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.
BM3 learning curve
I’ve been a proud user of BM2 and sneered at anyone daring to say how back to front and hard to learn the app was.
Well, the tables have turned, Intua have done it again. Now I am a proud owner of BM3 but cannot get myself to learn it as Cubasis does most of things anyway and I way more straight forward without the need for a manual.
Now the question is:
Is it worth learning BM3? What are the benefits over Cubasis if any?
Comments
Are you talking about the mac style sampler or the traditional layering keyboard style one?
I couldn’t imagine attempting to seriously finish a track on my iPad that wasn’t just concurrent loops without BM3.
My advice would be invest the half hour in actually sitting down and reading the entire manual, people should do this for all gear they buy imo. I haven’t had to refer back to the manual since I first read it.
Also give it some time. There is a lot of page switching and trying to figure out in which menu/page x function is nested. At first this annoyed and pissed me off like nothing else and I was ready to give up on it. But after some time to become familiar with everything I breeze through the program.
It’s not perfect and I still have some serious gripes with it, but at the same time I’m constantly surprised at just how many things it’s capable of doing, and I don’t think it’s ever crashed on me and I’ve yet to experience any critical bugs.
So yeah there’s a definite learning curve, and without reading the manual first you’re severely amplifying that curve, but I think it’s so worth it.
Drums!
That’s how I would sum up the advantage of BM3 over Cubasis.
Let me explain:
Cubasis is similar to most other DAWs where by drum kits have to be split by track if you want to use fx on certain drums. Cubasis also lacks any way to do bus groups for drum fx.
BM3 however gives you a wonderful seperate mixer as standard on all pad kits and also lets you choose each pad within the kit to put individual fx on. BM3 also has a decent choice of low footprint fx included.
The main downside to all this is that BM3 has no track freeze, so it’s easy to push your iPad over its limit.
With the few issues it has, BM3 is still one of the best DAWs on iOS once you have learnt its little idiosyncratic ways
Yup, sorry MPC style
Yeah, each to their own. I guess the linear Cubasis style multitrack audio sequencers are similar to the way reading text would work which most of us are used to since childhood.
Anyways, thanks for the help, will check junebug’s channel for sure.
I wrestled with BM3 mightily through the learning curve but I kept going back because it really does reward the user with that sample based workflow. I've used it as a traditional DAW for convenience sake but that was pretty frustrating. Audio tracks are a mess and I lost good takes more than once. But think of it as an ubergroovebox (great description from audiogus) and I think you'll dig it. My main workhorse these days...
BM3 is certainly worth learning.
I agree with D4d0ug, MPC style is where it's at.
It's worth figuring out the gestures, they really speed things up and open up a lot of hidden functionality. Get into saving, constantly saving...then when it crashes it won't really bother you.
It's a nice alternative to Cubasis. I wouldn't say better because I still use Cubasis a bit for some things.
All true though it’s a shame it ends up being referenced as a Groovebox when it is so close to being a fully fledged all rounded daw. Ie if they polished up the audio tracks section for a then people would be selling it as an almighty daw.
Very true. But I'm fine using other tools as my DAW for now.
Amazed that The Gus has not prowled by this sector...
I use it more or less in a linear fashion with the option to loop clips I am working on. I probably massively under utilise the sampler, (barely touching modulation and never map sounds to individual keys). For me it is all about a means to record/process, chop and place audio on the timeline. Using the sampler/slicer and pads etc are great. I initialy explored everything but probably regularly only use about 15% of the app but can at times get pretty darn close to what I consider finished tracks now, or finished enough for the iOS phase anyway.
The big BM3 breakthrough for me happened over the course of a couple evenings where I told myself to not try to make anything musical. Didn’t think of music or aesthetic at all. Yes of course it ‘sounds good’. It is 24 bit audio and AUs are great etc etc, so I just explored the app for a couple hours each night, tapping and double tapping all over the place seeing what went where, finding all the wormholes and parralel dimensions. You will certainly find a few juicy ones that help your workflow and you will over time carve those trails out in your brain and muscle memory. Anyway, after a few hours of just hunting and pecking I found then reading the manual had tons of context and filled in a lot of gaps / opened up new options. Being simply an ‘app nerd’ with it the first few hours pays off.
