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
Lorentz is my favourite synth, but in this case there's a no brainer winner:
https://blamsoft.com/audio-units/viking/
Viking synth. Sounds great, works flawlessly, low CPU and reliable.
It's free.
It's basically a Mini Moog. Which is king of synths. Did I mention it was free?
Whilst you're there, download all of the other blamsoft AUs. Also Free. I don't know if there's a way to send them beer money, but they deserve it.
If you play keyboards then Layr is hard to beat for playability.
StepPolyArp. It's not synth, just standalone apreggiator app (works also as AUv3 MIDI plugin) but it's pretty advanced. You can route it into any synth. There is no competitor on iOS, it's simply best
This is a good point, it's very versatile and has a fair amount of presets. The modulation options are very nice as well. The simple UI makes it easy to work with.
LOL, asking about synths here is like asking people their favorite flavor of ice cream. I prefer strawberry but my chocoholic daughter is convinced I’m defective due to that preference. Just expedite the process and buy them all now.
Synthmaster one is NOT stable or modern. If you go fullscreen in auv3 in aum, synthmaster one crashes literally every time.
Workaround: don't go full screen until that is fixed.
Make sure to report it to the dev.
SM One is a great sounding synth.
It doesn’t crash for me. 2019 iPad iOS 13.3
SM One is a super dope sounding synth...but for me it’s a pita to program. I don’t like all those menus and stuff like that (at least on iOS, it works great on my windows pc).
SynthMaster One's Arpeggiator is cool !!
LaGarage I think fits your needs, stability might be have niggles but its still new and they are updating regularly. It has a very deep in build arpeggiator too. Its future proof and has some unique routing algorithms, with switchable oscillator types.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vhxPLBpHJuI
Anything by Icegear
Aparillo! What the hell is this? Whoa!
N-dimensional psychedelic rabbit hole inside-out and gaining speed.
Hey hey wait a minute, if you want weird we have plenty
There is not much screen real estate on iDevices. There has got to be some way the users should be able to interact with the app - menus, buttons, pop ups... and SM1’s design is optimal and layout is highly organized - it is actually very user-friendly if you look at the page drop down, the left/right arrow buttons above it and the button bar above the keyboard that we can scroll horizontally - so many ways to access its various sections. We should get used to the way mobile apps function to be mobile.
Yup. The player interface in AU is kinda jacked up. Also, it’s insane that its a preset-based synth, but the preset browser is hosed... if you wait a minute or two then press the arrows, it always goes back to the first preset!
That’s not a curve. It’s a sheer cliff.. but it is amazing sounding and has some amazing capabilities.
If you’re looking for a one and done synth purchase, get groove rider. Not AU, but it’s just about limitless.
For AU, even though I have sooooo many, I personally always go to iSEM... It’s a great synth architecture in the real world, so many interesting sounds with minimal controls, but the virtual version has the awesome voice programmer which is basically like a mod sequencer. Huge mod matrix, etc. Tons of presets, decent app, etc...
If I could only have one AU synth, it would be ISEM.
I think it’s actually supposed to be a riff on the Voyager...
I just wish it could be played poly... don’t care about poly articulations, but being able to play chords would be cool...
I keep meaning to build a drum machine out of several instances...
OP here, with a progress report.
I combed through all your recommendations and comments and checked out most of the synths. I settled on Zeeon (Beep Street) as my first choice for analog emulation, backed up by Lagrange (iceGear) for cutting sounds (FM and other weirdness), and Factory (SugarBytes) for even more cutting sounds and dynamic, undulating excesses.
SynthMaster 1 got a preponderance of recommendations here. I bought it and worked with it for a while. But I ran in to too many little frustrations, I couldn't get comfortable with the interface, and the factory presets I browsed all sounded too busy (I know, factory presets are for show, and they need to be tweaked).
But when I started working with Zeeon, I felt at home immediately--starting with the nice crisp screen resolution. Great sounds with lots of detail. Easy to find all the right controls, all the analog basics are right there, and it's especially easy to see what's modding what. Yet, despite the clean interface it's full of advanced and fine controls and goes beyond the limits of what the old hardware synths could do. Handles presets well. I can see right away that is was designed for iOS (rather than being migrated). Zeeon met my qualification for "elegant" in all ways.
I like the sounds in the sample presets on Lagrange. I was a little bothered they all sound too similar, but decided it would come in handy when I want that particular in-your-face flavor in my mix. Plus, with the extensive list algorithms and filter types, I feel it has a lot more potential, and worth learning and exploring to make sounds that work with my music. The layout is fresh--no attempt to emulate the control panels of the hardware synths. I think it will complement Zeeon well.
Somebody here suggested SugarByte's Aparillo. Whoa, what a mind warp that is! I was impressed from the first sound. It's overwhelming. But then I poked around into the other SugarByte synths and found Factory. Comments I found online (a few nice threads on the KVR forum) said that Factory is more musical and Aparillo is really more for cinematic soundscapes (exactly as advertised). That's not what I want, so I bought Factory to round out my stable of synths and to reach for when I need extreme sounds.
I also bought DRC, which sounds good, but I couldn't get excited by the low-res interface and endless pages. Same for Poison--sounds good, but nothing special.
If any of you have comments on my choices and reasons, I'm all ears.
Thank you everybody for all your help. I'm sure this long thread will help plenty of lurkers in the future as well.
Steve
ThinAirX
That actually sounds like a great list of three. That was a very helpful write up!
