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.
Visual Synth by Secret Base Design
https://apps.apple.com/app//id1493237895
Description:
MIDI is widely used for music production; there are sequencers, controllers, and loopers that drive music synthesizers, enabling musicians to create complex works of art with just an iOS device or a laptop.
Visual Synth brings the same power - but to video playback. Load in a video from you iPad camera roll. By sending a MIDI note to the app, you can cue to any point in the video, start and stop playback, and control a range of effects, much like you would with a conventional audio synthesizer. You can adjust the speed of playback, change the volume of the video, and even fade to black.
Because MIDI is widely used, there are countless hardware MIDI controllers, MIDI generating apps, and powerful sequencers and loopers. You can use Visual Synth to complement a live performance with video, or put together a music video that is synchronized perfectly with the sounds.
Even if you're not using the app for music applications, it's still exceptionally useful. Because MIDI can be sent over WiFi, Bluetooth, and cables of various kinds, you can control video playback remotely with MIDI controllers. There are even apps for smart watches that can send MIDI - the possibilities are endless.
Secret Base Design has been creating innovative MIDI apps for years; Visual Synth provides a bridge between the music world, and video production.
Comments
I’m going to need to see a video to understand how this works. :-). Is that ironic?
This seems potentially quite cool 😎 indeed. Can’t believe it’s free!
Haven’t tried it out yet but it looks pretty straight forward to set up
Tried to input and use a video inside the app wouldn’t work.
@White
Thank you for posting
If you don’t press play you can still jump to static frames which can be cool too.
Has a lot changed since beta?
Hey, all -- finally got off my duff, and released the app. No major changes since the beta. It'll be free for a while, and maybe forever. I have no idea if the audience for this app is more than a half dozen people (iOS users, who play with MIDI, and who also want to play with video....), and I built it mostly as a fun project. If a million copies go out the door, maybe I'll start charging a buck for it.
Let me know if you run into problems -- @Jumpercollins -- was the video not importing? Info on the video format if you know it, and maybe any copy protection things, would help. All videos, or just one being problematic? I have not had trouble importing anything, but there's probably video formats out there that I have not tried. My expectation is that anything that can play on iOS should work, but I've been wrong once or twice over the years.
(It turns out you can get a lot of code done when you can't go anywhere or do anything else.)
You can toggle play on and off with MIDI -- and a bunch of other stuff. The doc page in the app gives you the MIDI notes to send, while the CC values are listed on the controls tab.
Cool! Thx!
Someone somewhere for their particular purpose is going to be very happy with this I'm guessing...
You are awesome
Thank you.
🙏🏽
So can you send or export the midi out
@SecretBaseDesign this is too cool! Is there anyway to export the video output?
@Poppadocrock -- MIDI goes into the app only; there are plenty of MIDI recorders and sequencers, so I'm figuring people will tweak the MIDI in whatever app they prefer, and my app will only "play."
@bcrichards -- no video recording at the moment, but I might be able to add that in. If you've got a Mac, you can use the Quicktime player to record video.
Super great. Thank you for this.
@SecretBaseDesign No it was just a plain old family video shot on a android phone. Anyhow I deleted Visual Synth, redownloaded tried again and it appears to work now and decompressed a few videos I tried so cheers for this tool.
Set this up using Drambo to drive it in AUM and it was really fun. Any chance of making it an IAA so that it will show up in an AUM lane for easy switching back and forth?
@SecretBaseDesign this app is great fun and yields happy accidents, thanks for creating! I find it works great with arpeggios or Any of the Rozeta modules. Would post a video but my kids keep stealing my iPad 😂👶🏼
Screen recording?
I see the potential for some quirky cat videos to start popping up.
I can see potential with this... but, I think it'd be a lot better if you could record the video. Yes, I know you could feed it into your desktop/laptop and record with Quicktime, then export it back out to your iPad to play with further. Though, it'd be a lot cooler if you could just video record the effects right within the app.
I made this video by opening a random AUM project in my list and then pointed the MIDI out at Visual Synth. This is simply pressing play in AUM, bringing up the VizSynth app, and then engaging the iOS screen record function.
It is that easy. Obviously, if I wanted to invest time in it, I could refine the MIDI going into VizSynth but making the point that video export doesn’t need to be a blocker.
Very generous of you to offer this gem for free, @SecretBaseDesign
After watching this video, I am now sure of something, @SecretBaseDesign : You should repackage this app as a video filter for apps like Tik Tok and the like
. There are innumerable apps that provide some basic functionality (e.g. a toon filter) for the masses, and this idea might have potential for that 
.
"Use this app with your cat videos and increase their adorableness by one million percent!"
For the record, that is my actual cat and she does have her own TikTok. She has at least one other cute video uploaded.
+1 for using the built-in screen recorder -- hadn't thought of that, and it gets the job done w/o me writing code.
@lukesleepwalker - very cool video, I hadn't thought about TikTok. Really try hard not to think about TikTok. But you guys are right. This might be good for TikTok. Sequence a little techno, add a cat video, and you have the electrolytes that plants crave. Now I have to read up on the TikTok API. This is truly the darkest of all time lines.
Good god. I'm on TikTok now. I blame society. Society made me do it.
I've got screen recording built into the app now, and you can toggle record on and off with MIDI. Set up a MIDI controller, and you can glitch and mangle a video -- recording whatever your glitching and mangling are. Then, send the video off to TikTok.
For the iPad, you can use something like Sidecar, and have a MIDI controller on-screen, without it being recorded by the screen recording stuff. I've hacked the UI to support the iPhone, so the next release will be universal. To mess with a video on a phone, without controls being visible, it'll work better with a secondary iPhone or iPad and something like MIDI over Bluetooth (cough, Apollo, cough).
https://www.tiktok.com/@secretbasedesign/video/6824950588283817221?u_code=dc9c27a39d9549&preview_pb=0&language=en&_d=dc9c2885g09daf×tamp=1589057655&utm_campaign=client_share&app=musically&utm_medium=ios&user_id=6824524789350368261&tt_from=twitter&utm_source=twitter&source=h5_m
Oh sweet! Thanks!
You should likely be selling this. I was initially having a quick look to see if it was something I wanted to buy after reading the description. I was kind of surprised to learn it was free.
I'm not sure how much I would've paid. Not making a comment on it's true value, but user feedback of about how much I would have paid and felt like I got a great deal. Maybe in the $1.99-$3.99. I think I would've paid $2.99 based on the description. I might have paid a little more after seeing a few demo videos of it in action.