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.
Your experiences with audio crackling and stuttering in different AUv3 hosts
To keep the app sales thread clean, let's discuss audio crackles and stuttering issues in different AUv3 hosts here.
I was quite surprised to be able to load 6 polyphonic instances of Zeeon in Nanostudio 2 with all oscillators and both layers active without getting any stuttering or crackles while in AUM, 2 Zeeon instances triggered by the same sequence played in ATOM were already too much.
Which are your experiences with more resource-hungry synths in different hosts?
Have you found some logic behind these issues and any workarounds to recommend?
@jolico has hinted at the phenomenon that in AUM, reducing buffer size could fix the problem which I found surprising.
I'd like to know more about such counter-intuitive workarounds.
Comments
when i purchased Mini5, i did lot of tests with various plugins in various hosts.. there vere small differences but nothing that significant... in general, when CPU is over 80%, UI optimalisation starts to influence audio performance significantly - in terms of this NS2 is obviously winner, even if you put CPU to knees UI is absolutely smooth and doesn't compromise audio performance (no doubt, because all NS UI is written in pure C++ using OpenGL, it doesn't use any Apple UI libraries)..
AUM starts drop out especially when you touch screen and move faders and BM3 UI starts to be significantly laggy, with significant dropouts when you're switching between screens.
Here i posted about AUM UI i teraction issue:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/comment/625785/#Comment_625785
But overall amount of plugin instances, in case i did use same buffer size, was +/- same in all hosts...
In AUM, when you load one or two instances and you start getting dropouts, where in other hosts you can load significantly more, just ty load ANOTHER one or two instances - in many cases this helps, because it forces CPU to switch from efficienct mode into high performance mode...
This is just my speculation - because NS uses relative low level code for UI, maybe that forces CPU to switch into high performance mode more quickly (i even readed this as suggested trick somewhere - to force CPU run in HP mode, just run some dummy simple code on GPU to trick whole CPU so it "thinks" you need to run some CPU heavy code) - so you don't have that kind of issues where just one or two instanstances of plugin are causing dropouts just becusse iOS still runs just on efficient cores and doesn't heat up high performance cores..
hope it makes sense.
Very interesting. Thank you @dendy, that's a lot to try out!
I don't run many instances of the same AU often so no experience with that, but with regard to lowering buffer... I find that increasing buffer above 512 rarely helps cpu but increases midi jitter (not only in AUM, but in general, even on desktop). I only use 1024 rarely at mixing stage when there is no midi left in the project.