Or the new awesome synth from BLEASS: Alpha. You can see the great demo from Doug @thesoundtestroom here:
@MobileMusic
Pure Synth Platinum is most definitely a wavetable synth, boasting almost 1,000 wavetables, with modulatable Phase Distortion and JP800 Detuning with several detuning phasing and modes. We also boast what we call WarmTables™, which, instead of mapping an entire waveform across the entire range of the keyboard, we use multi-waves like samples so that each section can be very rich. This makes for a very analog sounding waveform. We don't know of any other synth that really creates wavetables this way.
If Pure Synth didn't have any samples, it would be a fully capable synth in it's own right and the Detuning is available for the samples as well. Pure Synth also boasts Analog Modeled Waveforms in addition to the Wavetables.
Future Updates will include:
best synth imo, sunrizer ... comes with a good amount of presets and there are more across the web. i use this on everything, stable and amazing
also i second the vote for ppg infinite
I love model 15, model D, Zeeon, KASPAR, Europa is nice on the computer but shite on iOS, Puresynth, obsidian...if it weren’t locked up inside nano2, Sunrizer for that roland up sound. I’m getting into Lagrange a lot lately as well...aparillo is dope if you make your own patches but factory is off the hook when it comes to evolving
If Apple would make stand alone Alchemy again...it would rule the roost...but it’s is weakened to water and held prisoner by fb mobile.
OP here, with an update.
I found what I was looking for. Pure Synth Platinum! I've been playing with it for the last week, and going deep with all the sounds. I love the way it was designed--according to Jamal and those excellent demo videos--to sound great in performance.
What happened, since my last report, is that I played with Zeeon and Lagrange and found myself spending a lot of time trying to get any one of the patches to sound musical--i.e. to tame the silly sounds the sound designers spiced them with to show off what the synth can do.( I love Jamal's @GospelMusicians term for it: "wacky patches." Exactly!) I got depressed, dreading all the time I would spend to get a few dozen patches I can use. I also remembered that what I was really wanted was my old Alchemy back (the original, Camel Audio, and all my sound packs). Especially the vocal-sample sounds of Alchemy. And the orchestral sounds.
So I went back to this thread to see if I missed anything. I watched some of the demos of PSP. As soon as I heard the vocal sounds, I bought it. Haven't looked back. The best sign that PSP is for me is that I found myself doing long jams, creating new music, with single patches, following where the sounds led me. And it's true (as @GospelMusicians says a few post up this page) that the patches sound good in all ranges. I'm a two-fisted, 88-key piano player, so I really appreciate that. I can hear it.
I'm not deleting Zeeon and Lagrange or Factory. They sound great in their respective ways. I intend to keep them for special sounds, to round out PSP. But PSP is my go to for now on.
BTW, what's the difference between "wavetable" and "rompler?" In my original post I said I wanted wavetable. I think Alchemy was a rompler and I should have asked for that. Or are they the same thing? What is it called when a whole family of patches is based on samples of a voice, or of a cello?
Steve
ThinAirX
This is actually a pretty helpful entry on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavetable_synthesis
You can think of a wavetable as a collection of waves stacked together like pages in a file or book. One characteristic of wavetable synthesis is the ability to modulate through these wave forms as you play. So, for instance, you could have a wave table with a pure sine wave at the front of the stack, a square at the back, and any number of transitional (or not) waveforms in between. Then, as you play you could have an envelope or LFO choose which waveform plays as the note evolves.
A rompler plays only one waveform at a time.
I'm sure that's a vast oversimplification, but that's basically how I look at it. Apps like Korg Electribe Wave and VirSyn Poseidon that present a 3d view of the wavetable are very helpful in visualizing the concept.
romplers and wavetable synths are not super precise categories. Some romplers have wavetable capabilities but most don't.
In this context, wavetable means a series of single-cycle waveforms (often, but not always, stored as a .wav file whose length is a multiple of 1024 or 2048 samples with each consecutive series ofm1024 samples or 2048 samples being a single-cycle waveform. They create complex textures by scanning between those single-cycle waves. ROMPLER usually refers to a synth that uses read-only audio samples rather oscillators as the sound source. (That was a gross-oversimplification that captures the flavor of it).
Hi there,
Our v1.3.6 update is on the way with important fixes:
@ThinAirX Thanks for reporting back!
Some of us might have been a bit misled by what you were really looking for.
"Wavetable", while a rather clear category amongst "synth experts", is often mixed with samples in a ROMpler.
Sure, technically there's not much difference except in a few details.
Here's the common sense (please anyone chime in for discussion):
A typical wavetable synth is a synth using oscillators that use single-cycle waveforms that are usually 256..2048 samples long. The difference here is that the single-cycle waveforms are usually part of a table of multiple such waveforms, called wavetable. A unique property of a common wavetable synth is that the oscillator has a facility to move through the table of waveforms seamlessly without clicks. Samplers/ROMplers might have a sample or loop start shift feature but that's usually not without audible artifacts.
Wavetable synths are great for periodic sounds that can change their character over time but don't contain inharmonic, noisy or percussive sounds. These are very powerful synths that can emulate almost every classic, non-sample-based synth given you prepare the right wavetables.
Example products: Most PPG synths, Groove Rider, Nanostudio 2 Obsidian
A typical ROMpler uses oscillators with waveforms of any length and typically doesn't make use of any loop position shifting during sample playback which is more appropriate to emulate natural instruments.
Example products are many - Obsidian, Pure Synth, AudioLayer, BeatHawk, bs-16i, Sound Canvas and a thousand others.
Edit: Oops, I should stop writing long posts that go obsolete while writing