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.
App Development: where to start?
With all this time at home in lockdown, the internet throws a ad for Udemy who have some very enticing short term 80% off deals for coding classes.
If I were to aspire to write music apps for iOS and android, what languages am I best off concentrating on learning? Also how far could one get from learning just swift?
Comments
For iOS and Mac you can do anything that you'd likely need for a long time with just Xcode and Swift. A phenominal and free starting place is here: https://codewithchris.com/ios-app-development/. You can also find all his videos in a more pick and choose format on his YouTube channel.
Also: https://audiokitpro.com!
For Android? Maybe check out Juce: https://juce.com
Difficult question and answer. Maybe limit scope. Once you start talking multi platform you end up needing to be proficient in C++. I’m not sure if you can get away with just objc or swift if you take the audiokit path. I’d target a single platform and language.
Imho you get pretty close to nowhere
But you can get anywhere, if instead of 'learning' any specific language, you try to understand the mechanism behind it's instructions and structures.
Then language is reduced to a tool that you simply choose to best achieve a certain goal.
So just start with what @wim suggested, add a bit of attention to the 'mechanics' and all will turn out well.
In audio you almost will have to switch to some other language to code 'closer to the machine' for certain tasks, often C, C++, Objective C or sometimes even machine code.
Yeh, you can't "just" learn Swift because to do so you will also need to learn the fundamentals that underlie all languages. There are important differences between them all semantically, but the same concepts are present most languages. Be prepared to take a lot of side trips to really get it.
I'm learning that to follow a tutorial is one thing, but when you actually sit down to put those concepts to work from scratch, you quickly find how very much more you need to understand about what's going on under the hood. It can be a slow process, but is endlessly rewarding once you accept how much patience and learning it's going to take to really get anywhere.
I recently made a similar post but here's what I can say I'm doing. I have a Windows laptop, an iPad, a small iPhone, but my main phone is an Android.
I'm learning JUCE on Windows until I get a Mac.
In the meantime, as I'm learning app development, I'm practicing programming concepts with scripting apps like iOS Shortcuts, and Pythonista. If there's any feature I want in iOS, I'm making a script of it. Might even look into Mozaic/Streambyter to get MIDI things I want to work on iOS to work.
Just to put things into perspective, here's my history
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/38047/question-about-app-development-vs-scripting-for-ios-ipad-os/p1
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/37421/what-mac-mini-would-you-recommend
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/35525/what-would-you-recommend-me-to-learn-for-scripting-on-ios