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
would have been nice. I've got the mx-1 mixer and it's not class compliant either, folks have been requesting that they update the compliancy since day one, they've had several updates but no compliancy... so they're aware of the importance.
Yeah...it would be super-dope to be able to just hook this up to the iPad and go. I’m hoping that with the upcoming iPad OS that I can at least access the sd card directly through usb like I can on my Mac. That would make transferring samples a breeze.
Nice! Thanks for battery info.
you know if a tiny little company like elektron can do it with the model samples that big ole Roland can do it for us with all of their kit... I'll continue to beg them to come to their senses
Where are you voicing your concerns? I’d love to chime in with a few things myself!
I've sent them to Roland us, and also Roland Japan
damn dudes at the rate the TR8-s are dropping into the used market, we'll be able to pick them up for a buck fifty when the dust settles, people are scrambling for these MCs
I think the two of them would be the dynamic duo! TR8-S dedicated to drums and all 8 of the 707’s tracks freed up for melodic material! I’m about to hook my SP-404a up to the 707 and throw some long acapella samples into the mix! So far, I’m loving this thing!
@thatguysmitty sooo...you’re saying that the 707 and the OctaTrack would be a killer combo?
Well that’s what I’m telling myself at least 🤪
The Octa plays well with anything! 😂
@thatguysmitty well it’s Sunday. What’s your feeling and thoughts 💭 on the MC707?😬👊🏼™️
Is it everything and the perfect slice of bread you thought it was gonna be?
Well now..l wasn’t really looking for perfection. I’m way too seasoned to have expectations like that! But, my initial impressions are mostly positive. I’m really into it for what it currently does...which is provide a nice hands-on sequencing experience with a great sound engine. The sounds are really good, and there’s a ton of them. On par with, if not a bit better than their XV-5080 of the past. The VA synth portion of the unit goes REALLY deep. The onboard drums are really good samples! And, the ability to import your own samples to build your own drum-kits is awesome!
I do however wish that you could sample directly into the drum kits and tone library. Currently you have to import them onto the unit via SD card. You can do this via USB connected to the unit or, my preferred method, of just popping the SD card out of the unit and into my MBPro, and then back into the unit. You can do this while sequencer is running, whereas if you use USB, you have to go into “disc mode” which stops all creativity. They also need to work on their file system, as all samples go into one folder. Currently, it doesn’t recognize sub-folders, which makes importing and making kits super cumbersome and inefficient. Once the drums, or whatever samples you import are placed into a drum kit, you have some pretty good sound shaping options for each sound.
I haven’t had a lot of time to get into using samples in the synth engine yet. I did import one 808 tone into it, and had tons of sound shaping options to sculpt the sound available.
Also, using it as a audio interface works great after you install the drivers. I wish it was class-compliant so I could use it directly with the iPad...but, being able to stream all 8tracks in stereo into Ableton is simply awesome! And, using my iPad as an fx unit via the audio send & returns and my iconnectaudi4+ is the bees knees!
I’ll drop some more info as I get more aquatinted with this little beastie. It most certainly is a Groovebox...I was throwing down grooves in little to no time. The sequencer is pretty deep and has a few cool tricks up its sleeves. Love being able to sequence unquantized...and with swing per track & per clip. The looper isn’t really my thing, so I haven’t gotten into it yet.
Cheers
@thatguysmitty
Awesome review. Thanks for taking the time to post your feedback.
Just placed a few things up for sale to fund this investment.
cool and thanks for this... may I ask how are you feeling about the price of the unit, after spending time with it do you think it could have been a few bucks less or that they hit the proper price point?
bam!
Yeah. Just saw this. Decisions decisions. 🤔
I don’t really measure creative tools by price, I tend to value how much they add towards my creativity. I’ve paid way less for tools that inspire me...and paid a lot more for those that I didn’t jive with at all. Its hard for me say whether it’s worth the $1000. For me, if I get some solid grooves out of it and enjoy myself in the process, then I can honestly say it’s worth every penny.
Just from hearing all the stuff you’ve posted on this forum...I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy the 707. Hell man...you could get solid tunes out of a stick and a ball of string.😂
Hahah. You are far too kind. Thanks. The 707 seems like the GrooveBox I’ve wanted since getting into this making music stuff...so we’ll see.
