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
I value your advice, your music and your videos. You represent IOS in the best possible
light as a true tool for musical expression and not just a great little computer.
Ok ok ...I just realized I missed this . I downloaded the beta but I haven’t tried it out yet . Is there much difference in your opinion ? You just want my opinion or should I record something with it and post it? Sorry ...have been out of guitar mode a little latelly(temporary)
Oh,thanks sooo much @McD .
If you are busy and short on time, please wait until I have updated it to improve the high gain amp types. It will be better then.
Ok just shoot me a message when the cake is done and out of the oven . If it’s gonna be better then you are right , why scrutinize the tone before it’s finished cooking
Very nice. Question. At about 6:10, there is a brief exchange of phrases where one is only very slightly distorted (sort of a "Yellow Ledbetter" tone and a more distorted tone. Are those the same settings with different levels of picking force (or pickup volume changes) or two different gain stage settings?
We get to help while this app is in the Beta process.
I'm the guy that loved Stark so my opinion is worthless. Just play with it and work with the developer to fix the metal tone presets. Th cleans and blues are great. But the High Gain and 7 String styles are probably a joke and need an expert's ear to fix.
@flo26 left his initial thoughts on this thread. You probably know his style.
The developer is crafting tone based upon provided "clean" and examples audio files of other gear. Make some demos and show what the actual guitar signal was before the hardware did it's magic "transfer functions" and FX alterations.
Thanks for asking!
OK. Then for me it's the AUv3/Universal capability that will make me grab it first to stay in AUM for the User Interface.
I can also craft a "Rig" using it in AUM and AirDrop it to my little iPhone 5s and not need to turn knobs for a set-up.
I'm going to learn to use Bluetooth pedals and hardware knobs and never even need to touch the iPhone. I telco'ed my iPhone 5s to the face of my Tele'.
I can add Magic Death Eye and all my favorite tone tools. Maybe I can set ou a knob to choose different AUM project files/presets.
That explains a lot: bad heart, no soul left (sold it to Mammon), lost my mind in the 90's,
carpool tunnel syndrome (bad hands).
I'm guessing that Modeling Metal is really, really hard. Maybe converting to 8-bits and back to 32 would help get that essential sound of the dental drill, garbage crusher and radial band saw.
Just using tools like "tube model" saturators and EQ's won't cut it. Is there an IR of a factory floor with 120dB machinery requiring a noise reduction head set? Maybe that would shape the sound into a real hell on earth environment.
I hope you can figure out that sound soon... I'm getting eager for an update.
I hope my views do not offend anyone that covets the 100 versions of metal, high gain amp, and hearing loss hardware..
We are taking a break for Tet. Back next week.
I'll be sleeping off my New Year's hang over until after Valentine's Day so I can claim to be ill when I forget to buy flowers or a card. Why would anyone marry me? (Rhetorical question).
In the meantime, I'm playing with the free "Amp One" on IOS 9 on my iPad Model 2. It doesn' have any presets and expects me to know how to adjust parameters. I'll be lost for weeks. So, no hurry. Just give me great Presets.
Open TestFlight is still available to evaluate this potential future product and provide feedback to the developer. I suspect he's building the complex High-gain and intense Metal
tones. This will be a preset driving amp sim. There are very few knobs... the tone comes from the Amp selected just like the Fender v VOX v Marshall v Mesa Boogie v (maybe 5150)?
Hopefully no Crate. Worst Amp I ever bought.
It's worth considering that Gain Stage is AUv3 and you can add FX before and after it in your
channel strips or mix it with other track signals in a dry/wet ratio in AUM, Auria Pro or a DAW with sub-mix busses.
@McD
Duly noted.
Going to be testing it over the weekend.
Well mostly we were taking a break for Tet. But we are back now. Before continuing the research on the high gain amps I plan to release two simpler plugins. We have to balance our time between long projects like this amp sim and shorter projects that pay the bills on a short term basis. We are putting the finishing touches on a Boss/Roland Dimension inspired chorus.
I think it will also be sensible to release the core internal component of our amp models as a saturation plugin that people can use as a saturator in the typical sense or they could use it to experiment with building their own amp models while they wait for us to complete ours.
I hope they forgive our "Offensive" behavior and that's our Vets have come to terms with
a misguided effort to weigh in on a civil war. Imagine the French fighting with the North and
Spain sending troops to keep the South. It's really a local dispute and adding more guns and soldiers lives to the chaos is a bad idea.
If the TestFlight remains open we can provide useful feedback.
No credit cards to charge your bills to. It's the american way.
Nice. That's a great effect.
Awesome. Teach us how to use it well please.
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I’ve been using it with my guitar a lot lately, it sounds incredible. I really like the clean setting a lot
Is this still active? I know @Blue_Mangoo is working on creating more presets. No news is no news.
After listening to the opinions of beta testers and doing more tests on gainstage itself, I felt it needs some major revisions. Basically I never play high gain guitar music and didn’t have a feel for how an amplifier should feel at high gain settings.
I describe the feel of a guitar amp as a combination of compression and saturation. I believe the compression comes largely from the power supply sag. Most amp sim software feels a bit lifeless compared to the real thing because it has all the saturation but not enough compression. With gain stage I wanted to build the first iOS software amp that had enough of the compression component in addition to the saturation. Its clear to me now that the feel it has in the beta version is actually too much compression.
