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
I am not sure if the ‘pros’ out there got your memo about those rules of qualification.
There's probably many iOS-only songs that can compete with radio-ready songs. Maybe not economically. But technically and compositionally for sure! It always comes down to what "pro" means to you.
We need to distinguish between ‘professional’ and ‘commercial’.
To me, professional refers more to skill, or the quality of the creation.
Seems many people see it as ‘I make money doing this, so I am a ‘pro’. I think that just means ‘commercial’.
I mean, just look at the horrible Grammy nominations this year. Most of that stuff is not ‘pro’ to me, but it sure is commercially successful.
@CracklePot yeah. That's what I meant, too
Ok.
We can agree to disagree, then.
Wait, what?
(Yes, I know you are saying the same thing. I am just trying to piggyback on your statement, and maybe bolster the argument a bit.
)
Peep the creations section of the forum and see what ya think 😁
It really shouldn’t matter. iOS can get the job done if you want it too
I agree that you can get the job done. But most pro's (commercially successful or not) work to deadlines, on set budgets, so wouldn't even consider iPad/iOS for full production because they can get the job done way more efficiently with their existing tools.
It will be interesting to see a new generation of producers, some of whom only used iPads from the start. They may choose iPads, because from their experience it will be the more efficient and familiar tool.
I'm sure it will come. Not sure if it's going to be iOS but touch/motion based something. But even iOS improved a lot in the past few years. 2-3 years ago we barely could run 2 apps in sync, now we are talking about full production.
https://medium.com/micro-chop/ras-g-made-most-of-bakers-dozen-on-his-iphone-plus-a-40-track-playlist-151255764abf
This might break the all mixing and mastering rule - I just don’t have that info. But Steve Lacy made the track for Kendrick Lamar’s Pride on his iPhone using garage band. Not sure if Kendrick’s vocals were mixed into Lacy’s garage band session, or if they combined Lacy’s track with the additional vocals on some other platform. But Lacy claims some of the vocals that were part of the track before Kendrick got involved were recorded straight through the iPhone mic! (I don’t know if he still does, but he used to produce everything on his iPhone. www.wired.com/2017/04/steve-lacy-iphone-producer/amp ) That’s the highest profile case I can think of.
The answer is yes
Iirc most (if not all) of those 'made on an iPhone' tracks were in fact recorded on the phone, but production was done on regular studio workstations.
There's no problem to record contemporary top40 vocals with an iPhone mic - vocals get so much processing these days that the mic doesn't matter much... seriously
ps: the iPhone's mics are really good devices
I'm recording a Kawaii baby grand with an iPad mic today.
No problem to do pro production on iOS but why use a spade to do the job of an excavator? However, I could do a decent mix fast with BM3.
Dude, I’m just doing some light gardening, not trying to start a major weed farm.
For personal use you really only need a half-dozen plants or so. Well, some people anyway.
With DAWs and desktops, there use to be only plugins that came with DAW, no sample librarys. Then first VST plugin came out.
like, in 90s, it was mostly akai samplers and roland/korg stuff/workstations, and studios also had DAWs back then but "plugins" or "virtual instruments" wasnt really a thing till early 2000s
then DAWs, and vst, took over, now you have mixing egineers like andrew scheps throwing their analogue rig out and using pro tools and waves/uad/slate plugins.
Im wondering if IOS is in the those early days like desktops were, or if it's just a consumer focused device for companys to throw toys at. Computers were being use professionally since the beginning, set up in studios and stuff, it wasn't really a "consumer thing" to have, they were expensive...
But IOS has been totally focused on consumers untill "pro" came out, and I'm not sure if studios have it as a workflow or not.
See, if the demand for professional applications is there, ppl will make them, but if its just "throw them some looping synth strings and sell 1000 copys for 3$" it'll just be that...
But I also too think, that iOs is capable. I'm not sure how good it is as I've never tried it, but I want to do stuff like this.
I just want to see a pro song being done all on ios, using like 80 traks, all mixed, ITB instruments
or
I tried searching, so far I found these
so I'm guessing it definitely can handle huge 100 tracked projects, playing all in midi, with amp sims and stuff. I mean, the new ipad pro is as powerful as the new macbook pro out right now...
There's really not a conspiracy to make IOS fail for you.
They might show benchmarks of basic calculations that make the iPad chips appear to be capable but with real workloads
you can't discount the architecture of the Intel-based Computers and the adjunct processors for graphics, audio, vector and matrix math co-processors.
