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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

It Takes A Joule, Perpetual Motion and God

edited April 2019 in Other

Forgive the shambling, gamboling flow of thoughts here. Please move on for more substantive discourse.

It occurred to me today, that whenever I open the Ravenscroft 275 piano app it is always sparkling new, freshly dusted and never bears the scratch of a misplaced cup. That is, of course, if I have cleaned my iPad screen from the sludge of fingerprints that rigidly appear from nowhere. This magical achievement always satisfies me greatly... and, strangely, gives me hope. Sorting thru a debris soaked and dust moted world clogs the perceptive filter faster and faster as I age, it seems. Things vs. software. As soon as you get a "thing" it begins to deteriorate. The beautiful packaging, never to be reassembled to the pristine. The first frictions upon the mechanism. The grime that immediately begins its joyous but filthy escapade. Yes, by many reckonings. this is a definition of a "cozy home". it's greasy, but it's my grease. Oh, yeah, I was so stoned that night my head made contact with the furniture and left that concavity. Way comfortable.

Well, I recently had cataract surgery (successful) and another form of grime was cleansed by a new and unyellowed artificial lens. Reality sparkled! Momentarily. It was unavoidable and startling at first. Two weeks later, if I notice it I will remark, "yeah, man, clarity!". Two months from now... well, you know. Business as usual. Which is why this realization about the perpetual newness of software caught my attention. I mean, in Cubasis I will never need to replace a capstan... do teenagers even know what a capstan is? Cubasis' equations and algorithms are forever new.

I imagine software can be corrupted, but there is no slow deterioration that inevitably leads to the beloved but threadbare sport coat, the incredibly comfortable jeans, the shoes that no your every bone and sinew. Those are treasured possessions or sure. But for clarity... for accuracy, nothing beats the ten thousand taste buds on an infant's tongue. That number shrinks to three thousand by adulthood, and with it a universe of perception.

So, I marvelled at my little software app, always ready to spring to life with every ounce of functionality and UI it was imbued with. And I am thinking... this is forever stuff... created by the genius of a bunch of chemical filled sacks of saline powered by lightning storms... linked inexorably with the time busting truth of mathematics. In a word, WOW! Yeah, baby, I have my hands on the future. Thought in a virtual stewpot. The food of the gods, the white whale on Oprah, K2 with an elevator, Mozart's DNA stuffed into a binary tortellini.... and always virginal, submissive and indefatigable. My God, the perfect musical mate!

But... and therefore is always a but... in my reverie my newly lensed eye stumbled on the iPad's battery readout. 6%!!! Yes, I had it all... for another fifteen minutes. All these eternal notions of a constantly new forever at my service, my dreams of perpetual motion realized, the time at last, as Burgess Meredith mused about books in that iconic post nuclear Twilight Zone episode, to create to my heart's content came to the same tragicomic end as Burgess' did when he stepped on his coke bottle glasses and lost the precious dream of freedom forever. I was still tethered to the grid and all that it entailed. Millions of hamsters on treadmills at it for eternities to convert hamster horsepower into joules and watts, and fools like me to pay the feed bill. Oh, if only windmills didn't cause cancer!

I was daunted, but not for long! This electricity I am addicted to... it comes from the same place babies come from, no? The stork brings it and I just plug in. And while I charge up, there is another iPad in my sweaty grip. So, ok, it is almost like a perpetual motion machine. The energy required, as opposed to cathedral pipe organ playing, minimal if not inconsequential. I wield my algorithms like Jove, his thunderbolts, and I am godlike. The tools, Olympian, Vulcanesque and Thorlike scrumbled at my virtual feet leap into my hands with a nod and a touch. Was Michelangelo's Sistine masterpiece a foreshadowing of touch consciousness? Merely a prescient metaphor? Am I God and my Adam an iPad Pro2? Sacrilege for an Easter Sunday, I know.

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream (of consciousness)
Merrily, merrily, (quite arbitrarily)
Life is but a dream (of polarity).

Happy and peaceful renewal to all.

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