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Advice requested - best way to get audio & MIDI from AUM into Ableton in a single live pass?
Hi all,
Tl:dr version: Is there anything compact/affordable out there which can handle 8 simultaneous live channels of audio and 8 channels MIDI direct from the channels in AUM on IPad to corresponding channels in Ableton on Mac, such that a live ‘performance’ of a piece (e.g. manually operating faders, punching parts in and out etc) can be captured and recorded, audio and MIDI both, on the fly? At the moment I’m recording the audio per channel in AUM, just forgetting the MIDI, and porting over the loops, which is okay, but this obviously forgoes the ability to switch instrumentation or significantly rework the original material in Ableton.
I have a couple of Audio interfaces, including the one built into my Soundcraft desk, and a now obsolete Iconnect MIDI2+ which seems sadly somewhat flaky in operation, and, when it works, relatively over-specified for the task in hand as I don’t need to be sequencing hardware at all.
I only recently discovered IDAM was a thing, and that would be perfect but for the fact that, unless I missed something, it is stereo audio in only. (Leading me to think that maybe I need to go old school overdub style and record 4 passes of the same piece with a different set of live AUM channels each time- not ideal as it will prevent noodling on the fly.)
I preferably don’t want to involve my Soundcraft desk either, as although that has a built in audio interface it is set up primarily for my hardware experiments, and I’m trying as far as possible to keep this strictly between AUM on the iPad and Ableton on the Mac with as little flow-killing replugging and as much couch-composability as possible.
I also have a Zoom U44 which has both audio and midi and is great for integrating my small selection of hardware when required for sampling purposes, (and it can even run off batteries!) but it is limited to a maximum 4 discrete channels of simultaneous audio.
Iconnectivity seem to have withdrawn entirely from the unique IOS Audio & MIDI combined thing they did, their current line up seem to be conventional audio interfaces, and none capable of what the MIDI 2+ and 4+ did.
So I’m wondering: is there such a thing as an IDAM expander, in either hardware or software? Or alternatively: what’s the leanest workflow to record straight from AUM to Ableton that you know?
I know, I know, RTFM, ( 
), but I can’t help but feel there should be an easy way to do this, if only I was techy enough to figure it out.
All suggestions welcome.
Comments
Not sure this is still relevant for you. (Maybe you changed your workflow)
But i'll bump this to see if someone can shed some light
I believe the StudioMux 5 Beta should be able to do this. I haven't tested much, and not with more than 2 channels, so ymmv.
Hi, @senhorlampada, @wim. Yes, things have moved on a bit. I had, and sold, (to @Krupa!) an Iconnect 4+ , because I just couldn’t get on with it, though I think he and others have no problems. Iconnect have now brought out a new interface and on paper it would do, but I just never could get my head round the setup required, my bad, obvs, but I’m reluctant to try with them again. I’m keeping a watching brief for StudioMux, but won’t be trying that till it’s in a stable release state, as it sounds like the Iconnect interface grief cubed at the moment.
Instead, I can now use individual Atom 2 and individual channel record in AUM to capture all of a multichannel mix and port it all over to the Mac the hard way. Unfortunately my 2012 MBP has a very early Bluetooth spec, and doesn’t do Airdrop, so this tends to be slow and tedious via FTP from AudioShare. I’m hanging on for Autumn and the anticipated release of the Mk 2 Mac Mini, which I hope will solve this, and also my current lack of primary USB ports (I.e. direct connection to the MBP) . I have two on the MBP and three more which work as if they were primaries on my old school Apple Cinema Display.
I lose one of these to a powered hub, but I notice that for whatevever reason, the neat ‘it just works’ auto configuration with Ableton which happens for my Behringer X Touch ‘mixer’ control surface, Launchpad Pro, Beatstep pro, and Komplete Kontrol keyboard just don’t work unless they are directly plugged in to the MBP, I can’t go via powered hubs, and I’ve tried several.
(Incidentally - Does anyone know why that is? )
So yeah - as ever, a work in progress…
While I haven't tried StudioMux beta yet, I saw a discussion where it sounds like they thing it is stable and might be released soon -- I saw August 1 as the target date. Might be worth a try.
I do love the machine you sold me, though it’s not infallible (well maybe me 😆) - the audio matrix is a headbend, even when you get used to it, it’s just not that clear. I also have occasional trouble when I connect stuff to the host port, mainly my launchpad - it mostly just works but I lost a few hours the other day when I changed *something (who knows what) and it suddenly was device-non-gratis (working, but without ableton recognising it properly], until I did *something else and full functionality was restored… one thing I figured out was that sometimes the iOS master clock setting gets changed and that can cause crackles once audio has been running enough for them to get out of sync, but the iconnect app will easily change it back to run from the usb than internally.
But mostly, it’s just great, until I have a better Mac and idam is improved, I’ll be well hooked!
Interesting read on how all of your workflows changed (and yet we still have issues
)
I may want to invest in a multi-input interface/mixer in the future, but as of now i'm doing it the hard way too. Whenever I want to send stuff to my PC, I do it via google drive or just plug my device and send files via itunes/ifunbox (or send in samples and presets stored on my desktop)
For audio I happily send 18 channels from AUM to Logic Pro on Mac via an iConnectivity Audio4c
See post on April 28
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/44806/iconnectivity-audio-4c/p2
Pretty sure it would do the same for MIDI if I mapped
Btw, I just did a quick test of sending 4 channels of audio from AUM to Ableton live using the latest StudioMux beta and it worked like a charm.
Next, I need to check sending audio from Ableton to AUM and receiving it back.
https://community.zerodebug.com/t/studiomux-5-beta/1820
Just tested sending my guitar from Mac to AUM and back. There was a bit of latency -- but not terrible. And no crackles. (iPad Gen 6 with iOS 13.7 MacBookPro ancient running High Sierra and Ableton Live 10)
did you happen to measure it?
I didn't, but StudioMix reported 1 ms -- which I assume is 1 ms each way -- which would be in addition to the inherent latency that results from audio buffers.
I just did a test to check the round-trip latency.
Set-up:
Ableton Live Track A recording the guitar with StudioMux audio effect on the track set to send and receive to/from the iPad
On iPad, StudioMux app receiving from and sending back from same channel with no effects
On Mac, Track A's output (Post FX) recorded to Track B
On the Mac, buffer was set to 32 samples. The iPad set to 128. The offset between the tracks' audio was about 30 ms.
Here is the crazy thing when I routed from the Studiomux app to AUM and back to the Studiomux app on a different channel -- the offset was 20 ms
I should probably test again after rebooting everything -- but I probably won't
In any case, there is some latency when the audio makes a roundtrip from Mac to iPad and back -- but it is quite usable. And since the offset seems constant, easy to compensate for.
merci for the test