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.
iOS midi sync drift battle. (Video)
Needless to say, over the years, Midi sync has been a pain in the neck for most of us. I made this video not to bash developers but to finally and once for all solve the midi sync issue. I’ve also made this video and thread public so we can all have a say about our experiences with sync.
While clock sync between has improved immensely over the years, with Ableton Link and clock compensation in Audiobus there’s still one issue that escaped our attention:
Please enter....drift.
Basically, despite cloak being all good and even at the beginning of the session, if sessions is left to play unstopped for a few minutes magical things start to appear out of nowhere:
Please enter...polyrhythms....
Just kidding. Simply different apps start drifting.
In the video I’ve used:
3 IAAs
2 AUs
Audiobus (host).
Everything is synced to Audiobus via midi sync accept AU apps which automagically receive the clock from the host.
I’ve found that strangely my results didn’t group apps clock ability by the type of app AU vs IAA etc. It all seems random and likely due to different way apps process sync information. Here over the period of 5 minutes there is a significant drift between two groups of apps:
A. Loopy HD, Ruismaker Noir and Patterning
B. Drambo and Samplr.
Looking at Audiobus’ visual ticks it seems that it could also be included in group A. But let me show it to you so you can see for yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Comments
@Michael @Marcos @brambos @giku_beepstreet @benkamen
I can guarantee that Noir is more than sample-accurate. It resyncs to ~10 decimals accuracy every render call.
Obviously this accuracy depends on the clock phase transmitted by the AU host. So if you notice drift it is due to the host, not the plugin
Cool, thanks for the reassurance. So the next important question is: what if two hosted apps drift between them?
Thanks for doing this test! Very interesting particularly given that the ones that seem out of time are both an audio unit and an app, synced to completely different things (midi and AU host sync). Super weird, and I have absolutely no idea how that could be...
Are you able to reproduce the same set up within AUM?
I’ve tried but AUm seems to only send midi clock to one destination at a time and I thought daisy chaining would be beside the point.
Would you like me to send you the audiobus session I’ve tested it with?
True that. No, that's okay, I think I can reproduce it if I need to. Not sure where to turn next, right now, though, will need to think about it. A little reluctant to abandon Loopy Pro dev for a while to investigate right now as I've got a bit of momentum =/
Ok. I’m sure it can wait, I’m not playing any serious shows anytime soon
@supadom Could you possibly share the AudioBus project / URL?
No problem
http://preset.audiob.us/5g8rOG61jpczwwa
I tried 4 AU, and those did not shift.
The AudioBus link sharing does not work anymore, @Michael
Didn't we have this already and it got fixed?
How could you copy the link, @supadom ?
I tried both "Copy" and sending to iMessage, but the first did not work at all and the second only produced a fairly useless "rich link", that I could not paste into the forum
http://preset.audiob.us/E9W8eTJoSl7SAnZ
Ahh, "Upload" first, then "Copy"
@Michael a little bit offtopic, but trying to open the link from @supadom crashed AudioBus 2 times now.
EDIT: The preset got saved, but even loading it from the list of presets crashes AudioBus!
Anything I can do to give you more information?
BTW, I don't have Samplr, I thought it to be Samplist, but it is not.
Still, this should not crash AudioBus...
Whoa! Yep!
I did so, @Michael
I saw three crashes:
I sent the latest, while loading from within the App
Thanks! Got 'em, and I can see the problem. No idea why this hasn't come up before! On it.
At your service
Oh I know that feeling.
Try this one. I took out Samplr and reset Loopy session.
http://preset.audiob.us/7X3gsJQYPsBU9JP
I got the new AudioBus beta and this does not crash anymore.
It seems that both Loopy and Drambo require some audio that's not part of the AudioBus preset, but I can still see them in the mixer, so that will be OK.
I will try again tomorrow.
I repeated this without MIDI Sync enabled, but Ableton, IAA Sync and AudioBus Start / Stop enabled with 1 IAA (Animoog), Zeeon, Phasemaker, Troublemaker and Sub Bass 808, driven by MIDI from Rozetta and could not see any drift between them.
http://preset.audiob.us/yexFgGBYyKlVMFb
So I may test this wrong
Just to let you know that all of the sync issues with the above apps have been sorted out in their latest betas. Amazingly quick support. Thanks devs.