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.
MIDI scripting in an AUv3 is great! Now what about audio?
Being able to code my own audio processors or synths in an AUv3 plugin is something that I've been searching for a while.
MobMuPlat packs PureData code into an IAA app and works quite well - but it's not an AU.
Something like Mozaic or StreamByter for audio signals sounds like an exciting concept, don't you think?
Comments
Doing it for DSP is much more difficult than MIDI. The Audulus developer had it working but found that getting it to be reliable and stable enough would require major re-architecting which he is working on. I think getting a DSP programming environment working in the limited memory footprint AUv3 allows is a pretty big hurdle.
Fingers-crossed that Audulus 4 gets finished by year's end.
Audulus will be AUv3 at some point.
I find audio at least an order magnitude more difficult. I think that would cross the line from being fun to being work for me. I still dabble in Audulus from time to time, but not usually for long, and definitely not at a low level, mostly just using pre-developed modules.
I don't think memory is the limiting factor (except when using long recording buffers or delays).
For a start, wrapping existing PureData libraries into an AUv3 shouldn't be too difficult, right?
You can have them on iOS, just not as an AUv3
Are they publicly available?
Probably because it's not as straightforward to use as, say, Audulus or zMors Modular.
More patience required to learn using it.
Are the .zop patches based on PD vanilla or do they use additional externals?
Got a few links please?
The mutable stuff is all open source & TBH there is no reason they all couldn’t be ported to AUs
Regarding scriptable DSP - These platforms are obviously a lot of maintenance & support. Porting one put’s you in that support path so I can see why it hasn’t been done (you also get all the fun of dealing with Apple & Paucity of documentation)
Also hint: it’s not the road to riches. Only Max/MSP has a paid model. Supercollider ended up going open source. PD always has been.
For what it is worth I think Audulus is your best bet (it’s also great)
(Check out Orac too - it runs on a raspberry pi so low cost of entry. I contributed a couple of modules for the first version. Need to port them to v2)
From my POV it feels tight using Émilie’s code in something paid. She has contributed so much by open sourcing her work. That said Arturia did it with her blessing so.....
If I had any spare time at all (cue hysterical laughter) it would be nice to make free ports of them though
No, the idea is to provide the platform itself (in the same way Émilie used it) so anyone can load open source creations/scripts.
Much like we have quite a number of shared StreamByter and Mozaic scripts for MIDI here already.
The same is possible for audio e.g. with MobMuPlat today as an IAA and in Audiobus, what's not available yet is an AUv3 that can load them.
I understand that. I just meant straight ports would be possible too
Sounds good!
@brambos has some experience with AUv3 audio and MIDI, he might be up to the task ... ?
PD as an AU would be amazing, would truly give iOS modular new meaning, but I should check out MobMuPlat. Thanks for the links.
The economics of iOS music is not what you imagine. Search the archives and you will find some details from @analog_matt . Even super popular music creation apps generate much less revenue/sales than you imagine. Sadly.
In other words, it's good to have a main job to rely on...
Yes, it's a bummer that not only most people use Win/Mac to make music but also the number of musicians doing electronic music is more like a huge family than world population.
The economics of music production software generally isn't that great sadly.
Most successful music apps barely buy you a bicycle in my experience.
One of the not-so-expensive kind.