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
Ha ha I can understand your reasoning. Ask about cpu efficiency of synths and you get a bunch of engineers comparing how to measure each accurately. I'm guessing all you wanted was a few pointers to synths that other musicians find don't take too much juice on a similar iPad to yours?
Sugar-bytes factory i can load up quite a few instances in AUM. Also as some have said, the synths built into DAWs can be quite efficient as well.
It might be worth asking which synth apps to avoid as some of them are real CPU hogs but in the whole most synths seem to work pretty well on iOS. Although, as has also been mentioned, many synths can be efficient with one patch and not with an other.
My go to synths currently are Factory, Zeeon, Lagrange and KQ Dixie.
I guess it's clear to see from the responses that there is no simple answer except for a few highlights and lowlights in terms of CPU load but then again it depends on the host (to my surprise, much more than I expected!), the kind of patch, the polyphony, audio buffer settings etc.
Keep in mind that Layr is multitimbral... and from what I’ve seen, somehow, the cpu use stays the same even when you increase the number of voices. So in the # of sounds per cpu usage, LayR prob wins.
Surprising that no one mentions SunVox.Especialy with the latest AUV3 update.
Which is probably the most powerful thing you can have in your iPad too.
+1 on SunVox. Hyper efficiency.
As for LayR.. I just stopped using it. Can’t be bothered. It is magnificent, and yes, I know it loads everything up front and that’s why the huge CPU hit.. but it is just too CPU-costly to commit to..
I used sunvox years ago (on my Palm Pilot, no less!) I must check the iOS version out.
Of course, it depends what one is doing with it. For big rich sounds with lots of oscillators and filters and/or voices, it is quite efficient compared to what it would take to create similar textures with other synths (which would require many instances of them).
I think Andy (who created it) would agree that if you are using it for things easily accomplished with other synths, it will seem CPU heavy and maybe not worth it.
Yes, totally agree with you.
I had an interaction with LayR's developer in another thread a couple of weeks ago and he explained how and why LayR behaves the way it behaves in regards to resource usage.
Still, it makes LayR pretty difficult for me to find a use case for. If I must choose between using one instance of LayR with 2-3 instance of other effects/instruments, or 7-8 instances of other effects/instrument, I'd rarely not choose the latter.