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Video: How to model a guitar amp using a parametric EQ and a Saturator

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Comments

  • If you can compute great wave shaping and EQ while delivering on <10 msec latency it should make guitar players pretty happy. I'm saving up my pennies for this one. Black Friday will likely make me go crazy (again).

  • @Blue_Mangoo BTW: Many of the AU hosts support latency compensation for FX plugins (Garageband, AUM, Audiobus 3, Auria Pro and NS2), this had been a big topic in the end of 2018.

    Thats why AUs should report their current latency to the AU host .

  • @_ki said:
    @Blue_Mangoo BTW: Many of the AU hosts support latency compensation for FX plugins (Garageband, AUM, Audiobus 3, Auria Pro and NS2), this had been a big topic in the end of 2018.

    Thats why AUs should report their current latency to the AU host .

    Thanks. I saw latency compensation reports coming out in the logs when I tested our upcoming noise gate plugin in AUM this morning. So I think you must be right. We haven’t worried about it up to now because all our apps have zero added latency except for binaural location, which adds about 0.2 milliseconds when the “min delay” setting is off. When I asked our dev team to test latency compensation for that app they said they didn’t see the host apps responding to changes in the value they were reporting. But I don’t think they tested every host app. Maybe only Cubasis and auria. And that was 2018, so maybe the hosts hadn’t implemented it yet. Our saturator has a little bit of latency, I think about 0.5 milliseconds, so we will need to report that and test the compensation.

    We almost never use FIR filters; that alone is usually enough to keep latency under a half-millisecond.

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:



    @McD said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:
    @frond asked:
    you also mention sag. are you implementing a sag emulation?
    @BlueMangoo replied:
    Yes.
    @frond asked:
    will the saturator be capable of interacting/responding to pre gain/pre distortion/pre overdrive, ect. auv3's?
    @Blue_Mangoo replied:
    Low latency helps because it reduces the time between when you touch the strings until when you hear the sound.

    Latency is the biggest complaint I hear from real guitar players when I give them an IOS amp simulator to play with. Remove latency and deliver a good tone and it might get more players to value and IOS Amp Sim.

    The latency measurements shown above are from my iPhone 6s. At 48khz, not so good, but I’m very pleased with the results at 96kHz sample rate

    Oh that is surprising!
    I guess 44.1 wouldn’t make a big difference compared to 48. So I might just switch over to 96khz then. Is it a lot more cpu intensive?

  • edited November 2019

    @jacou said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:



    @McD said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:
    @frond asked:
    you also mention sag. are you implementing a sag emulation?
    @BlueMangoo replied:
    Yes.
    @frond asked:
    will the saturator be capable of interacting/responding to pre gain/pre distortion/pre overdrive, ect. auv3's?
    @Blue_Mangoo replied:
    Low latency helps because it reduces the time between when you touch the strings until when you hear the sound.

    Latency is the biggest complaint I hear from real guitar players when I give them an IOS amp simulator to play with. Remove latency and deliver a good tone and it might get more players to value and IOS Amp Sim.

    The latency measurements shown above are from my iPhone 6s. At 48khz, not so good, but I’m very pleased with the results at 96kHz sample rate

    Oh that is surprising!
    I guess 44.1 wouldn’t make a big difference compared to 48. So I might just switch over to 96khz then. Is it a lot more cpu intensive?

    In the case of the setup I am running for guitar amp simulation 96 KHz is approximately the same cpu load as 48 KHz because I designed the saturator to take the input sample rate into account when deciding how much oversampling is needed, so internally It runs at about 750khz sample rate regardless of the audio interface sample rate setting. It’s rather heavy on cpu, but I always test it on older hardware. It probably runs lighter on new devices, I hope.

    I suspect you could get into trouble running high sample rates with a large number of tracks. I don’t really know because I never do that. Maybe someone with more experience with complex multi-track recording and mixing can comment.

  • edited November 2019

    @Blue_Mangoo What is the difference between the expected latency (given your sample rate, buffer size, and hardware) and your measured latency? Is that the latency of your plugin?

    At 96k and 128 buffer size, the buffer delay is only 1.3 millis; doubling and adding 2ms HW I+O delay (?) gives expected round-trip delay of 1.3 + 1.3 + 2 = 4.6 millis.

    Given your measured delay of 9.3 millis, the difference is 4.7 millis, or 450 frames at 96k.

  • I sense a Training Video brewing... better yet. Ship this app and then do more videos.

