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.
Aargh! Duplication of work
I’ve been mixing down and preliminary mastering a bunch of new songs I’ve been making since late last year. It was a slow start last year as I tried straying away from Gadget and wasted a lot of time, eventually came back to Gadget via Korg Electribe Wave and exporting pattern audio from it into Gadget Zurich. At the time I exported them as single audio files per pattern, just to get the idea of where they will go in the composition.
Anyway, the past fortnight I’ve been mixing down in Auria Pro (as now I can go from Gadget exported separate tracks, via moving them in Files, to importing them in Auria, which is something I couldn’t do this time last year (hence taking last year’s album over to the Mac and finishing it in LPX). I’ve been mastering it down as instrumentals as a preliminary – the lyric is not written for any of the songs yet, they’re not finished yet.
The point of this post? I thought I’d mixed and mastered seven songs. This morning I listened to them over speakers. It turned out that two of the songs were the same song! I’d renamed one of them many months ago from the Gadget name to the new name (when I thought the new album project was going to be called ‘On time’ – it isn’t any more). However, I’d kept the original Gadget work as well as the new one all this time and ended up individually working on both at different times.
Boring details of the pain of getting Korg Wave patterns to match what I’d imported in Gadget
Sometime during the last 2 weeks I spent a sizeable time one evening recreating all the Korg Wave sections of the original/old one in Wave as a ‘song’ in Wave (not fully accurately, as I have a lot of Gadget scenes that have mixed bar lengths, so a 4 bar Wave pattern audio would coexist with another instrument that is 2, 3, 4 or 5 bars and the repetition of that scene would be dominated by the longest one).
I spent pretty much the whole day Friday and yesterday on the new one doing more or less the same thing but with a much more structured attempt at imitating the Gadget resulting bar pattern making a similar compatible song in Korg Wave. In the afternoon I abandoned that approach and instead went back to Gadget and brought in the patterns each track or channel at a time, split across individual tracks. That way Gadget could cycle them properly, I exported that all to Auria and finished it.
Comments
Haha. Which did you prefer? Hopefully the 2nd version? 😂
Actually the former one was louder, so if it were a snap decision I might’ve accidentally chosen that one. The latter one has more sophisticated structure, more sophisticated Korg Wave parts, and separated Wave parts per track (although I’d spent all that time in the week imitating the Wave parts of the former one back in Korg Wave’s song mode as separated audio tracks after not getting it correct by pasting patterns all over the place).
I think the exercise was useful as even on the latter one, I’d gone around three tedious times using different ways of putting Korg Wave per-track audio exports as patterns into Auria alongside the Korg Gadget per-track audio. At least it exposed a lot of compositionally weak areas of my Korg Wave use, and that implanting separated audio exports of Wave patterns into Gadget Zurich is about the best way forward for me in the future.
One problem I also had to work around is that some of the Wave patterns exist on the Korg Wave app on my iPad, some on the Wave app on my iPhone, and one song (not this one) uses patterns from both! There’s no satisfactory way to get patches, patterns and stuff from the iPad Wave to the iPhone Wave and vice-versa. This is a broken experience and shouldn’t be the case. On Gadget if I save a song with synth patches on the iPhone and open it on the iPad, I get everything
(except the synth patches are not saved anywhere available in the second instance – but at least they’re there in the synth when it loads up, so all I have to do is remember to ‘save’ the open patch in each synth and it puts it into an inconveniently separate list with the correct patch name but different patch number).
Oh and why is Korg Wave so quiet? I can hardly hear anything in it when I’m using it. When I put them over into Gadget, they’re very quiet, and when they’re finally in Auria, they’re easily dominated by the rest of the stuff. I’m not artificially going to up the volume of them, they’re from a quiet app, they stay quiet. Same as if I do night photography, everything’s black. Because there’s no light.