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.
Beathawk AU Disk Stream or RAM?
Okay, so I tried Google and came up with nothing. My question is, does the Beathawk AU disk stream its internal samples or load them into RAM?
Comments
UVI (makers of BeatHawk and Ravenscroft 275 Piano Apps) doesn't divulve much anout their implementation techniques but the RC275 uses 883MB of storage and runs on a 1GB iPad 4 with IOS 9.3. I think they would have to load some samples and add more as you play to make the piano sound as good as it does. Adding them in realtime implies disk streaming to me. But it's just a guess. They could have some sophisticated modeling and use fewer samples and smarter synthesis of the sounds produced. But great modeling on an iPad 4? I think using memory management tricks like disk streaming is more likely.
So, I think they can do it. AUv3 had limits of 340MB per app and RC275 worked in that environment so I don't think they made the whole piano with all layers and effects fit into that limit.
So, having that sample playback engine I'm sure they leverage it into BeatHawk. I'm not sure which app came first but I'll bet they share a lot of the sound engine code between products.
All we can do is guess 'cause they aren't talkin' about their tricks.
The pro way to do it would be to store some ms of the beginning of all samples in RAM, then stream from disk on demand as keys are played (with perfect transition from RAM sample to disk sample, of course). Should be doable within AU limits to provide huge sample libraries this way.
Yes. That's an excellent description of disk streaming.
Assume any note can be played at anytime so load a small segment of each possible note (at several "volume" layers too I'd assume) and then pull up more sound buffers for the actual notes that are pressed at specific volumes from the disk.
It's magic, Peter!
Okay, so I asked UVI, and learned the AU STREAMS the samples.
Ecstatic right now.