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.
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Comments
Not being able to manually input BPM into Serato Sample is one of my main, and only, complaints with that near perfect program!
Generally, it works really well. What is especially surprising, is that I had loaded a loop cut to be precisely 2 measures long. The good news was that the quality of the time-stretching was not strikingly different from the better iOS apps.
I liked option 1 (BM3) the best, by far. Do you know if Zenbeats uses elastique stretching too?. I like how it just does it and you don’t have to choose an algorithm, automagically sounds good.
Not sure what Zenbeats uses. I used to use it when it was stagelight and found the small amount of sample stretching I did was ok. I didn’t really have anything to compare to at the time.
I always thought the audio track editing was very strong and was surprised it isn’t mentioned more.
Zenbeats’ sounds good, but I don’t think having options as you do in Koala and BM3 is any kind of downside. You don’t have to choose an algorithm, but you can if you want.
i kinda had app C pegged as SEGments.
I really wish Intua would just release the sampler as a stand alone AU. i'd pay almost any asking price, even 99.95$
Thanks for this @espiegel123. I was trying not to see the results before posting, but my preference monitoring over the MacBook speakers were 1, 2 then a long way behind was 3. 2 always seemed a little tweaked so hence my preference for 1. When I discovered it was BM3 I wasn't surprised, but Koala is pretty good too. I actually like to defer to BM3 for time stretching when I have samples on the desk top. It's just a workflow I've gotten used to.
Interesting. I so far did not use any of these for "serious" time stretching, do not have BM or Koala. But I do love sEGments for many reasons. But it sounded really bad in this test. Thanks for the test.
sEGments great for a lot of things. But for time-stretching it isn’t. The best bang for the buck seems to be Koala. A number of apps are all in the Koala/BM3 ball park in terms of quality. BlocsWave is in that ballpark. Cubasis, Twisted Wave, Zenbeats, and MultiTrack Recorder sounds good, too. I still haven’t figured it a good way to post the examples for good comparison. I’ll try to do that next week.
Auditor?
I haven’t finished evaluating Auditor and want to spend some more time before sharing the examples from it. The parameters it provides make a big difference and for the examples I was using, the presets gave results better than sEGments (much better) but not as good as BM3 or Koala, and I would like to see if with some tweaking I can match the best. Auria Pro is also in the group at the top.
The big surprise for me so far has been that Ableton and Serato Sample did not necessarily stand out. Ableton is maybe a little more transparent than the others. To me Serato was not better than the others which was a surprise.
Ah woah, it’s amazing you lot consider koala to even be in the same ballpark as Bm3/elastique, i really didn’t think koala could be kept at such a low price with the license fees of something like elastique (I don’t know how much it costs but I heard it ain’t cheap.) so I had to make my own.
Can’t talk too much about the algorithm, but it’s actually really simple (like 200 lines of code), I Did a lot of listening tests comparing with Ableton’s complex mode (which I think is also elastique), sort of developed it more by listening to it as I went rather than trying to get the maths right. Tbh, I don’t 100% know what it’s doing mathematically, it’s probably doing some horrific stuff to the signal phase.
I have a bunch of improvements to do to it, I think someone mentioned that it does something to the stereo field, and it also occasionally smears a transient, and also it behaves well for percussive things but if you take a Rhodes passage or something soft, it can go slightly off the rails.
Please use your magic on an au sampler. You’d make a lot of us very happy 😂
@espiegel123 any chance you can run the same test through the new sEGments timestretch algorithm?
@Paa89 has done a comparison here: https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/46883/segments-sonic-time-stretch-test-with-cubasis-3-and-bm3#latest
but would be good to hear it with your test
I'll try to get to it in the next couple of days.
Thanks man!
Here is the Cocteau Twins time stretching example. One is Koala. One is sEGments with its Pro algo. One is sEGments with its original. I'll try to get to the other sources I used in the next few days. The original tempo was 63.5bpm and is slowed to 40bpm here.
First one sounds smoothest to me, second one sounds ok but the guitar is a bit messed up, third one the guitar sounds obliterated.
So are they in the order you said?
I'll reveal order later so as to not bias people's comparisons too much.
Cool. I didn’t know if it was a blind test or you’d just said the order already 😂
Thanks for taking the time to do it 👍
Something tells me that the sEGments high-quality algorithm is still using warp markers and this is creating audio artefacts. Usually, warp markers are only used for drum breaks or material that's close to the original tempo. Then you get a granular based algorithm for textures and the high-quality algorithm is generally formant based for time stretching vocals (and supposedly fully mixed material). And these high-quality algorithms tend to smear the transients, which is fine if you're overlaying a new rhythm section but sounds kind of flat of fully mixed material even near the original tempo.
This is why the majority of Ableton DJs tend to stick to beat warping on fully mixed material. A DJ will usually stick to a maximum of 8-16% pitch bend range and beat warping holds up well on fully mixed material in this range (especially the sub 10% part).
To augment that last post, it's not that a DAW like Ableton stops you from placing warp markers on audio that's being processed with its high-quality algorithm, it's just that the end result will suffer from 'warble' artefacts.
Don’t think anyone else wants to guess this time 😉
So what’s the order?
I'd love to hear how the different algos handle more challenging sounds like percussive sounds with shorter and longer transients, rhythmic loops, polyphonic arps, staccato playing etc., especially regarding the difference that the new sEGments IAP makes...
Koala first then the new algo then the old
Maybe someone else can do it. I won't have time.
Thanks for doing this. Koala still a bit better then but not massively.
If you just listed the apps, no audio, I would have guessed BM3, Segments, Koala. After audio it’s clearly B, A, C to my ears. Koala, BM3, (very close) and segments in last.
Thanks @espiegel123 for doing this , this is a cool little test. I was hoping for better results from sEGments, but good to know the true quality of koala. I have all 3. Any others for comparison would be welcomed. I see you are working on it. Maybe break them into categories, either by type of app, or price, or whatever. I would definitely be interested in hearing a few of the other apps mentioned above just to see what my best options are….
Just a thought… Maybe use same samples with same everything just use 3 new apps. Instead of a long list, there will be 3 apps in each. Just thinking out loud. Lol.
Thanks again.
To be honest, in all the tests that I've done...even with different material, the relative quality has been similar when the tempo is slowed significantly. When the tempo is slowed less, the the differences are less noticeable.
@espiegel123 Were you using the new IAP for higher quality time stretching on Segments?