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.
Common location for samples across apps?
Is there any way to have a directory full of samples or loops be accessible from multiple apps? It seems like if I use AudioCopy or AudioShare that I am creating multiple copies of the file and taking up more space than necessary on my iPad.
Comments
Short answer.... Locally, no
I use audioshare to pool, but like you say files are duplicated in apps. Dropbox gets the pool off your machine, but still files are duplicated in apps
So wouldn't this be a good idea, rather than having to duplicate them. Photos works like this, so it must be possible - over to Apple!
I could be wrong but, if an app has the audioshare 'open in' SDK ,then a duplicate is not made....the original file is sent to audioshare....but not many apps have added the SDK.??
I use ifunbox,about once a month to see what apps are holding onto dupes and delete that way.
Jailbreak your device and you'll be happy
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@commonstookie sadly no, that still makes a copy.
No bad effects here from JB. buy iFile, create 'aliases' 'shortcuts' 'symbolic links', whatever you want to call them, and you're all set.
@Zetagy that's a great idea, I hadn't thought of that for music making purposes.
@Simon there's not much that can go wrong unless you get too adventurous. The jailbreak itself doesn't cause any problems, but because it opens you up to a world of software that isn't regulated by Apple you can get caught out. As long as you're careful (stick to the default repos) and do a bit of research before jumping in (the r/jailbreak subreddit is an amazing resource), there's really no reason not to. You can restore with iTunes at any point if you need to get back to a non-jailbroken state.
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Is this the app you're referring to @Zetagy?
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifile/id495655551?mt=8
AFAIK jailbreaking will make the app sandbox not work any more, which makes all your privacy settings useless. Some apps try to detect jailbroken devices and refuse to run on them.
That's correct, on non-jailbroken devices, apps can't access each other files since they are sandboxed. That's why I made AudioShare, to have a central library of audio samples. It's up to the other apps if they want to keep a local copy of the files used, but at least you can clean away files in other apps and keep the originals in AudioShare, instead of trying to remember which app had which files, etc..
Ok, so I picked up AudioShare. This is the closest to what I was looking for given the way apps are sandboxed. The integration with Auria is great. Too bad it doesn't look like Beatmaker implements it. I tried downloading some kits from ibeatmaker.com through the AudioShare web browser, but couldn't figure out how to get them over to Beatmaker except by sending them up to Dropbox.
Is there a list of which apps currently support using Audioshare in this way?
There's a list at the bottom of the page in the link...
http://kymatica.com/Software/AudioShare
BTW, if you come across any other apps that implements AudioShare SDK that aren't listed there, let me know and I'll add them.
If you JB, you have the Cydia Store (not iTunes). In Cydia, you buy iFile.
http://cydia.saurik.com/package/eu.heinelt.ifile/
In iFile, in a directory window, press Edit.
In the lower left, press "+".
You are now in the "Create" dialog window.
For "Type", select "Symbolic Link". Name it.
Ok, now press and hold to copy it, pick another app's directory, go there, paste it.
Voila, inter app functionality. I can save directly from one to another, they can all see each other now.
I used to do this with everything going to Beatmaker, under iOS5, gave it up for a long while under 6, glad it's back for iOS7 now.
I've not been able to get symbolic links to work at all across apps. I've tried creating new directories as well as copying links of existing ones and pasting them into other apps. The apps usually see the directory, but it's always empty even though there are wav files in it.