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 have a degree in Music and went back and picked up one in Engineering and had to learn the math too. So... I've forgotten a lot from both. But the vocabulary persists.
How about polar to cartesian coordinates? Good times.
Imaginary number spaces (3D?). Mandebrot sets? Fractal Geometry?
Determining the Q for a Filter circuit? (It's was an EE degree but heavy on the computer skills).
Compiler Design
Programming
Operating Systems design
IC systems design
Distributed Systems
All relevant to the stuff we want to make music but so much harder than a user would ever comprehend. It's a miracle that 100 vendors make products that work together on the iPad... and not due to Steve Jobs. It's talented engineers communicating and making products/platforms.
@mcd: oversimplification: equal power crosdfades between two audio sources of the same amplitude results in a smooth transition from one to the other without a noticeable dip in volume.
Linear crossfadez are simpler to compute (I.e. use fewer CPU cycles to compute) but there can be a little dip in volume at the crossfade's midpoint.
@Max23 : tx for Nave vs Ppg breakdown.
In your opinion, is sound quality comparable?
How do the 3 PPG synths compare to each other?
If you had to choose one from Nave and the PPG iOS synths, which would it be?
(to anyone that has experience with them all)
The most amazing thing with the Wolfgang Palm stuff is how light they are from a DSP perspective. None of them have modern 'ZDF' filter designs yet they still sound rich and cut through a mix nicely.
If the usual Easter sale comes along and Mr. Palm's stuff is discounted, get them all! But if I had to pick one it would be Infinite. Nave is brilliant too but I've found the Waldorf synths are a little heavier from a DSP perspective over the years (that opinion is based on comparing the desktop plugins).
It's possible to cram enough to pass all the Math tests as an undergraduate.
Then I took a Graduate Class and they expected me to remember everything that came before. I dropped the class and took a job helping sell computers, networks and software
for big companies. Most of my peers took Liberal Arts degrees and skipped all the math.
You can learn it now on Khan Academy with a much better teacher. Some of those math teachers inhabit my nightmares to this day. How many languages is the KA content converted to? Wow! Math and Music are pretty universal.
You can import wavetables into Scythe as audio (e.g. Serum type) and then convert them to wavetables. It is unfortunate that there isn’t a way to export wavetables from the Scythe editor. With PPG apps you can at least share presets with their wavetables.
The major formats are the PPG .wts, Waldorf .wtb, and Serum formats.
SynthMaster One, Scythe, GR-16, and Poseidon can all use Serum wavetables. GR-16 seems to be the most particular in terms of having the correct format whereas as the others are a little more flexible.
I do wish there were an iOS wavetable editor that could export wavetables to the various iOS apps which use wavetables.
Creating timbres for Animoog isn’t so difficult but can be tedious as you have to use an iTunes method to get them into Animoog. There is some flexibility in the size but there’s definitely a narrow range especially if you want the tuning to work.
The advantage of Poseidon, SynthMaster One, and the PPG apps is that they’re all AUv3 and can have user imported wavetables using only your iOS device.
It would be very nice if Waldorf were able to update Nave to support some more integration with other apps. I don’t know how to convert .wtb (Nave) or .wts files to other wavetable formats though it’d be nice to share them.
The Granular Synths seem to sound similar to Scythe to me. Is that true or am I just not experienced enough to hear fundamental differences? There's an airy, woosh-ey sound in my estimation.
The idea of looping over sounds that morph in a cycle seems like the common ground to me.
SpaceCraft and Tardigrain seem to occupy the same soundscape as Scythe. I have never
play a Waldorf Synth or App.
I'll await the comments to tell me I'm way off base and then fire up some Apps to hear the
essential differences as explained to me.
The early wavetables were an example of function following form (read-write memory devices). With modern processors do we need to enforce "powers of 2" that are used to
store and address data?
1
2
4
8
16
32
54
128
256
512
start again adding Kilo-bytes and repeat with Mega then Giga then Tera then Zeta then...
How many 1's and Zero's in the first Zeta-byte?
10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 50
64-bits can hold some big numbers.
"I want an 8-bit reverb." Form following function? Not sure I ever get that right.
If you really want to create your own wavetables, you'll most likely end up on Windows/Mac. There is no full-featured wavetable editor on iOS yet.
Creating a wavetable needs time and planning-ahead, and I highly recommend searching for free (Serum) wavetables first and try them your synth.
Additive synthesis and FM synthesis are technically different from wavetable synthesis but they can sound exactly the same, as long as you stay with "harmonic" sounds which is the most common case.
Given the periodic nature of these, you can basically emulate FM and additive by using wavetables, and for one sound you only need more that one wave cycle if the sound changes over time. 4, 6, 8-OP FM? No problem. Just extract the right wave cycles from the sample.
How often you sample snippets of the sound to put into your wavetable highly depends on the sound properties - how fast does it change, how well can the wavetable interpolation of your synth modulate other parameters seamlessly etc.