This approach to multi-code processing has developed over 30 years. You've seen what it can do but the iPad doesn't compete yet and you think they're holding back. They're not. They can't use as many transistors in a chip that lives between 2 slabs of metal and glass. It would melt. Those desktops and even laptops have big heat sinks and fans for good reason. My iPad never gets as hot as the bottom of my MacBook. That heat is a by product of a lot of processing goin' on.
Improvements to IOS will continue to give us more capability but the form factor of the tablet will always work against us. Trade-offs, trade-offs, trade-offs.
I was overwhelmed by and tired of PC DAW/VST world.. then around 2009-2010 i discovered ios music making, which was like a fresh air, it was much closer to experience with hardware synths/samplers... i just had an app on my ipod touch, which ran into my roland sp404 or into guitar amp.. like another instument, just that, like kaossilator or microkorg.
But time goes, and ios music app scene became more and more complex, mimicking DAW/VST sphere, all those production studios
People were writing the whole compositions ITB since NanoStudio (but actually earlier, in SunVox for example).. but oh no, it was always "not enough professional" "i need 96 tracks" "i need it to be like logic pro"
sigh
On the other hand you can’t discount the disadvantages of Intel architecture vs latest ARM chips designed in-house at Apple. With a different architecture you can get more performance with less processing power (=less heat) and those benchmarks are clearly showing that the newest iPad Pro is actually faster than most of the macbooks used by people. Take a look at Affinity Photo, which can do some cool stuff in real time that Photoshop on a Mac takes seconds to process. Or look at how smoothly Fortnite is running in 60FPS compared to other platforms. Music apps might not be there, but I think the only limiting factor hardware-wise is limited amount of RAM, not the processing power.
Some reference: https://daringfireball.net/2018/11/the_2018_ipad_pros
You can't compare graphics to signal processing (in this environment).
The first us done on a dedicated GPU chip, while DSP is performed on the main CPU with low priority. Keep in mind that 'serious' music production is a topic only relevant for less than 1/1000 of all customers
Auria Pro can do professional mixdowns regarding sound quality.
(it is somewhat limited in space design due to the lack of reverb options)
But the more serious limitation is screen estate - 2 monitors 24" upward are standard today. On desktop you often split a single recorded part over several tracks to process sections differently at certain locations - instead of complex automated effects in the channel setup.
(so a high track count doesn't mean there's the same amount of instruments)
Workflow focussed editing is still a major flaw on IOS, but it's neither OS nor touch inherited - it's simply overlooked.
I think with Pro-R, Kleverb and Virsyn AudioReverb there should be enough high quality options. And Auria also has a Convolution reverb plugin (Although personally I prefer algorithmic reverbs to convolutions).
It's definitely not enough if you use reverb for a specific sound design.
If you intend a certain ambience for this part/track and a different one for the next, then you run out of options. The sound just isn't there.
Reverbs are quite complex processors and I'm neither into nor after the true high end stuff.
But I use to pick from 3 in Pro Tools and 4 on my WIN DAW.
Each is focussed to get a certain aspect of the instrument/voice target ambience right.
They all do just 'reverb', but with very different responses - and I know in advance which one to pick for which idea.
Reverb is a crucial aspect of mixing imho.
Not sure, but in the Kendrick + Lacy case, the opposite seems more likely: Lacy’s track (pre Kendrick) was finished in GB, Kendrick got to hear that track when selecting material for his album and chose to use it. (That’s common practice.) What’s unclear (to me) is what happened afterwards: how involved Lacy (+iPhone) was in the process of arranging and mixing Kendrick’s vocals + whatever else happened to the track after Kendrick picked it.
It’s a thought provoking case to me.. (Listening to the track, I wonder if the intro vocal harmony was done by Lacy. But AFAIK the beat that begins with the guitar chords (around 24 seconds) with the female vocal part that swells in is Lacy + GB + Anna Wise (+ some additional Kendrick vocals). There’s an early, super crude demo on SoundCloud - quite different - where we can get a sense of what Lacy is doing with the vocal harmonies + iPhone mic. ()
Even if you take a 'finished' IOS mix, there's still a lot of options to postprocess it into something very different on a typical studio DAW.
Could I? Probably, but not in any way keeping it mobile, because I'd need my treated studio and monitors.
Ok even more interesting (just noticed this talk) at around 6:15 in the talk he opens the GB session for his single Dark Red
He also claims the beats for Gabby and Curse on his band’s Ego Death record are iPhone beats. (Presumably lots of the main vocals were added later and not mixed on the phone - otherwise they wouldn’t sound consistent with the vocals on the rest of the album. But stills..)
@Konokoknk
define "proffesional" .. it's song which was published on official label, no matter of genre, or it must be popmusic which is played in mainstream media ?