zebra
Bazille
Dune
Thorn
SynthMaster
Phonec
Aalto
There are others too, those are just the ones I've installed so far. There's even some effects and other stuff like arps.
To get the download I subscribed to the free month trial through their iPad app. From there the download process is relatively painless. Just thought I'd share in case anyone hadn't seen this before. The magazine is pretty decent too.
Comments
How crippled are they?
It varies, but they do have a CM Studio badged range which are fully useable.
They seem to mostly just leave a handful of elements out, like maybe some effects, or certain modules, or they’ll reduce the number of elements like for example Zebra just gives you 2 oscillators and I think 1 filter rather than the full modular system of the paid version.
If you look at them for what they are rather than what they are not, you’ll see they deliver quite a bit.
Phonec is an awesome plugin for dusty, BOC type sounds. Ive had the full version for a year or so and it’s always inspiring. And of course the U-He plugins are some of the best out there.
They also have a few GB of samples on the DVDs
Phonec is good otherwise too, and yeah Bazille. I'm particularly impressed by Thorn as well.
Many of those are very usable. Things they do to entice you to get the full ones are like, single v. Multi oscs, few presets, limited mod options. I’ve bought the full versions of a few of those more out of wanting to support innovative developers than need.
Eh Synthmaster, I have the full and don’t use it because I had made so many patches in the CM version. Then Synthmaster one came out which is easier to jump into.