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
Could you provide a specific example of the types of musical movements you’re aiming to achieve over the course of your song, and how Cubasis limits you?
Yes, and I also know how to use the black keys on the keyboard.
I can hit every note on the Piano🤪
I do a lot of classical music these days , I did the complete Bach Art of Fugue which has 810 separate tempo changes and 10 separate signature changes, I also do progressive rock which also has many tempo changes (think YES, ELP, Gentle Giant, etc.) .. Cubasis is a no go for both those styles of music unless playing live as if recording to 2” tape .. but I just don’t have the sight reading chops anymore nor the memory of Glen Gould to do that .. so sequencers to the rescue. I also do some synth pop and Tangerine Dream style work .. and Cubasis is perfect for that. It’s all give and take in the IOS ecosystem.
I have used some of the same notes as Bethoven, Bach, and Mozart in my music. This is why, when I request a feature, it's ridiculous for a developer to argue that its not a top priority.
Are we all clear now??
lol..."generative monkey clickers".... "actual creative musicians" the horse you sitting on is very high.Just because you have different demands does it not automatically make you a better or more creative musician.Don't turn your disappointment into a shitshow against other users.
Reminds me of Buddy Rich .. in his eyes you were less than human if you didn’t play jazz 💩 lol
But he was a great drummer, saw him in concert one time.
Well, I’m surprised to hear that those of you who could play difficult classical pieces actually need complex tempo change tools in a DAW. Makes little sense to me. All you have to do is play out the piece (let’s say piano first) for x-minutes, then go back in and fix a few notes here and there. You’ll do your tempo changes based on your feel. Be your own conductor. How do pianists or orchestras do it?
Sure, you can do it. And we do. It’s like playing to tape. But there are a thousand other needs for tempo and signature changes that don’t involve playing everything in by hand. It would be great if we had an iPad daw that could hang. But for now I’m still stuck with the pc.
Nothing wrong with chord organs and Casios. Don’t get down on yourself if that’s your level; everyone starts somewhere. But some of us have graduated past the toys and need more capable tools. The fact is that Cubasis at this moment is not capable of some very basic elements of music-making.
The great classical composer Robert Schumann composed mainly for piano, but he had a disability in his hand that prevented him from playing what he wrote, his wife Clara Schumann was a concert pianist and would play out the pieces for him as he wrote .. there was no computer in his day. In these modern times .. a couple examples, Hans Zimmer is an American composer who writes fairly complex musical scores for Movie .. but he is not an accomplished instrumentalist, he writes his orchestral pieces with many time and tempo changes into Cubase sketches before it’s passed on to the actual orchestra (at least he use to use Cubase .. may be Protools these days) Tom Holkenborg is another American composer who writes for movies, his pieces too contain many time and tempo changes, he also is not an accomplished instrumentalist .. but composes his sketches into Cubase before they are passed onto the orchestra in a sound stage studio for recording. The list goes on and on of artist who compose for a living who rely on their DAW’s with tempo/time signature changes to make a living. Hope that helps clarify things a bit.
Time and tempo changes are almost mandatory for film scoring. Fitting music to film is a huge technical challenge. Cubasis is hopelessly inept for that.
Well said @cloudswimmer. I wish cubasis had time sig and tempo changes from day one. I have owned it on iOS from day one and can not use it. Imagine a car with no gear box and no accelerator or brakes. I worked on the Rite of Spring from a full orchestra score and could do this in the late 90’s with Cakewalk... Here is a fun video of this in action:
Nobody answered the question though... how do orchestras pull off tempo changes? To what device are they playing? How did they do this 100’s of years ago?
Ooh ooh ooohh! Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!
The ... conductor?
But stick with the PC. Leave iOS to us musical toddlers.
😂
Thanks, I didn’t know those apps had added tempo and signature capabilities. Why is Cubasis allowing itself to be left in the dust by the competition, and thus encouraging its user base to migrate away? It seems short-sighted.
Steinberg is like Apple - secretive and lagging behind the competition (yeah).
But when they release a feature, they nail it - like Apple.
It’s not as easy as it sounds. And the relative market of people who would pass Cubasis by based on that is almost certainly very small.
Return on Investment. Cost vs. Benefit. Those are business basics.
MultiTrackStudio does as well.
Correct. And that’s my point. Last I checked, conductors don’t sit there using DAWs to tell them what to do. So all you so-called advanced musicians who could play Chopin, et. al, somehow can’t follow the conductor in your soul? Interesting. Again, still not getting why classical and rock musicians need a DAW to play to. I don’t think Neil Peart was using a pre-programmed click track with multi-Sigs when he lay down those advanced drum tracks 40+ years ago.
Your point is valid in one sense, but in another, you’re making the case for the advantage of tempo change in a DAW. If you think of the tempo track as the “conductor”, it makes sense that there’s an advantage to having some flexibility there without having to go back and re-record every part when you want to alter the tempo.
I don’t see it as much different than mixing. Sure, we can play at different dynamics, but we don’t expect to go back and re-record every piece whenever we want to change relative volumes.
Tempo is no different than dynamics or any other part of the creative vocabulary. It’s just that today it’s not a part of the dialog for the majority of musicians, so not given high priority by that many developers.
Plus it’s hard to implement, particularly when there’s recorded audio involved.
Tempo and time signature are like grammar, arbitrary rules made to give structure for those not literate enough to understand nuance. You can write songs without them easily enough.
That’s a fair point, but there‘s a self-fulfilling prophecy risk. If Cubasis corners the beginners’ market while failing to keep up with the competition’s power user features, they risk being branded as a toy-maker. For example, Casio and Peavey are two hardware brands that have made some really good stuff, but many people won’t consider them seriously because of their history of selling cheap entry-level products.
Perhaps selling down-market toy apps while ignoring power users is a viable strategy. Novation seems to have embraced it with their iOS apps. But if Steinberg wants to protect Cubase’s reputation, allowing Cubasis to fall so far behind — while still charging premium prices — seems risky to me.
That’s like asking Colin Nancarrow why he needed a player piano. There are countless additional use cases where playing in is not an option, or where post-production editing is made much easier by having a conforming grid.
Fun thread with good humor. @cloudswimmer, you probably know but Schumann hurt his own hands with a strange practice technique. I think he tied strings to his fingers ( should have left them in his pianer). Sometimes we fuck ourselves up for no good reason... well, he was depressed. That’s a reason, I guess.
I think the big code rewrite that just happened was required in order to be able to add significant features moving forward. Not to say it wont take time but I wager it is their intention to make it all grown up at some point. I think the minimum spec on Cubasis 2 was very accommodating to low end devices and as such limited its full potential. Ipad 2 was released in 2011, which is an eternity in mobile years and yes those old 32 bit devices were hellah toys. Anyway, the future of Cubasis 3 on 64bit devices etc is likely much much brighter.... and it will take time.