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
Switching Spaces (whatever method you use) is still one of the things about the newer M1 Pro MBPs that makes it feel like a big upgrade. The new promotion display makes it so smooth, and for something you do a lot like switching Spaces, it really stands out.
Great update:
With Monterey 12.2 my Mac Mini M1 again sleeps, like in "SLEEP" after the command "pmset sleepnow":
mini:~ root# date ; while sleep 60 ; do date ; done
Mon Jan 31 23:35:29 CET 2022
Wed Feb 2 19:20:49 CET 2022
^C
So, no powernap anymore with constant wake-ups!
That's fantastic news!
I can then re-install my cron script that checks for successful login after wake-up from sleep ... in case it was not me, the Mac will fully shutdown then.
Also I may test "usbkill" which checks for new USB devices attached and shut down in such a case.
There is light at the end of the macOS tunnel!
:-)
I'm sure most users are more excited about the 593 new emoji but this is nice as well 😉
Yes, that will be true.
:-O
If not afraid to learn some Lua, Hammerspoon is seriously awesome for window management and many other tasks
Great, thanks!
The problem may be, that macOS is so much crippled already.
I just cannot do the things I would like to do ...
For example:
I have a script that would like to find those processes, disable their respective service and kill the processes too, if still needed:
BAD_ROOT=(
'/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ApplePushService.framework/apsd'
'/usr/libexec/AirPlayXPCHelper'
'/usr/libexec/airportd'
'/usr/libexec/locationd'
'/usr/libexec/rapportd'
'/usr/libexec/wifip2pd'
'/usr/sbin/WirelessRadioManagerd'
'/usr/sbin/bluetoothd'
)
BAD_USER=(
'/System/Library/CoreServices/ClimateProxy.app/Contents/PlugIns/WeatherWidget.appex/Contents/MacOS/WeatherWidget'
'/System/Library/CoreServices/WiFiAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/WiFiAgent'
'/usr/libexec/sharingd'
)
BAD_NO_PORT=(
'/usr/libexec/wifianalyticsd'
'/usr/sbin/BlueTool'
)
But ... I cannot.
As I cannot control launchd without disabling SIP.
And I even tried that - but then, lots of things seem to not work properly anymore.
macOS is ... just for users, not for admins.
New emoji has proven to be the most effective way to get people to upgrade iOS so far. Don't knock it.
That's horrible.
I can only hope that it's not true ...
But then ... it would explain why Apple is so much concentration on this
This is why every major new release includes new emoji. It works. People use their social media apps and cameras more than any other functions.
Other than new app "Wordle!" (which is this week's hot app) look at the top 5 apps: https://www.similarweb.com/apps/top/apple/store-rank/us/all/top-free/iphone/
That finally also explains many things I am wondering about in the last 2 years...
Need to eat that some time.
Thanks!
Disabling SIP is going to become more and more problematic.
I'd say that's a fair assessment. Can I interest you in a free copy of FreeBSD?
If you don't mind my asking, what's your use case for your Mac? Macs really aren't good for being servers anymore. They've been getting worse and worse for this over time since Apple killed the server version of OS X. I think they are great for certain types of things because of the OS and the applications that are available. But, they really suck for other types of tasks because of the OS and the lack of applications. For me, they provide a combination of productivity, creative, and programming/scientific tools that nothing else has, but I wouldn't reach for a Mac if I needed to write business oriented software again for example.
I bought the Mac Mini M1 to try programming for i*OS / macOS, with Xcode and Swift.
Then I noticed that I don't like to switch between Windows and macOS and am using the Mac as sole desktop computer ever since.
With lots of problems because of the restrictions.
But I still like it and continue to get used to it.
So, no - FreeBSD or NetBSD or Linux cannot get me want I want and need.
For now, it is macOS and probably later Windows again.
Linux only as root server at a provider.
I've probably mentioned it already, but I have a headless Mac that I just VNC into from my main Linux desktop (VNC window is just always open sitting on Desktop 1 whenever I need it)... not something you'd consider? (It's reasonably smooth over a Gigabit ethernet connection...)
That's what the Mini was originally designed for. It's a gateway drug into the Apple ecosystem for developers.
Some of those restrictions you have to live with to keep system workable as a dev machine even when they aren't what you would really like. Lots of stuff is configurable if you can find the documentation somewhere.
There are still some very nice things about the Mac. For me, it's the best combination of productivity, dev, creative, and engineering applications I've found.
I was mainly just joking with the FreeBSD question, even though I do actually like and use it. I think I have more Linux devices now than I do macOS and iOS combined, but I'm really annoyed with it right now since the last Manjaro update I did completely broke my little gaming machine and it took about 6 hours of screwing around to find that they had updated the kernel to a version that is incompatible with the Nvidia drivers that they installed.
But yeah, if your main goal includes iOS programming, macOS it is.
Yep, you mentioned that some times 😅😅😅
I would probably use Windows as desktop computer and then try the same with a headless Mac.
But that's problematic with the differences in keyboards and so.
I'm fine with the Mac as desktop, even if I regularly complain 😜😜😜
I'm an admin by nature, which makes things very hard for me, compared to Windows or Linux (or Unix).
But as long as I am trying around with Xcode, the Mac will stay as my desktop.
Also, I now use DEVONthink, which is a fantastic thing!!! I only used DEVONthink To Go on i*OS before.