That is kind of cool for the lower gain tones because it sounds like an exaggerated version of what I like about real amps compared to software ones. But as you push the gain up, it just doesn’t work to have that much sag. It sounds flabby no matter how you filter it and it never saturates enough even when you push the gain to insanely high levels.
So there are several things that I need to do:
Basically I thought I could get all those amp types from one architecture and just tweaks Settings to get the differences in tone. That’s probably still true in a way but the definition of “tweak settings” has to expand to include developing alternative models of preamps, power supplies, etc. iOS customers usually expect a music app to cost less than $20. I was planning to sell gain stage for $15. If each amp requires individually modelled components and we have 25 or 30 amp presets then we would need to charge more than that. So I am thinking about splitting the project up and doing different styles of tone as totally separate plugins. Those that are ready earlier could release earlier and if I need more time for others we can keep working.
I quite like the idea of building software amps where each amp is a separate plugin, so buying a software amp would be more like buying a real amp: each amp has one or two channels and a few settings but it doesn’t attempt to make every possible guitar tone. Then instead of paying a high price for a software that models your entire guitar rig and all possible tones, you buy each component individually and connect the rig together in AUM.
To keep the company going we need to release some new apps in the next month or two, so I am taking a break from gain stage to develop some other projects. I’ll be back after we have done a few other releases.
@Blue_Mangoo Sound like a good idea to me. I would rather buy a cheaper amp sim with limited feature than a huge suite of feature I don’t need.
That's what I thought. Packaging Amp types for less that $10 or shipping a free product with limited presets (Tones) and then selling IAP's for additional presets will probably give the best return for the work and let you ship as you continue to develop more product(s).
Targeting a tone based on a specific famous recorded tone might make sense as you did with Kid C. It's just tricky not to get into any legal hassles, I would guess. Would Larry's Kid
or "Eddie's Beat" or "Joe's Alien" or "Eric's Laylah" be defensible in court?
I also like the idea of imitating specific tones from songs. I am no legal expert but i suspect those naming issues would not be a problem unless it was successful behind our wildest dreams. And if that happened and someone complained, I would be happy to change the name of the preset.
The amps in the line 6 helix have all unoriginal names but it is an open secret what they are...
http://dshowmusic.com/line-6-helix-amp-models/
Somebody had fun thinking of all these.
Sometimes I feel like the pressure to appear knowledgeable tricks us (or me as a software dev) into believing that these classic amps and other gear are more widely known than they really are.
Speaking for myself personally, it happens once a month or so that I am watching guitar channels on youtube and I hear about a famous piece of guitar gear that is totally unfamiliar to me. And it takes me about two weeks to start talking about that piece of gear in conversations, dropping its name as if I assume that everybody in the world already knows about it, even though I only just found out last week.
This happened with the chorus plugin we released earlier this week. Honestly, I played guitar for thirty years before I ever heard of the dimension chorus. But by the time we released a plugin that models it, I wrote the app description with the assumption that readers would know the dimension chorus without me mentioning it by name. I even got slightly annoyed when a few beta testers didn’t figure it out, which is ridiculous because just over a year ago I myself could not have figured that out.
Oh well... you gotta call those models something. If people don’t understand, it doesn’t matter that much. They Can just listen to he sound and like it... or dislike it.
I hadn’t heard about the chorus either
but that said.... I am not a modulation fan. I cant remember last time I tried a chorus inside the helix. Delay and reverb i know some pedals 
Point above was, that probably there is some right issue with naming them like their original counterpart. And: coming up with names can be fun 👊🏼😁
Yes, I think you are right: those amp names are registered trademarks.
I agree about modulation. I stopped using chorus years ago because it seems to sound ok on solo guitar but it makes the sound get lost in the mix. We chose to do a dimension style one because its more subtle than other chorus effects and almost doesn’t sound modulated. Its the only pitch modulated effect I could ever see myself actually using in a recording or performance.
Just happened to see this... I don’t know for sure but as a player that sounds just like switching from playing more softly, or with finger pads, to striking harder - te setting sounds the same to me. I know this because I’m more of a touch player and use a lot of dynamics, expressive switching from pads to nails or striking harder.
it’s also what I’m always looking for in my sound, guitar and amp, an expressive range running from that kind of soft to that kind f bark.
Oh i absolutely See the worth of combining chorus with synth and get some dynamic going on, so using this as an AUv3 to combine with almost anything... cool thing but a guitar signal. I like Tremolo. Sometime it can be cool if it’s really deep and hacking and slashing the chords/swells. I may habe to dive deeper into mods and guitarsound
Back to topic I really liked some of the amps and their modeling and tone. I am not a high gain, heavy metal tone guy also. The AC30 was spot on. Really nice warm dirty. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I also really enjoyed some of those sounds. But I also got a bit discouraged because I felt the response was at least fifty percent negative. I certainly don’t want to please everyone but I think it’s important to package things in a way that people don’t pay money for an app and then go “oh, this isn’t what I was expecting.”
If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that even the best models in gain stage respond to dynamics in a way that is totally unlike the hardware they claim to model. In many cases I dearly love the way they sound to the point where (do I dare say this?) I almost prefer the model to the real thing. But if we are making “models” that are designed to sound cool rather than realistic then we need to present the app in a way that doesn’t mislead customers into believing that they are getting realistic models.
It's still my go to when I just want a nice guitar sound and don't want to mess about too much, be sad when the beta dies...