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
@McD, thanks for all the suggestions and ideas to make Piano Motifs a better and more fun to use app. I think you might like what’s coming in the pipeline 😊:
In life as well. In my humble opinion, No one knows everything about anything. One is always learning in all aspects of life.
Interesting. Lock previous chord progression? If so, 😯
You're very kind. Ideas are like assholes. We all have one.
Execution is king. @brambos, @SevenSystems and other developers who traffic in ideas here have actual proof of the value of ideas by executing and making them into applications.
Fernando or @azul3D_Apps has already proven he's got instructing ideas... but a few tweaks
are generally obvious, right? Documenting advice is hardly work. Advice is just a form of baboon antics and an attempt at influence. Sometimes we think it helps but generally it's just noisy display and hard to implement.
@azul3D_Apps : whoa, that looks great
Do you need people to test? ^^
That will do it... I'm going to start looking for film music gigs. This is where I'm stuck without
more variations. I need you to crank them babies out for me to pass muster:
The buttons are 75% Piano Motifs and 25% assigning instruments and cut and paste
of your MIDI lines. Most of the Piano Motif buttons are: Next, next, next... maybe... save...
next, next... KEEPER!
With "Lock Prev" I'll get more lines to add to the orchestration and use the progression
as a type of loop for the oboe, then the cello then the brass and then strings and then
swap in a B section maybe changing Major to Minor. Then return to the beginning and
never have to actually use the pencil much. Writing notes is so... mundane and exhausting.
Anyway, I'm not going you a cut but I might give yo credit when I pick up my Oscar.
My nick name for you will be "You know who you are..." Thanks in advance.
That is too much fun. Listening to this one I can practically see the hobbit scarfing his second breakfast.
I like that lock feature, I’ve definitely been an advocate. Awesome
Now we want a variation where we can design a chord progression and generate
4-8 parts. Orchestral Motifs. I'd pay $1.50/voice without complaint. 16 parts? No problem.
Everyone would get StaffPad and flood the market with "talent".
Then we'd beg for mood buttons:
Fist Fight
Death of the hero
Death of the heroine
"Your first" (tender)
"Your first" (inebriated)
"Your First" (call girl)
Car chase
$1/mood - sold/packaged in genre packs
So very gracious of you 😀
Who is this? Not that it matters. "You know who you are..." Get back to coding please.
I need the updated tools. The clock's ticking on my plan for compositional fame using IOS
tools at budget prices. That desktop stuff is great but beyond my budget. I'll probably have to fork out $500 on StaffPad libraries to get all the little touches I need to compete with
Hans Zimmer and John Williams and their army of arrangers and software assistants.
Theres a rumor that IOS 14 makes StaffPad slower. I doubt I'll notice since I'm going to just import MIDI and skip the manual labor. What am I, a medieval Monk?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz
A new version of Piano Motifs (v2.7) is now available on the App Store.
This version has the following new features:
• Added the ability to lock a motif's chord progression (with its key, scale, time signature and accompaniment) so that the next generated motif can use it again.
• Added programmable accompaniment styles. Seven different accompaniment styles are now available.
• Removed info button. All motif information and button labels are now displayed by default.
• Fixed iOS 14 issue where BPM slider was defaulting to minimum value and not the default value of 120 BPM.
• Optimized MIDI Out MIDI Note Off messages at end of a motif.
• Added chord progressions.
Some samples of the type of music Piano Motifs can generate:
Samples of Piano Motifs played on other synths with effects:
Enjoy!
It's a really good update Fernando, vid will hopefully be coming in the next few days!
Really great update! Piano Motifs keeps getting better!
More details later but one random request popped into my mind based on your song titles Fernando, please give PM the option to auto generate a song title for each motif like Gadget does so I don’t have 10 songs named with the same date on them. Thanks again!
Is scale masking a possibility? Say, give me an F Lydian melody but with no Ds or Gs. Or user-defined scales would be even better.
Polytonality would also be cool. Say, give me a melody in Ab melodic minor over a chord progression in C minor.
Thank you @azul3D_Apps for all the updates!
Awesome update @azul3D_Apps not only is the locking feature awesome, but getting to choose the accompaniment (Chord, arp, Bass, etc...) is really cool. Congrats on another great update to a great app.
Is it possible to get several different accompaniments for the same composition? For example, PM generates a chord progression and melody that I want to keep--could I get several different accompaniments for that?
I asked for that in the beta process and @azul3D_Apps explained that the way the application is currently written that would not be possible in this update. I huge re-write would be required. He has not committed to such a re-factoring of the application to do that.