  • @Blue_Mangoo : I don't know what the situation was with latency compensation a year ago, but some time in the past six months someone confirmed with tests that Auria Pro and GarageBand do latency compensation. That might have been new to Auria (not sure). I can't recall if AUM added it in a recent-ish update.

  • McDMcD
    edited November 2019

    @espiegel123 said:
    @Blue_Mangoo : I don't know what the situation was with latency compensation a year ago, but some time in the past six months someone confirmed with tests that Auria Pro and GarageBand do latency compensation. That might have been new to Auria (not sure). I can't recall if AUM added it in a recent-ish update.

    I think latency compensation is useful for aligning multiple sources of events. All events get aligned with the slowest input... so the effective latency for something like a Guitar Sim could not be improved by waiting for other inputs to catch up. So, for this app developer it seems to be a side discussion about audio timing relevant to a DAW developer like AUM's @j_liljedahl. I mention his name because he often joins in to clarify these deep technical issues.

  • just watched the video? very interesting. i’m just catching up to this thread. has the suturator app been released yet? looks nice

  • @eross said:
    just watched the video? very interesting. i’m just catching up to this thread. has the suturator app been released yet?

    Not yet.

    Guitar Players here are eagerly awaiting the release of this efficient/low latency Guitar Amp Sim in an AUv3 format.

    Keep an eye out for the release.

  • @McD said:

    @eross said:
    just watched the video? very interesting. i’m just catching up to this thread. has the suturator app been released yet?

    Not yet.

    Guitar Players here are eagerly awaiting the release of this efficient/low latency Guitar Amp Sim in an AUv3 format.

    Keep an eye out for the release.

    It has low latency but I wouldn’t call it “efficient”. It does 16x oversampling as efficiently as possible, but 16x OS doesn’t go lightly on the processor.

  • @McD said:

    @espiegel123 said:
    @Blue_Mangoo : I don't know what the situation was with latency compensation a year ago, but some time in the past six months someone confirmed with tests that Auria Pro and GarageBand do latency compensation. That might have been new to Auria (not sure). I can't recall if AUM added it in a recent-ish update.

    I think latency compensation is useful for aligning multiple sources of events. All events get aligned with the slowest input... so the effective latency for something like a Guitar Sim could not be improved by waiting for other inputs to catch up. So, for this app developer it seems to be a side discussion about audio timing relevant to a DAW developer like AUM's @j_liljedahl. I mention his name because he often joins in to clarify these deep technical issues.

    Your explanation is correct.

  • edited November 2019

    @mojozart said:
    @Blue_Mangoo What is the difference between the expected latency (given your sample rate, buffer size, and hardware) and your measured latency? Is that the latency of your plugin?

    At 96k and 128 buffer size, the buffer delay is only 1.3 millis; doubling and adding 2ms HW I+O delay (?) gives expected round-trip delay of 1.3 + 1.3 + 2 = 4.6 millis.

    Measured delay is 9.3 millis, giving a difference of 4.7 millis, which is 450 frames at 96k.

    The measurements I posted above were done with no plugins running. So there are three sources of latency there:

    1. Hardware
    2. Operating System
    3. Buffer size

    It’s easy to calculate the length of the buffer and subtract it so what’s left is from the hardware and operating system.

    EDIT: now that I reread my three-item list above, I see that both 1 and 2 are confounded with 3, in other words, the buffer size affects the latency of the hardware and the operating system.

    It surprised me to see that the HW + OS latency is not constant, but changes depending on sample rate. I always thought it was fixed and there was nothing we could do to change it.

    Plugins can be designed so that they won’t add any additional delay above what’s already there. As long as they are designed for real-time processing you shouldn’t have to worry about them.

    On the desktop, many plugins aren’t designed for real time applications, probably because they are market towards mixing engineers. Personally, I think iOS plugins should be more real-time oriented because it seems the iOS community is more into live performance.

  • @espiegel123 said:
    @Blue_Mangoo : I don't know what the situation was with latency compensation a year ago, but some time in the past six months someone confirmed with tests that Auria Pro and GarageBand do latency compensation. That might have been new to Auria (not sure). I can't recall if AUM added it in a recent-ish update.

    AUM has had latency compensation since version 1.0. (Aligning all outputs, so the total delay equals the most late signal)

  • Many are eagerly awaiting Drambo.

    I'm eagerly waiting for this saturator (which will like be branded as an amp simulator).
    I wonder if the developer is wrestling with the dreaded question of "cabinet" modeling or
    paring back to the ReAmp approach focus on pre-speaker tone shaping.

    It can't be much longer now... certainly sometime in 2020.

  • @McD said:
    Many are eagerly awaiting Drambo.

