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.
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Tried it and did not like it.
In the Samples from Mars thing I've just bought, each pack comes with samples in Ableton Live, Battery, FL Studio, Groove, Kontakt, Logic EXS, Maschine, MPC1000 & MPC2500, Reason NN-XT and SFZ (as well as plain wav) formats. Anyone know what iOS AUs support any of these? I don't use samples much, but might now.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned or not, but plasmonic is on sale until the end of December; I’m unlikely to be able to resist, even just with my lightpad block it’s ace fun…
Can't believe I missed this one. 73% off Sienna A (€40, down from €149). All of the extra volumes are 30% off too. I highly recommend Volume B, C & D on top of A, as these provide a great set of options from my favourite room (the Spitfire Mastering Suite). Plus lots of really useful consumer Hi-Fi options, car stereos and such like. There are other studio rooms in volumes A-D, I'm just highlighting my favourite.
Sienna really works as advertised, as it's not only a set of curves for a wide set of studio-grade headphones, it simulates audio played back through speakers in specific studio spaces (the quality of the sim is a multitude of times better than anything I've used to date). I find this especially useful when using Sennheiser open-back studio headphones (my model is the HD 660s). My advice if you do pick this up, is to pick a room and stick to it for your main monitoring/mastering workflows and then adjust the speaker models in that room to your heart's content. The consumer HI-Fi, boombox, tiny Bluetooth speaker sims and suchlike are a great sense-check for how your mix/master translates.
A friend of mine just picked up the core Sienna plugin (Sienna Volume A) and Volumes B, C & D and the total cost was less than the non BF price of Sienna A alone (€145).
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumea
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumeb
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumec
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumed
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumee
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumef
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/siennavolumeg
Here's the Sound on Sound review.
And this is the blurb in the Acustica Audio page.
Audiolayer allows to import Sfz and Exs files. However, some sfz and exs files crash.
I wrote a few months ago to the developer about the crashing during the import process. He is very responsive and sent me a beta version that works better. It is not released yet (and the testflight link he sent me expired). It will hopefully be released soon.
Audiolayer is a very nice advanced tool with a lot of features (see other threads in this forum about it). However, it is not a drag and drop easy tool.
Good to hear the import/crash situation seems to be improved in the latest beta. Hopefully, Harry can get a public release out sometime soon. Modern iPadOS devices have the chops to really push AudioLayer closer to the world of desktop samplers. And the EXS format is a reasonable cross-platform format to work with.
I’d really like to see multiple outputs in AudioLayer. I have the full collection of Goldbaby drum sample packs that have been put out over the years and all of them include an EXS option. I've tested them in AudioLayer and the import works well but a single stereo output isn't really suitable for the way I like to work.
My 2 fave synths are Plasmonic and Generate, and not just cause of the sound but I love using these with MPE.
@shinyisshiny All of the Newfangled Audio products are winners, be they fx or synth.
Do you also some of the presets actually duplicated, with slightly different names, like SQ Club Rotation and
A note of caution: their payment arrangement is atrocious. The money is taken from your card or account immediately, but then nothing happens, they tell you you didn't make an order, in the support section they blame PayPal and say they can't do anything to help you, then you get a refund, then rinse, repeat. I'm in round two now, trying a different payment option each time
I'm sure it doesn't happen every time for everyone, but be prepared.
At this moment I didn't notice that.
The whole Acustica Audio system being based around the Aquarius content management system is a shock the first time you use it. But it makes more sense over time. The truth of the matter is that in the past Acustica suffered from serious pirating issues so Aquarius was devised as a way to manage authorisations. And for that purpose, it works very well as Acustica hasn’t suffered at the hands of the pirates since Aquarius was introduced.
Thanks @SamSamSam, I have AudioLayer so I'll give that a go.
It’s a shame that the iOS version is such a damp squib of a barely-demo.
I also bought the Samples from Mars and plan to use them with AudioLayer. But it’s not easy. The whole library is huge. Too much for my iPad. Unfortunately there is no preview to check out the samples before import into AL. Any ideas how to solve that? I’m thinking about following @tahiche and reduce the instruments to one or two samples per octave but that’s a lot of work or requires nifty scripting.