@Max23 I guess you're mixing up Infinite and Wavemapper. Feature-wise, IMHO WaveMapper is the most powerful of the bunch, while Infinite is the latest and probably easiest one to use. That's why it has more factory material on board.
Only WaveMapper can import and process user samples to either wavetables or "TCS" time-compressed samples, something like fast-scanned wavetables to avchieve better transient synthesis compared to classic wavetables.
Infinite can import stuff created on WaveMapper though, so it may not be a bad idea to get both
iPulsaret is granular - I don't think it does wavetable does it.
Do you also own Groove Rider?
16 good wavetable synths in one app is really something
iPulsaret is the first app I purchased from apeSoft years ago.
Great app, Alessandro is a very creative guy.
For the longest time I wondered if I really needed iPulsaret and iDensity.
Long story short - I did.
The reason I recommend Infinite as someones first proper exploration of Wolfgang Palm's set of apps is that it's the most accessible. That's not to say that it lacks depth, but Wolfgang learned a lot from his first two iOS synths and poured that knowledge into Infinite.
Reigning in complexity to make something accessible is something to be celebrated.
Can you say a little bit more about getting Serum wavetables into Scythe. Does Serum use save its wavetables in audio file format? (Totally ignorant here)
So, if one ignores CPU-efficiency and learning curve and just look at sound quality, would you go PPG Inifinite or WaveMapper or Nave if you had to choose one -- I understand that's subjective but that's what I'm after an accumulation of the subjective?
@rs2000 : I guess I would disagree that (composite) wavetable synthesis and FM synthesis sound very similar -- unless we are talking about simple FM generated sounds being used as wavetable sources (in unless a wavetable synth is applying FM to modulate its wavetables), FM with non-static carrier and modulators can create sounds that strike me as quite distinct from what one could do with wavetable synths -- though wavetable synths with the right wavetables can create some sounds that are FM-y.
@mcd: vis-a-vis wavetable (in your case maybe you are talking about Scythe's presets?) vs. granular. There are regions of overlap where granular synthesis and wavetable have similarities -- wavetable synthesis can be thought of as a sort of special case of granular synthesis.
Granular synthesis in essences let's you take arbitrarily-sized slices (or windows or grains) from an audio sample and re-arrange them with varying degrees (and types) of overlap and at various spacings. A rich granular synth will give you control over grain size, grain contour (i.e. by applying amplitude envelopes to the grains), the rate and spacing and position of the grains pulled from the audio source and the spacing and overlap type of outgoing grains. (That was an oversimplification).
So, if you think of a composite wavetable as being an audio sample made up of the individual wavetable waveforms sequenced one after another, you can think of wavetable synthesis as being a special case of granular synthesis where each grain is the save of the wave table.
Granular synthesis -- when you take full advantage of its possibilities and apply them thoughtfully to different source sounds -- has an exponentially broader range of possibilities -- but those can also make your head explode as you try to fathom them.
An interesting thing about granular synthesis is that when the grains are big, the harmonic fingerprint is straightforwardly that of the source audio. It turns out a lot of time-stretching/time-compression is a special use of granular synthesis -- as it lets you make sounds longer or shorter without changing the pitch.
As the grains get small, the harmonic footprint becomes different and develops resonances due to the rate of repetition of the grains. And how you overlap them and how you order/re-order them takes on a lot of significance. It is amazing how much one can do by controlling just a few granular synthesis parameters: grain size, overlap type, source grain position (i.e. whether you take the grains sequentially or randomize the source position), output spacing.
The Mac program MetaSynth has a simple granular synthesis effect called grain that give you control over just those parameters and it is amazing how much variation you can get with them.
Got a few of these FM examples for me? (please no noisy or inharmonic ones)
Well, the typical bread and butter FM synth sounds like those EPs, bells, basses, leads that most guys use can easily be done with wavetables. For percussive stuff and samples with optional FM I prefer to use Stroke Machine
@rs2000 : as I said in my initial response, if you restrict the comparison to the typical simple world of DX7 presets, wavetables can imitate those. As soon as you start doing interesting things with the modulation (especially if you have dynamic modulation), wavetables are not a good substitute. Custom wavetables would need to be built to cover particular time-slices but can't capture a richly changing modulation. Ruling out noisy and inharmonic sounds rules out a lot of interesting territory. But without ruling that out, wavetables still can't satisfactorily create richly changing dynamic FM patches where the modulation is responsive and changing.
Most people, I guess, think of FM synths being synonymous with typical FM presets, but such presets don't really represent the capabilities of FM synthesis. As soon as you start doing realtime manipulation of carriers and modulators, FM becomes a lot more interesting -- though I realize most people don't do that. When I got my DX7 (1984?) shortly after they came out, I used to spend hours doing weird timbral improvisations by controlling the operator parameters via CC. I don't have any recordings, though.
What's great about FM is that gives you easy of control over the brightness. FM's not so much about the sound as the modulation.
FM can also create great drones and pads. Unfortunately the DX7 makes those kind of hard to program, but synths like FM8 allow you to some really cool stuff.
Also bass lines. Can do great basslines with FM.