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
Thanks @palm and @Gestrumentsander ! Stuffing PolyHarp into an AUV3 would be quite a task! I'll be testing out a few AU3's as updates to kicked-out-of-the-app-store-for-being-too-old apps of mine, and when I get the hang of it, I'll get to some of my unreleased apps as well.
I'll also keep making videos, there's a lot of ground to cover.
When the AudioKit AU stuff is finished, perhaps that will make this somewhat easier.
I am hoping it will help many devs get to the AU holy land.
Droneo as an AU would be sweet
Yes - been waiting for the newer version that is looming
Droneo is a gem.
The thing that will replace Droneo will definitely be AU, and there have been many attempts (by me) over the years to replace it! The new variant will make more sense, probably support Ableton link, have more powerful and sensible generative features, more flexible timbres, etc.
Fantastic!
Breathlessly waiting.
YES!! I love it already.
Hi folks:
Your favorite ugly app has version 1.0.3 on deck with a "near" touch mode that plays the closest string near where you tap. It's kind of fun if inauthentic! Look for the update if you've bought it already.
Now we’re in business! I and my sausagey fingers thank you, Henry! Can’t wait to try it out.
thank you for the update!
Nice, thank you for the update.
@jhhl Just playing with the new update and the new Near setting. Works just the way I was hoping, so this will start getting a lot more use. Thanks again.
I thought I'd found a bug when it was only working on the 1st String Area (on presets with multiple Areas) but eventually figured out that the setting has to be changed for each in Edit. I'll make Near Only versions of favored presets and be done with it.
I've even managed to find some color themes that aren't too bad. Now, if you'll just give us a dark mode, or some tie-in to the current preset theme, for the menus and popups I'll have no more complaints. Cheers.
@jhhl why does the pan default to full left?
@jhhl : I used to love Ellipsynth and miss it nowadays, are you at all interested in an update for it? (Great work, thank you!)
It would be nice to see it return to 64bit land.
@jhhl I appreciate this app more and more. One thing that I cannot explain is that the midi notes become much shorter after a little while. For exemple, I play a piano and at the beginning the notes are very sustained but after a little while, there is no more sustain for any notes and then suddenly I have another sustained note, etc. Is there a way to avoid this? I would like to keep the same sustain for any note I play
Has anyone pointed PolyHarp at AudioKit Synth or D1 with the new Wilson scales installed?
I'll bet it sounds magical but I'd like everything to be AU since opening IAA's is frustrating to me but I'd do it if it sounds amaze-balls.
Well there's a philosophical problem. MIDI thinks it's a piano. That means there are note ons and note offs. The only time there's a real note off in PolyHarp should be when a string is damped or has lost all its energy. Another way it kills off notes is when its polyphony is filled up. Then it tries to find the least objectionable note to kill off. Your MDI device may not have a whole lot of polyphony, so it's good to dial down PolyHarp's setting to match the MIDI Synth you are playing (or less...). This is going to be an even bigger problem when I get around to supporting MPE, which maxes out at 15 note polyphony unless you are in some special cases that can be accommodated (like 24 ED2, where you can send all the "normal" notes to one polyphonic synth, and quartertone sharp notes to another polyphonic synth).
I might do a kind of watered down microtonal mapping where instead of the best possible intonation, it's forced into 180ED2, which is lots better than 12 ED2, but is only accurate to 6.66 cents or less. But it would have lots of polyphony if the other side can handle it.
In MIDI mode, it's not keeping track of energy, so it instead sets a timer - which is set with the decay slider. If you set the timer short, it'll send note offs pretty rapidly. But really, PolyHarp and MIDI only go so far with each other. It's really about making chords that are purely imaginary and playing them even though they may have dozens of strings involved.
That said, yes , it seems to send a lot of note offs all at once killing repeatedly strummed notes. Part of this is because MIDI doesn't really define what happens when two note ons come for the same note without an intervening note off. They might be being sent in the wrong order or something (on on off instead of on off on ...) I can investigate - I can probably get this to work better.
I haven't really talked a lot about the synth portion of PolyHarp, which is deliberately stupid, but there are some wavetables in there that are only interesting at really slow speeds. The wavetables are kind of a mess, which is why I want to replace them with generating functions directly.
I have a version of it, but there a lots more kinds of iDevices out there that I need to tweak the UI for. It'd be nice to be AUv3 and support Ableton , MIDI learning, blah blah blah. I kind of need to make a framework would do all the gluey stuff, and would just make variants that would just spit out channels of output. Kind of like Ape Soft or other devs.
Really what I'd like is for Yuri Turov to make a variant of Shoom that uses granular synthesis, because it would be lots better than Ellipsynth and feel almost the same.
Well, it actually pans depending on where the string is "plucked". The strings run the whole length of the quad - the thickened parts are really just indicators of the pitch.
There's a modulation set up in a lot of the synthesizers that is doing that.
This kind of enigmatic control shows that the second modulation turns strums position into pan modulations on each string, with a linear curve, scaling the range from 20% to 80% of the pluck distance to 0...1 where left is 0 and right is 1.
you can flip it, flip the ranges, change the curves, whatever, or delete the modulation entirely with the "-" button which is so innocently sitting above the table of modulations.
Touch modes are associated with string areas. For instance, you can have two areas that have different modes for them. This is good for slapping - you can make a skinny string area next to your usual one to whack all the strings. In the real world, I use the palm of my hand, or twang an elastic band stretched over the strings, or whack it with a chopstick.
As far as colors go -- well, I'm not a big fan of dark modes. If you pull down the brightness control (lower left corner segment) , you can get pretty dark.
I have a different Skin controller that is a little less confusing than this one in that the actual interface elements are associated with those circles. The circles still can be locked and related to each other, or not. That may go in at some point, but it means doing some backward compatibility gymnastics.
Hey ! I figured out why MIDI was cutting those notes short - the same logic was in two different places! Duh! Look for improvements in 1.0.4!
Great news ! I think that solving this issue will really bring a new dimension to this app
... and PolyHarp 1.0.4 should be available as an update now! .. Or as a new download!
It works much better now. I still have some “interruptions” with the midi notes, but maybe it comes from the instrument itself and not PolyHarp. This app is AMAZING. I think that most people here haven’t yet really understood its true potential. I hope some will publish in use demo with various instruments. It will help promote the beast.
One improvement I can suggest is to be able to change the lenght of the note depending where you press on the screen. For exemple, when I press on the right, then it is a long note and when I press on the left, it’s a short note. It would be very nice when playin strings
I have lots more videos to make! Some will be just playing it and hacking around with it.
Mostly, PolyHarp wants to keep oscillators going all the time!
My guess is you are talking about playing strings different places ("nut" or "bridge").
that would rightfully go with the modulations. Right now, you can set up a modulation to send CC01 in case you want to use that to tell a MIDI synth to use that to control a release time or sustain level or something.
PolyHarp 1.0.5 makes the MIDI behave a little better still! Multiple strums were not resetting the MIDI NoteOff timeout for a string, so it would cut off too soon!
Thanks for this. It becomes better and better!
I'm using PolyHarp to test out an idea I have about microtonal polyphony beyond MPE's capabilities.
Here's me writing about it:
http://jhhl.net/nucleus/InHope.php
And here's a video of the as yet unreleased prototype support:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ebJZRZFLFg
That MIDI-192 support is in the latest PolyHarp in the app store. I'm looking for more multi-timbral polyphonic synths that support the MIDI RPNs that set up pitch bend limits. bs-16i seems to be the only one amongst my collection.
I kind of thought GeoShred might, but it turns out it's only 6 voice polyphonic!