Since we are talking future time investment it may also be worthwhile to bring up Nanostudio2. There are quirks in Bm3 that honestly drive me nuts. Part of it is that there seem to be unfinished (or sadly buggy) hanging bits... just hanging there... teasing with juicy potential... look at that slutty potential.... err, anyway from the screenshots it seems NS2 may be a leaner, cleaner experience but without the sampler and more focused on synth automation, if that is more your thing. Can’t really say of course because it is not out yet!
Took a while to roast the weenie...
BM3 is also the best (and an incredibly stable) 'single' platform on iOS for live performance. The fantastic 'in the box' sampler adds a massive amount of stability and makes it very light on processing to maintain a wide bank of rhythmic and melodic sounds, which can be then supplemented by 'specialist' stuff as AU instruments. The mixer is incredibly versatile and feature rich and full mixer control for live performance can be achieved by hosting all live instruments in a single bank. It's very easy and stable then to record the full performance as a single bank track of MIDI data (with optional audio tracks) if that's desired.
Like @AudioGus , there are parts of BM3 that I rarely use. I assume these unused parts are quite powerful - scenes being one of them. I pretty much use the timeline and the sampler (though not very deeply on this last). I sort of like Cubasis, but there's something that I find off-putting about it and I typically chalk it up to my lack of familiarity.
In regard to BM3, what is it about the audio tracks that some of you dislike?
My own beef with BM3 is the lack of easy copying and pasting between tracks - a bit futzy for me.
It is super efficient. Leaning mostly on the sampler and using AUX tracks with AU fx etc I am amazed at what gets going on while staying under 50% cpu on the 2017 ipad.
The mixer is incredibly versatile and feature rich and full mixer control for live performance can be achieved by hosting all live instruments in a single bank. It's very easy and stable then to record the full performance as a single bank track of MIDI data (with optional audio tracks if desired) if that's desired.
Hmmmmmm ... thinking, processing ...
Audiotracks...
1.) recording directly to them does not always work. Too many times i have jammed out something exciting only to see that big blank track staring back at me.
2.) agreed regarding copying and pasting
3.) i want classic five point editing of audio clips (levels, start/end, fade, slip, pitch/stretch/ eq per clip, the basics)
I use an iPad Mini 4 for BM3 with 8-10 hand made multisampled melodic sampler instruments, 16-20 layered sampled pads of drums/percussion, 3-5 AU instruments, a couple of effects sends for reverb/delay, a couple of built in EQ or compressors dotted around and 3-4 audio streams being passed through and processed. Whole thing is controlled by MIDI (I don't touch it at all during performance). This is at performance latency levels. I've NEVER had any issue with processor related audio glitching! Amazing!
I haven’t had problems recording directly, but I see from other posts that it’s a common issue.
I had not given much thought to the editing of clips, but can see that these would be quite useful.
A nice ‘ease of life’ feature would be if you could highlight a range of a wav (anywhere you see a wav) and be able to send it directly to a new pad.
Aaah, yes...
NAILED IT.
While I'm at it, simpler re-sampling would also be most welcome. I've learned to live with the way you select an empty pad, hit the record button, select sync, set the bars, hit start. BUT, wouldn't it be amazing if you could hold down a pad and resample whatever is playing at the time (sync'd to next quantum).
Haiku for hold down a pad and resample whatever is playing at the time...
This simplicity
essentially applies to
all of my desires
Yum! This would take it into the realm of realtime playable looper.
Yessir, and take advantage of the live performance advantages that @OscarSouth mentioned and the underutilized Scene mode that @ALB noted. Remember that you can go into Scene mode from the pad view too (which is great fun live).
@AudioGus : Won’t NS2 have a sampler?