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.
Apples Big App Cross OS Merger.
Is this a good or bad thing?
Comments
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-20/apple-is-said-to-target-combining-iphone-ipad-mac-apps-by-2021
Until Apple announce it officially and proves that cross-porting indeed takes zero effort it doesn’t mean anything.
And even then it remains to be seen whether devs want to bother with the extra support-burden that adding new platforms brings. I’m not sure I do.
I think it’s aimed at apps like Netflix where an iPad app is a better experience in general than a web app but it’s not worth making a Mac only app. Being able to ship a Mac app with little extra work would be good for those kinds of companies and apps.
The ‘marzipan’ apps that apple released with Mojave are pretty horrible though (News, voice recorder, etc).
First party apps designed for a specific platform are always going to be better. There are other cross platform apps such as those that use Electron and they’re pretty much universally horrible compared to a ‘true’ native app.
It also opens the door for developers to ignore the Mac natively. It won’t affect iOS I don’t think but may discourage developers from making Mac only apps. Which for me is a bad thing.
Be interested to see if they develop Logic and Mainstage as a duel port.
This seems to be a logical and inevitable step for app sanity.
Also, the article mentioned that iOS and Mac OS will remain two separate systems. But..... that doesn’t preclude the possibility of an iPad or laptop one day running BOTH systems in parallel, switching between them as needed. Maybe even in split screen. Can you imagine using desktop DAWs and VSTs on an iPad Pro? The possumabilities! 😲 (ok, Surface and others got there waaay earlier, but still would be cool. Assuming it’s at least somewhat affordable)
They will of course become 1 os eventually, it’s just a matter of when
Yes, look how well it is working for Windows phone...
they are already 1 OS since the very beginning, when the iPhone was introduced as 'running OSX' ;)
(just user interface access is designed different both graphically and in functions)
The unified development approach may possibly open a way to app design with enough revenues to meet professional expectations in performance and usability.
Man, all I want them to do is add a god forsaken memory card slot to the damn iPad, that’s it, WHY CANT THIS HAPPEN!!
For music, I don't see this having much impact for me or similar usage cases, at least not any time soon. The long-established companies that make music/audio apps I use on desktop are probably not going to start coding them different for cross-platform compatibility. They would be compromising their core products. I'm not a developer, but I think these kinds of apps are far too demanding for that. If they want to get in on selling to iOS users and remain "professional," they should create apps optimized for each platform. I'm not sure about iOS apps, but there aren't that many I need to run on Mac OS. Touch is often a primary feature that makes an iOS app different and attractive.
I wonder how it would work. Is this new kind of cross-platform app to be sold at one price on both platforms? If so, in some cases it might be attractive to iOS devs who want to expand their market, to offer their inexpensive apps to Mac users. Major desktop devs, though, may not want to sell significantly less expensive cross-platform versions.
Simple. It is because as-is, Apple can charge 10X the cost of ram for the higher storage models, and get you to buy a new iPad when you run out of storage to boot. They get away with it because we keep allowing them to. It will not change as long as there are no successful competitive devices with reasonable storage options that work as well for music production.
I held out far too long with an android and caustic, I just couldn’t take it anymore seeing all the dope synth apps on iOS and caved, shame on me...lol
Android latency is still painful. Regular ol Linux has none of those problems and I’m sure developers would love to tap into the billion devices running Android, but it’s a wasteland. Still Apple makes things harder for mobile music making stripping out headphone jacks, crushing a whole market by moving to usb c without thunderbolt compatibility. We’re not anyone’s target market other than the devs who show up and post on these forums. It’s frustrating. I gave away my iPad mini to my kid and my 9.7 pro to my wife and I’m trying to draw a hard line in the sand about universal only apps but even with 6” iPhones that’s a pipe dream. Maybe this is why we can’t walk into a store and but an op-z? Love the creativity of these apps: aum and Audiobus are revelatory for mixing synths together, Roseta is great, gadget is sublime, but the slick super portable interfaces just aren’t there.
caustic on Android is what made me get an iPhone to begin with!