It's possible he'll make a new application that supports multiple parts, allows more control over the chord progression and gives the "composer" more choices. I suspect that Piano Motifs as intended has run it's course and such a massive re-write will open the doors to
a new product vision.
This is all complete speculation and I look forward to more of these great enhancements to
generate music with a strong theoretical basis so we can quickly generate film music.
But controlling the chord progression would also open the options for other genres that
avoid traditional chord progressions in favor of more shock and awe. Like alternating the
chord roots in tritons or purely random intervals that destroy any sense of a key center that makes music sound like the traditional European composers that are the general template for movie music (hello John Williams... how's Gustaf Holst doing these days?).
In the mean time I'll be saving batches of MIDI loops from this version for import into
StaffPad, Cubasis and Xequence 2 to cut and paste useful segments and make more complex arrangements from these source materials and then add my own melodic ideas
to the final mix. This is "push button" inspiration in the same vein as Riffer, Fugue Machine,
Rozeta Tools and other productivity aids to avoid the manual labor of outlining music with
some sort of logic structure. Good times... there are many desktop apps for these approaches but this one brings a new low cost tool into the mix for IOS music makers.
I'd buy a 12-tone serial version of Piano Motifs. Even better--can we get user-defined tone row length? Of course we'll also need inversion, retrograde, transposition, diminution and augmentation.
Probably more profitable would be a tintinnabuli app though. And pretty easy to program....
If @azul3D_Apps isn't taking notes I'm sure there are other MIDI capable programmers that could be incented to follow this thread and get to work: @coniferprod some to mind. He can deliver a user interface and has a good handle on MIDI from his SynthJacker app. Unfortunately SynthJacker was made somewhat irrelevant when AudioLayer added the auto-sampler feature in an update. I have really open SynthJacker since. He's a very responsive developer so he might consider this BUT knowledge of music theory will be important to me
but purely random tools that provide basic inversion, retrograde, transposition, diminution and augmentation do pretty well too. Anything that creates loops and has a random button seems to sell. But when something fakes actual traditional musical practices I get excited.
But I'd love to see @azul3D_Apps break away into multiple parts using the same theories that make Paino Motifs so useful for my desire to auto-generate film music with real orchestra sounds. Nothing prevents these parts from driving synths and I might give that
some effort at some point but for now I'm going to make demo's of instant orchestras without writing a single note. Just import MIDI into apps and cut and paste to produce longer works. 32 bars of C major followed by a B section in F major back to "A" then a C section in F minor... etc. That should keep me busy on the couch watching TV for news of the death of democracy.
I would really like an app that could take a midi file and say, halve the clock, or invert the melody. Transposition is easy with Scaler.
Playback with one MIDI player at 1/2 BPM and recording into another at normal BPM should be a workflow approach to 1/2 clock.
Inversion of melody is trivial in Mozaic. Just declare or set the midpoint and invert intervals
above to below and below to above and either use strict intervals or force into a scale. As you suggest Scaler helps with transposition, scaling forcing and multiple instances can generate parallel chord or intervals like parallel 6th's which always sound like good voice leading.
The serious musical theorist can go crazy with Mozaic and make tools quite similar to those being requested and share them for free. There are many that already exist. I'm surprised no one have made videos showing them in action. I even donated to one videographer to
try it but Mozaic is just too complicated for many to fight through to mastery. The GUI's are just too limiting and it becomes a RTFM exercise if there is one and total guess work if not.
Reading the code is not an option even for a good programmer. It's too event driven to see
cause and effect. But for experimenters there are really cool randomizers, generators, chordulators, etc.
Also Atom lets you change speed of midi playing. It even goes backwards.
Gosh, this is awesome. Simply fantastic for generating variations on a theme. Love it!
I agree, great great update, thanks for all your efforts!
@Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr, great compilation of ideas. Some might be possible in Piano Motifs, some might not. The app is in constant evolution fed by user input and new ideas to improve usability and variability. As @McD explained, several accompaniments for the same progression and melody aren't possible with the current code base. As I have mentioned in the past, you can clearly see that this app's evolution is naturally leading towards user defined chord progressions. An evolution that most likely will happen in incremental steps.
Thanks Gavin, looking forward to the video.
@yowza, great to see you are finding 10 songs a day worth saving from Piano Motifs
! You could always use the save with bpm, key and scale option, of course, only if those parameters are different. Might take a look at what can be done for song names without bloating the code.