    I'm eagerly waiting for this saturator (which will like be branded as an amp simulator).
    I wonder if the developer is wrestling with the dreaded question of "cabinet" modeling or
    paring back to the ReAmp approach focus on pre-speaker tone shaping.

    It can't be much longer now... certainly sometime in 2020.

    Today we are making presets and fixing bugs. As I explored the approach in the video at the top of this thread I found it necessary to add several controls that control the size of the power supply transformers and capacitors that supply current to the tubes. That helps a lot in getting more interesting and realistic sounds out of it. However, At this point it is taking me several days, and sometimes weeks to find settings appropriate to emulate of a single amp type. I am really loving the tones it makes but it the interactions between all the different knobs and settings is frustratingly complicated and I doubt there is one in a thousand customers who would have the patience to make his or her own amp profiles using this method. So it needs to have a really good set of presets before it can release.

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:

    @McD said:
    Many are eagerly awaiting Drambo.

    I'm eagerly waiting for this saturator (which will like be branded as an amp simulator).
    I wonder if the developer is wrestling with the dreaded question of "cabinet" modeling or
    paring back to the ReAmp approach focus on pre-speaker tone shaping.

    It can't be much longer now... certainly sometime in 2020.

    Today we are making presets and fixing bugs. As I explored the approach in the video at the top of this thread I found it necessary to add several controls that control the size of the power supply transformers and capacitors that supply current to the tubes. That helps a lot in getting more interesting and realistic sounds out of it. However, At this point it is taking me several days, and sometimes weeks to find settings appropriate to emulate of a single amp type. I am really loving the tones it makes but it the interactions between all the different knobs and settings is frustratingly complicated and I doubt there is one in a thousand customers who would have the patience to make his or her own amp profiles using this method. So it needs to have a really good set of presets before it can release.

    Take however much time it makes to get it right!

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:
    As I explored the approach in the video at the top of this thread I found it necessary to add several controls that control the size of the power supply transformers and capacitors that supply current to the tubes.

    So, you are modeling amp components after all and not just focusing on wave shaping.

    At this point it is taking me several days, and sometimes weeks to find settings appropriate to emulate of a single amp type.

    Ouch. Hopefully, there will be ways to share user presets using PatchStorage.

    I am really loving the tones it makes but it the interactions between all the different knobs and settings is frustratingly complicated and I doubt there is one in a thousand customers who would have the patience to make his or her own amp profiles using this method. So it needs to have a really good set of presets before it can release.

    I am glad you'll ship presets then because these apps get reviewed in minutes to days.
    Stark went down in a few hours by fudging the cabinet feature badly. Now we have IR choices to patch that. By doing a more focused implementation ReAmp is considered a gem "must have" tool.

    Keep working on the app you would want to own and defend.

  • @McD said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:
    As I explored the approach in the video at the top of this thread I found it necessary to add several controls that control the size of the power supply transformers and capacitors that supply current to the tubes.

    So, you are modeling amp components after all and not just focusing on wave shaping.

    We aren't modeling amp circuits. I don't even own an amp right now. But we've been working on this on and off since 2013 and at this point we have some clear ideas about what sounds good and what doesn't.

    Waveshaping is a component of every amp model, but if wave shaping is the ONLY component of your amp model, that's a very weak model.

    At this point it is taking me several days, and sometimes weeks to find settings appropriate to emulate of a single amp type.

    Ouch. Hopefully, there will be ways to share user presets using PatchStorage.

    The amp models won't be editable presets. It's not like Bias where you can mix and match parts to make your own amp. You just use the amps that I put in there. I think we'll put in an amp or two that has no tone stack and no cabinet so people can EQ their own stuff with a pair of parametric EQs. I would still like to release an app where the amps are editable but that's something for the future.

    I am really loving the tones it makes but it the interactions between all the different knobs and settings is frustratingly complicated and I doubt there is one in a thousand customers who would have the patience to make his or her own amp profiles using this method. So it needs to have a really good set of presets before it can release.

    I am glad you'll ship presets then because these apps get reviewed in minutes to days.
    Stark went down in a few hours by fudging the cabinet feature badly. Now we have IR choices to patch that. By doing a more focused implementation ReAmp is considered a gem "must have" tool.

    Keep working on the app you would want to own and defend.

    I did not know that ReAmp is popular. I bought it to use for reference and comparison. I couldn't really figure it out though - in 15 minutes of fiddling around with it I couldn't get it to sound like a guitar amp. Do you just plug a guitar straight into it or is there more to the story?

