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
patience, guys, he said he‘ll get to it with the next update
This is only the first update - mainly aimed a fixing non working sections like quantise, track choice, integer track lengths, copy pad to buffer & save. As such the sections are now much more modular & moveable for me to work with.
The new panel is just not as wide, its the same height as before...
I have no control on the size of the window the host provides but my three horizontal strip working area needs to be compressed to two - this I can work on next.
The new UI option is coming with the update to support the iPhone smaller height as @audiblevideo controls are much more compact (e.g. the pads are small buttons split into left/right).
Cool chill out.
State saving would just save having to save all the pads to files really, at the moment its just the AU Parameters..... but yeah its next on my list!
Thanks again for the great update! The six pads are plenty for me. If you are able some day to put pad merge and/or overdub recording, then I can’t imagine needing more, especially since with AU you can just fire up another instance. I love the way Group the Loop and Loopy do this with audio.
I tested recording 16 channels, with automation, coming from GR-16. Playback sounded identical. No missed notes, automation, or anything.
An option to automatically turn off thru -> when the buffer is auto copied to a pad and the pad is set to auto. It’s fine to leave thru -> enabled when recording live playing, but when recording from another app, output is doubled when the pad starts playing, until you stop the feeding app. Enso does this brilliantly with its “Rec & Stop” setting for audio.
As for the UI, I think the main thing is to get the aspect ratio of the window to be more like typical plugins from developers such as Bram Bos. There seems to be a pretty standard window height that works well with almost any host. The width isn’t nearly as important as the height. Basically, if it sits well in hosts like Cubasis and Audiobus that have a fixed window size, it’s likely to work well in hosts with floating windows as well.
I hope the people being harsh about the UI will chill out. UI stuff is time consuming. To me it’s obvious that bug fixes and missing features such as state save should come first.
@midiSequencer hey, I’m sorry. My interface comments were rude. I should’ve kept them to myself for now.
My wife and I tragically lost a beloved family pet a few days ago and am still a bit raw. Little stuff is aggravating me much more than usual.
I shouldn’t have let myself lash out on your interface like that. I apologize and will be patient on it’s evolution.
Cheers
Workin good @midiSequencer
For those in a hurry, I understand UI frustration, not everyone has the time or skill. My mockups took several hours and I had a head start from what was provided.
Meanwhile the app you bought for under $30 (<- largest typical amount $10) has done...
Step 1
Have an idea
Step 2
Plan
Logic flow language and library requirements
Code
Step 3
Problem solve. Come up against this library won’t do what I want it to do -itis.
Spend several hours read the documentation/stackoverflow/github.
Are the mockup controls in the right space have the correct cognitive sizing grouping and functionality?
Do I need to partition some controls off into another pane or settings panel?
Do the native UI libraries have what I need. Am I making custom components?
Code
Step 4
Test and debug
Code
Step 5
Make your mock up code buttons look pretty. Skeuomorphic or flat? Color pallet? Don’t know illustrator or Xcode Figma or photoshop — learn them.
Is the text contrast good does the logic still work?
Code
DeBug
Rinse, repeat
Add features
Rinse, repeat
That’s my estimation of what happens
Sorry for you loss.
Yeh, me too.
glad to see you're happy with 16 midi channels - its needed for mpe anyway & captures a complete session in one recording.
yeah thru can interfere with playing over a playback - will put something in to suppress this. Enso came out after my app, but I can look again at how it manages input/record/playback and apply to the midi domain. I have the app, just not had time to learn it.
Yes, I need a ui size that is more standard - as you say Cubasis is a good model to follow - I've been too focused on AUM as its still the only host to provide midi effect multiple outputs.
No worries - life can be cruel, but at least this forum cheers us up!
Thanks! Photon already super, super useful, so no rush!
The Rec & Stop setting in Enso does the following:
This is amazingly useful. You can set up Enso to record a fixed number of measures and begin playback immediately (like with Immediate in Photon), with no overlap of input and playback. You can then disable or remove the input with no interruption at all to the playback since no audio is being passed through.