We were discussing that here: https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/48098/best-way-to-make-use-of-samples-from-mars-on-the-ipad
It’s a travesty. So much so that I removed it within a week of installing it!
Sample Crate? I don't have it, so maybe there's some obvious reason why it's not a good solution.
Good for them. I wasn't talking about the Aquarius system but their "webstore" btw.
Meanwhile I tried all the payment options that they offered, and PayPal did not let me use even PayPal itself 🤣 - I have never experienced this on any other site - and now the price is back to 149, so I guess they decided not to "take my money", and so this was the extent of my involvement with them. Another first-world problem solved, I guess. 🤷
Of course Sample Crate makes it easy to preview the wav files. But it is still quite a time consuming task. You have navigate from folder to folder, scrolling down to a middle note sample and then preview it. Repeating that for hundreds of instruments. I think I would prefer an mp3 with instrument demos, so I could easily choose.
How did I miss that, thanks @krassmann - I'll follow with interest.
You could start with "Essential Wav from Mars" as they've already stripped down the instruments to 1 note per octave. Also the drum kits are all sensibly organised with all the hits you really need and nothing more.
Just use the 16 bit WAVS and it's under 1GB and easy to go through and audition using AudioShare. When you find something you like you can then import the EXS into AL if you want more than the essentials gives you.
I'd just make my own instruments with the WAVs though. Just about any sampler would be easier to use than AL though; It's such a slog. I find all of Virsyn's UIs to be fairly inscrutable TBH.
@krassmann Maybe their SoundCloud can help you narrow it down - https://soundcloud.com/samplesfrommars
Another excellent new Kontakt thing from Pendle at Sound Dust at 30% off until the 17th (discount added in the cart).
https://www.sound-dust.com/kicktom
Another first-world problem solved, I guess. 🤷
I downloaded a few free Acoustica plugins a few years back but ended up deleting all of them because when installed a huge bunch of miscellaneous files were dumped into my plugins folder like they didn’t package individual plugin component files into their own container. It took me forever to delete all of the files out of the plugins folder. I’m not a huge fan of iLock but I found Acoustica’s anti piracy system even more annoying than that. YMMV
I’m not a fan of it myself but their latest generation products are not only very good, they’ve also overcome much of the classic latency issues of years gone by. But I've been a Nebula customer for a good many years, so I've begrudgingly grown used to ignoring the worst excesses of their copy protection and suchlike.
Cool, thanks. I think it’s not possible to identify single instruments but it gives an overall impression of each collection.
I had the same experience.
The store is a nightmare. I lost 2 hours trying to get through, and ended up buying the chosen volumes 4 times. Now the money is on hold in PayPal, and there is no way to cancel the payment. PayPals “Help section” is even worse than Acousticas shop. Aaaaaaargh
Thanks for pointing me in the direction of this developer - he's got a sound design brain that's right up my strasse and creates some amazing sounding Kontakt instruments and libraries.
Main site here: https://www.sound-dust.com
Well worth checking out...👍
I’m pretty certain you don’t need a sample per note for 99% of scenarios. In my final script I kept 2 samples (C & G) per octave, but one is plenty. Like @klownshed mentions, the essential pack is that way.
I know the script is a bit of a pain to use as you need a desktop. I’m pretty sure it could be easily adapted to work in iOS through Shorcuts app. I did find problems with sandboxing and such so I quit.
Actually it just occurred to me that it’d be great if Sample Crate (@alecsbuga) implemented a “search/select files” that could use regular expressions like it does with batch renaming, so you could select all files that contained “*_(C|G).wav” kind of thing.
sfz will work in Audiolayer, I think EXS too, but it might be exs24 not sure if they are the same.
Wav files in any sampler, or drum app or app with audio import. chameleon for the synths and Digistix 1 or 2, koala, hammerhead, SDSx, eg pulse, neon, etc… for drums, or one shots. I use wavs to make drum kits all the time in Digistix 2.
I’m not sure but my guess would be FL studio stuff works in the mobile vers But I don’t have that app so I don’t know.