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:

    I did not know that ReAmp is popular. I bought it to use for reference and comparison. I couldn't really figure it out though - in 15 minutes of fiddling around with it I couldn't get it to sound like a guitar amp. Do you just plug a guitar straight into it or is there more to the story?

    I wouldn't say that ReAmp is widely used for guitar amp simulation. I get the sense that it is more frequently used to give some " analog-like warmth" to tracks and mixes that feel "too digital" (whatever that means to people) rather than for guitar amp simulation.

  • @espiegel123 said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:

    I did not know that ReAmp is popular. I bought it to use for reference and comparison. I couldn't really figure it out though - in 15 minutes of fiddling around with it I couldn't get it to sound like a guitar amp. Do you just plug a guitar straight into it or is there more to the story?

    I wouldn't say that ReAmp is widely used for guitar amp simulation. I get the sense that it is more frequently used to give some " analog-like warmth" to tracks and mixes that feel "too digital" (whatever that means to people) rather than for guitar amp simulation.

    That makes sense. I didn't get the sense that it was a replacement for a guitar amplifier. But some of the saturation sounds seemed like a good way to warm up a track.

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:

    @espiegel123 said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:

    I did not know that ReAmp is popular. I bought it to use for reference and comparison. I couldn't really figure it out though - in 15 minutes of fiddling around with it I couldn't get it to sound like a guitar amp. Do you just plug a guitar straight into it or is there more to the story?

    I wouldn't say that ReAmp is widely used for guitar amp simulation. I get the sense that it is more frequently used to give some " analog-like warmth" to tracks and mixes that feel "too digital" (whatever that means to people) rather than for guitar amp simulation.

    That makes sense. I didn't get the sense that it was a replacement for a guitar amplifier. But some of the saturation sounds seemed like a good way to warm up a track.

    I think that ReAmp is very good at that -- as do a lot of people -- which is why Stark was such a disappointment. Many of us hoped that it would do for guitar amp/stompbox simulation what ReAmp did for preamp simulation. But it was not to be.

  • See also: https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/33399/how-to-improve-guitar-sound-with-a-few-ios-apps-no-comments/p1
    for how some folks have "completed the story" with respect to ReAmp.

  • @Tim6502 said:
    See also: https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/33399/how-to-improve-guitar-sound-with-a-few-ios-apps-no-comments/p1
    for how some folks have "completed the story" with respect to ReAmp.

    thanks :)

  • @espiegel123 said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:

    @espiegel123 said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:

    I did not know that ReAmp is popular. I bought it to use for reference and comparison. I couldn't really figure it out though - in 15 minutes of fiddling around with it I couldn't get it to sound like a guitar amp. Do you just plug a guitar straight into it or is there more to the story?

    I wouldn't say that ReAmp is widely used for guitar amp simulation. I get the sense that it is more frequently used to give some " analog-like warmth" to tracks and mixes that feel "too digital" (whatever that means to people) rather than for guitar amp simulation.

    That makes sense. I didn't get the sense that it was a replacement for a guitar amplifier. But some of the saturation sounds seemed like a good way to warm up a track.

    I think that ReAmp is very good at that -- as do a lot of people -- which is why Stark was such a disappointment. Many of us hoped that it would do for guitar amp/stompbox simulation what ReAmp did for preamp simulation. But it was not to be.

    What is the problem people have with stark? I want to make sure I am not making the same mistake.

  • @Blue_Mangoo said:
    What is the problem people have with stark? I want to make sure I am not making the same mistake.

    It doesn’t sound good, it’s thin and fizzy sounding. Don’t make that mistake 😀

  • @richardyot said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:
    What is the problem people have with stark? I want to make sure I am not making the same mistake.

    It doesn’t sound good, it’s thin and fizzy sounding. Don’t make that mistake 😀

    What he said. The cabinet emulation is not helpful. @flo26 demonstrated that using an iR cabinet after helped a lot, but even still there something not realistic/attractive in the distortion. If you listen to their posted examples, I think you will hear that they don’t achieve a great sound.

  • @richardyot said:

    @Blue_Mangoo said:
    What is the problem people have with stark? I want to make sure I am not making the same mistake.

    It doesn’t sound good, it’s thin and fizzy sounding. Don’t make that mistake 😀

    Ah ok. That seems to be the problem with many other amp sims too. Speaking from experience, avoiding that thin and fizzy sound is quite difficult. However, making sure that it doesn’t happen with our plugin is our absolute top priority and its also the reason why it has taken is seven years to finish developing it.

  • edited December 2019

    So ... what is the reference for good sound?

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