Thanks again for all your observations.
I'm like that as well, I'll pay whatever for the instrument that feels right, but this one's got me thinking about the price for some reason... will have to wait till I can spend time with one I guess.
a cool refresher + new features vid, you gotta love loopop although I wish he would go more in-depth into the sampling features of the deluge and use better samples for his time stretching demos as the one in the vid already sounded over stretched to begin with so I couldn't really get a good idea of the stretch quality
wait a minute so I'm reading that on the deluge you can have parameter locks on a Per note basis in addition to per step, is that right???
damn the things you could do to funky baselines with that... can any of you Deluges users say whether or not it's possible to have different BPMs or time signatures on a per clip basis within a single song?
This is just my first thoughts on the new Roland MC707, there are no sound previews or in-depth guides to using it. Yet! Stay tuned for more info shortly on Roland’s latest Groovebox.
OK, after spending most of today playing with the 707 with the manual next to me, it's all starting to 'click'. This little box is amazing, I'm getting some really nice sounding grooves out of it and finding all sorts of nice touches. Such as:
I love the fact that the Mute button is momentary, and that you can use it and the track select bottons to mute things without having to actually be in Mute mode. Easy enough to mute individual drum sounds too, as long as your drum track is selected when you press and hold mute.
The synth engine is getting a lot more intuitive to edit quickly. Using the arrow keys to jump around to the various sections is actually not too bad once you know where things are and use the Func button. Still a display heavy process and not something I'm likely to do much live, but for creating sounds I think it's pretty well laid out.
Clips can be 8 measures long, the measure button just cycles through the first 4 then the second 4. On that note, I like that the progress leds at the top of each track each progrssively slowly get brighter as your clip progresses, making it easy to see which tracks have long and short clips at a glance.
A lot of the effects like the multi-mode filter or delay feedback use bi-polar knob movements, giving you basically two effects on one knob. Think Pioneer DJ filters.
You can change the colors of the Note pads on all the tracks, including the color of the octave shift buttons. This makes it easy to know exactly which track you're on at a glance.
You can reload a saved clip if you mess something up while tweaking it, though it's not really a real-time process.
All this time I thought it had 64 voice poly, when in fact the max is 128. Woo hoo.
There's still a few things I can't figure out or am not fond of though:
How do you copy say measure 1 in an 8 measure clip to measure 4?
Why do we only have access to 8 scenes from the Scene buttons when the 707 has 16 scenes? Granted scenes here are not always strictly horizontally aligned like Live, but still...
Saving a project can only happen with the sequencer stopped (SOAB), and there's one too many confirmation dialogues as part of the process. Grrr.
I wish there was a way to reload scenes/all clips from the front panel instantly. Tweak away and go crazy to create a build up, then BAM back to your saved clips and it all kicks back in on time. Basically Kit Reload on the Elektron boxes, the lack of this was a major complaint of mine on the TR-8S too.
Still trying to figure out an easy way to convert a project set to be track based Sounds to one that is clip based. I keep starting new projects and want to use the next scene to make a new "song" and lose all my settings as soon as I do this. I know, I know, make a default project with this already....
I wish there was a way to easily shift the keyboard scale so you're not always starting with mainly "C" laid out. Also, pre-built major and minor chords for the Chord pad mode would be great.
Programming the Scatter functions is still totally baffling to me.
All in all I'm liking the 707 more than I expected, and I hope Roland continues to refine it a bit more.
@ Tarekith thanks for your overview video and thoughts. How is that display screen , can you adjust contrast/brightness ?
If you figure this one out, please let me know! I know how to duplicate/double measures...but, copy/pasting specific ones would be golden!
Do you mean you can duplicate measures that already have note data in them, and the note data remains? Or just that you can increase the step count and make the clip longer by adding measures (which are then blank)?
Thanks Tarekith, lots to digest here
If you have a 1 measure loop, and then while in the measure edit section, you press function and the > measure button, it will double said measure as well as duplicate the data within it. Same with a 2 measure loop, making it 4, with notes and data intact.
Thanks Broseph!
Appreciate this.
Please keep me updated on any advances or set backs with it.
What are you replacing with this unit?