The Always setting is useful when playing from a keyboard or something. In this case, playback starts, but you can continue to jam over the playing back audio whether you are recording or not.
I probably didn’t explain that very well. I’m sure you’ll get it when you look into it. Here’s a video I did earlier that may help explain a little ...
Showing that great UI/UX isn't just slap some random pictures together & hope they work! I often do this to support code writing but its hard to come up with a great design before the functionality is defined.
My controls are left over from the new skin from Quantum & Audiokit - I personally don't like two-tone apps but haven't really mastered colour theory yet - and thats what I like about your designs the colour contrast is great.
hard to come up with a great design before the functionality is defined. <– I face this all the time in webdesign.
How can I build a page without knowing the content. Yes I can just Lorem it up, but what about hierarchy and chunking of information. All too important in "don't make me think" and mental cognition.
thanks for the compliment.
Related 30 min educational rant (start at 7:50)
I just realized you can chain Photons together and record from one to the other to effectively merge pads. This ends up being a good substitute for overdub, just auto-dump to pads until you have the part built up the way you like, then record those pads playing at once to a single pad in another instance.
Awesome! I was just maybe a little too excited to poke around with the new UI. Haha. I meant no disrespect. Keep it up, I’m gonna have a lotta fun with this.
Did a few midi sequences with the amazing Nora Phase Sequencer.. Thought I would share..
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ejec4o9gvb7p8mx/AADhWWBPQ-Ct56fjTjSfxpdaa?dl=0
Great realization. Just tried. Cool
thats the great thing about midi - its universal!
Nice! And it’s so easy just to click on a link, select export, and the copy to Photon. I had some fun exploring these. Thanks for posting.
At the risk of encouraging feature bloat ...
A setting to make a pad “exclusive”, so that when triggered all other pads stop would be super useful. You could have six patterns, and flip between them without overlap.
I thought about suggesting “exclusive groups” where multiple pads could be triggered together, while stopping others not in the group. But that seems like overkill, and really wouldn’t be needed if the ability to merge pads is present.
Hi, please could somebody explain me how the groove thing is working. Thank you
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/comment/609679/#Comment_609679
http://www.amssoftware.org/manual/PhotonManual.pdf (Pages 15 & 22)
Put simply - Groove applies the rhythm of MIDI file B to MIDI file A.
It does more, but that's a simple distillation of the idea:
Wanted to see how midi sequences would ‘fit’ into projects with different keys (using Bram’s Scaler to ‘quantize’ to key)...Works great... like Blocs Wave on steroids...
Peace..
I have this selected only play in Quantum. I plan to include multi-select so the controls affect all selected pads, so will add play only selected as an option too
The velocity knobs of the pads are not working. It’s either on or off.
And one more think I have to say. I bought this App some weeks ago, I paid money for this and it’s still not working right. Give it away for free. But I have to work for my money. So if I pay for it it has to work right or give me my money back.
Like all early releases, there have been some issues , but the developer has been very responsive and the new release has addressed a lot of issues. If you are experiencing problems, report them and I am sure the dev will address them.
it is to be expected that a totally new app will have issues to be ironed out. I have found Tony to be super responsive to bug reports.
this info doesnt help me understand your problem @hei can you provide more info?
what determines the final velocity, the one you hear, is a combination of at least 3 things:
1) the midi note velocity you either recorded or loaded
2) the pad velocity control - think of this as a multiplier of 1) so 100 = no change, 0 means always 0
3) the synth you attach to photon outputs and how it interprets velocity -many patches ignore it so you could quite easily get off or full on.
I think 3) is your problem, so try a synth patch that includes velocity (eg Zeeon)
i justed tested midi in all 6 pads and the control does work
Just ask Apple for a refund.
Or maybe attempt to learn how to use the app first, before you claim it has never worked.
It works pretty well for everyone else.