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.
Manual brain (MIDI controlled audio routing)
The beauty of something like Scatterbrain is that it’s a self-contained product that delivers its functionality in a clear and straightforward manner. It has the audio routing and the sequencer with randomization and retriggering. But the beauty of the iOS ecosystem is that it’s getting sophisticated enough that you can cobble together a bunch of things to build out sophisticated functions.
Several people have been clamoring for Scatterbrain to have a slower timings. If you’re just looking for a way to distribute audio to multiple channels you can do this with AUM and MIDI control.
1- set up as many pre-fader sends as you want (with AUM that’s up to 16, but of course you’re stealing them from traditional bussing duties). You can keep the output for the channel if you need a 17th output or just want an un-effect sound. Or get rid of the output to make the cuts more pronounced.
2- configure MIDI control to set the Send Amount for each bus send with a note
3- send notes to the MIDI control to select which bus you direct the audio to.
This obviously requires more set up and is a bit more fiddly, but it has some nice advantages:
-You can have up to 17 outputs.
-You can control the routing manually with a keyboard or use any sequencer you want (or add midi effects). Rozeta Cells is nice here for slower values.
-You can have multiple sequencers running to get semi-chaotic switching.
-You have control over the level of signal sent to each bus, just adjust the velocity of the notes.
-You have full control over the gate length of each cut, just change the length of the notes.
-If you want to apply an envelope to the signal sent to each bus you could use one of the Envelope patches for Mozaic to control the send level. You would then be sending notes to Mozaic; have it generate CC envelopes; have those CC streams control the bus sends.
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BTW, if someone wanted to crossfade outputs, this would be possible with a different approach - you’d need something like MidiFlow or a Mosaic script to transform one CC stream into 4 offset streams to control the bus send levels.
Comments
I recently demonstrated something very similar in another thread:
Using ATOM to route to multiple channels using buses and MIDI notes to control channel volumes.
Needs a bit more setup work like you said but then you have full control and a proper effect sequencer.
This is the kind of stuff I love; playing with all the little Lego pieces to build out something very sophisticated and powerful!
Yes, these jobs are great in phases of low creativity and missing inspiration 😁
Or in my case, even in phases of high creativity and inspiration! I easily end up getting distracted by the new shiney-shiney, the feature-packed update, the problem-solving exercises...
There's truth in that, yes.
Sometimes it's the questions of forum members that make me try new things and find new inspiration
Cool setup. I'm wondering how much of the SB functionality is covered by this DIY setup? Haven't picked that app up yet. I guess you would have a hard time doing any stuttering here? Or maybe with the correct type of FX channel ...
Stuttering as in repeating a buffer of audio? No, that's not directly part of what's shown here; this is just using MIDI control to route audio to different busses.
The response time is really good, so you can do rapid-fire changes, but this is really to show people asking for longer slice times in Scatterbrain an alternative approach that has some nice added benefits that could be useful when working with longer slices (e.g. note velocity controls the send amount, so you can adjust the levels of each cut dynamically; note length controls the gate length; etc.).
You could set up something like Turnado in front of all of the pre-fader sends and control its stutter with another MIDI control (e.g. a note to turn stutter on and off). Then send "chords" to the channel to activate stutter and change channels. But coordinating stutter length with slice length becomes complicated... that functionality is better handled by a self-contained package like Scatterbrain.