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.
AUM feature request
What if we were able to:
- Group any FX in a channel
- Bypass any group
- Solo any group (bypass the other FX)
- Save any group (incl. settings)
- Load a saved group on any channel
Thoughts?
Why is this not a feature?
Why would this be a good/bad idea?
Comments
Group any FX in a channel = Mix bus
Bypass any group = Mute Mix bus
Solo any group (bypass the other FX) = Solo Mix bus
Save any group (incl. settings) = Save Aum session
Load a saved group on any channel= Ok you got me here
Mix busses are cool on iPad, but on my shitty little iPhone, I can only see one channel at a time and have to scroll to find a specific bus.
Also, muting that bus will cut the chain.
Yes, the iphone does present challenges. Maybe put all your buses next to each other to cut down and scrolling for now.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to be able to bypass/solo/save/load groups in this mess?
First world problems 😂
You know when you show plugin via midi. Think it would be good if not possible now.
When you close a plugin via midi. All plugins close instead of stack. Obviously it would be midi but maybe there could be a midi and cc number to return AUM to, no plugins shown.
and some other solo setups. Not sure yet.
Nice mastering chain, bet that loop sounds fantastic.
Thanks.
I call it “The 💩 Polisher”
For bypassing and/or soloing groups, you can assign the same MIDI control to the bypass of multiple plugins with one key.
Or, better, you could assign different notes and then use something like Tonality's Chord Pads to set up "chords" that trigger the groups you want. This way you could, relatively easily, set up multiple different groups, including having the same plugin in different groups.
Good idea.
@jolico have you tried the Channel bookmark in AUM?
It will take away the pain of scrolling.
Combined with what @hacked_to_pieces said, it almost gets you what you describe.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
@CracklePot thanks for the bookmark tip I did not know that.
You’re welcome.
😊
it would be cool if in an effects slot you could open a single window to load multiple effects into, like a little rack... so you can have em side by side locked into the rack and just open one window and all of your effects pop up at one time for tweaking
i jump around a lot in aum and constantly opening opening opening
maybe that’s what’s meant by group fx but i’m not sure
Yeah grouping of AU as racks would be nice, a bit like Ableton racks
Midi read. That’s all I ask.
Option to have horizontal split view to double the amount of visible tracks.
This is my #1. Really want a greater project overhead. It's easy to work up to 20 channels sometimes, and a chore to scroll around when you just want to open a single AU.
Got many more on my wishlist, but I'll save those for another time.
This is easy for me to say, because I have no idea how hard it would actually be to do.
Some smart dev - not @j_liljedahl as he has made it abundantly and frequently clear he has no interest in this - could win big by doing an add-in AUV3 for AUM which allowed editable fader and pot animation a la Ableton.
Nothing fancy, just the means to be able to iteratively tweak faders, pots, mutes, enables etc, whilst AUM is in record mode, have it play back those top level changes just to AUM itself when in playback, have it overwrite existing automation in a loop overdub mode, and have a one shot way to delete all automation, or copy automation from one channel or set of channels and inserts across to another. You could even save snapshot mixes fade ins, fade outs, pans, whatever... It wouldn’t need a timeline, just an Ableton style ‘red dot’ on the top-level AUM automation-enabled pots and faders which would playback the last thing you recorded onto it until you grab it again and retweak.
Imagine being able to hook up a Launch XL, tweak your mix in real time across 8 channels, have that all played back, and revisable on the fly on subsequent ‘loops’ of a running mix...
This is sort of already possible in Drambo beta with AU support, although it works via p-locks so it's unfortunately not exactly like snapshots, which would be much more awesome. I am still in touch with the developer with some ideas on how to achieve it, hope he'll manage to indroduce something like this, as I agree this would be the most creative feature in AU host since... Ability to mix AUs together? 😄
I don't know anything about how Ableton works, but maybe you could do something like this with the midi mixer in Nurack?
Watch this video starting at 6:05 where he demos the midi mixer and records automation using the midi recorder:
That’s a weird setup. Not knocking it at all, because, as was said above, rules are the only thing to avoid. I’m just intrigued by all those EQ stages. I’d be really interested to know what the different settings are in the EQs that are in a row...
Good old Toneboosters EQ plays multiple roles in my master chains:
All the other EQs added their own magic.
Eg. DDMF DirectionalEQ was essential for that specific track, because it was all done in Groovebox which still doesn’t have panning.
I could have include all of the above into one instance of TB EQ, but at the time, the above was more convenient for A/B testing and experimenting.
My more recent master-chains look more or less like this:
That mute trick with AUM's built in keyboard works great, even on the iPhone.
Luckily, AUM will allow for mapping the same MIDI message (note number) to multiple mutes so you can freely define multiple mute groups.
@White : thanks for the tip, looks interesting. When my purse recovers from Black Friday I may need to investigate further...
😎 👍
Request: A “tall-as-possible” bookmarks list.
The bookmarks system is good if you have more than a handful of tracks, but I always have so many tracks that I have to scroll the bookmarks list, and not scrolling is kinda the reason for bookmarks existance.
But when the bookmarks list comes up and needs to be scrolled, there is plenty of vertical space that it could take advantage of. So why not have a tall-as-possible list, in order to minimize scrolling bookmarks.
I kind of like that aum is so awesome it's taken a year for anyone to think of any way to improve it. All of my wishes are on the UI too and mostly making it work better for big projects.
My list would be:
i) Add pitch and mod wheel to keyboard
I know there are 3rd party ones, and I have kb1 myself and rozetta, but would be good to have in Aum
ii) Compact view in landscape mode
There's too much horizontal empty space, could squeeze in an extra channel or two.
iii) Collapse / expand mix bus
For any channels defined as a mix bus, include a +- icon to the left of the top icon.
This would show or hide any channels assigned to that mix bus.