Brain is fried at 42 years I guess. I need to be relieved from this rusty physical existence soon 😁
Maybe you remember, that I'm quite a bit older already.
Rust everywhere 😅
In your young age, I was... 🍾⚡️🔥⚡️🍾
Hehe, just kidding 😅
After the Mac can sleep again, without waking up again and again, I could enable my wake-up / login protection again:
So, it noticed that I logged in within 10 minutes after waking up .... all fine.
Otherwise, it would kill all Apps, umount all volumes, inclucing remotes like OneDrive and encrypted like Cryptomator and VeraCrypt and then shut down.
Great!!!
I ran into a new problem.
After downloading and uploading lots of stuff to and from OneDrive, my Mac Mini M1 got nearly unusable!
The OneDrive process used over 40 GB and some other process over 20 GB of virtual RAM.
Also, the swap space on disk was used heavily, of course.
And finally, my disk usage was increased horrible.
Whatever I tried, I could not find a solution and finally resorted to a reboot.
This fixed of course the swap space and memory problems ...
But.
My disk usage for was still increased from 50% (or was it 30%?) to over 80% ...
I tried to delete everything that I could find, but still:
I even deleted one of the users I used for the OneDrive activities, but the disk remains full.
I checked all partitions, but the above mount-point seems to be the problem.
So, the biggest part is "Users" with 37 GB ... and the sum is by far not 345 GB as written above!
What's happening to my computer?
What is Apple doing again?
Or was it OneDrive?
I tried "diskutil" to check the disk and partitions and think that I found the problem:
There is LOTS of storage space marked as "purgable" ...
But how to purge it?
I want to see my real disk usage ...
How to get rid of whatever Apple is caching there?
Again, so frustrating.
Got it!
Down to 21% again
Purgeable space can come from some different places. It often comes from iCloud drive files that are locally cached. Maybe this has something to do with OneDrive now that they are using the file extension stuff that Apple wants them to move to. You can get some idea of where things might be coming from using Apple Menu -> About This Mac and then using the "Manage" button on the "Storage" tab.
Typically, you don't need to do anything about the purgeable space as the system will recover it when needed. But, I have run into situations before where the system had a bunch of space tied up in Time Machine backup snapshots and I had to force delete all of them. Another thing that gets to be a pain now is with the way APFS works with sandboxed partitions that look like they've got tons of files in them but almost everything is a symlink to the main System and Library directories.
Random unqualified comment from a simple-minded minimalist bystander: Could it be that this whole business is getting so complicated with so many exceptions and levels of redirection that basically nobody has any idea anymore what's really going on, ditching the basic UNIX philosophy entirely? (same with CoreAudio)
Yes, found that - but it did not help, as OneDrive seems to work differently.
But yes, the problems came with the last OneDrive updates, where they now have a totally strange concept, where the OneDrive Sync location can be on an external drive, but uses a hidden location, while there is a SymLink that points back to ~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal and therefor uses space on the internal disk.
But somehow, they only mirror this internally and it seems that the real content then get's transferred back to the external disk.
It's a horrible construct, but it seems they needed to do that because of Apple.
I did not yet fully understand this construction.
But it already creates problems for me:
My Sync locations are normally on an external disk, and I have users created for any of the OneDrive family accounts - as the disk is mounted with "noowners", normally all users could access those files and I could copy, move or otherwise manage the Sync locations for all users.
No problem.
Now, the "seemingly" location is a strange SymLink and at least apparently not on the external disk that is mounted with "noowners". This means, that all the users cannot access the Sync locations of other users anymore - basically disabling any easy way to handle content.
Using "sudo -i" or directly "su - user" to switch to other users does not work anymore, at least it does not give access to the apparent Sync locations.
So one problem leads to the next.
Tomorrow I will try to copy from one account to the external disk, then login with the other user and move the content into the Sync location. Hopefully this works.
It is even worse: When trying around with this, I noticed that my Timemachine disk is constantly working.
I already fear that while the Sync locations on the external disk are excluded from Timemachine (the whole external disk), all of the synced content may still have been backuped by Timemachine, as the "apparent" location is in ~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal for those users - and therefor not excluded from Timemachine!
Also, that OneDrive used 40 GB of virtual memory and that over 40 GB of Swap space got used ... is simply unacceptable. They are doing "something" wrong here.
Anyways, deleting those snapshots purged my disk and this already made me more happy 😅🤗
Yes.
It seems so.
I don't use any of the cloud services for file syncing. I only use them for backup and I control that all by hand. If I need to sync files between devices, I use specific applications. The only exception I guess is Notes because that one actually seems to work. I do use Time Machine, but only when I'm prepping for an update and the rest of the time I leave it off. For all of the file sharing stuff I do for our family I use a Linux based NAS with a RAID setup. The good thing from Apple is that the OS has good support for all of these types of standard tools. The bad part is that their UI's for them and all their automated stuff pretty much sucks now. There was a time where they were pretty good on that end too, but that seems to me at least to be pretty much gone.
All I'm going to say to that is "systemd."
(CoreAudio is still pretty much OK to me. The next layer up is getting more and more wonky though.)
Even so, isn't rsync available on MacOS for someone who wants to implement a simple, "unixy" syncing solution?
EDIT: and there's a (very old) rsync client available for iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/acrosync/id428855722
Yes, but that does not sync to OneDrive 😅
There is also rclone, but I was not able to set it up so far - I'm not even sure that it works for OneDrive 365 Home / Family - or however they call it now.