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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Microbit Bluetooth Wah controller - Coding advice please

Here is a 2017 Youtube video of a bluetooth Wah for iOS using a BBC Microbit.

Looks good and here is a github link to the 'Bluetooth midi package for microsoft microbit'

https://github.com/Microsoft/pxt-bluetooth-midi

Unfortunately (for me) I can't find any instructions on how to bring these things together. Can anyone offer some advice? I've done some stuff for Arduino and tweaked some code for midi controllers, but without any real depth of knowledge. Here I'm not even sure where the front door is - if I download the Github files what do I actually do with them?

Forgive my ignorance, I'm happy to put some learning time in here, but after much searching I'm at a complete loss of where to start, so much knowledge seems assumed. I figure if anyone here can help, then there will be others too who could make use of a bluetooth midi controller you can stick to your shoe.

Thank you to anyone with any advice. I'm also playing with mimu's Glover (desktop), but that's £120 and this looks so tantalisingly simple and cheap...

Comments

  • This certainly looks like an ambitious undertaking, given the project's lack of documentation.

    If you look at the makefile, it references some tasks that are defined in the VS Code configuration. VS Code is cross platform and free, so I'd start by downloading it (it's a great editor, and basically the winner of the Sublime-Atom-VSCode Editor War). This file also mentions a dependency on pxt, which looks to be the Microbit toolkit. The file gives the commands to install it, but it'll require installing Node and NPM first.
    https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-bluetooth-midi/blob/master/.vscode/tasks.json

    I don't really know anything about the Microbit platform, but note that there is an open issue that this project is out of date and doesn't support the "v2" board.
    https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-bluetooth-midi/issues/13

    It's a hangover Monday and I've only started on my coffee intake, but hopefully that's a little bit to get you moving forward.

  • @Liquidmantis said:
    This certainly looks like an ambitious undertaking, given the project's lack of documentation.

    If you look at the makefile, it references some tasks that are defined in the VS Code configuration. VS Code is cross platform and free, so I'd start by downloading it (it's a great editor, and basically the winner of the Sublime-Atom-VSCode Editor War). This file also mentions a dependency on pxt, which looks to be the Microbit toolkit. The file gives the commands to install it, but it'll require installing Node and NPM first.
    https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-bluetooth-midi/blob/master/.vscode/tasks.json

    I don't really know anything about the Microbit platform, but note that there is an open issue that this project is out of date and doesn't support the "v2" board.
    https://github.com/microsoft/pxt-bluetooth-midi/issues/13

    It's a hangover Monday and I've only started on my coffee intake, but hopefully that's a little bit to get you moving forward.

    That’s pretty good on a hangover :)

    Much appreciated, I’ll have a peer down those rabbit holes. This seems to contrast with the Pi Bluetooth midi device that @wim posted - that one said “this is complicated, but follow these detailed instructions and you’ll get there”, this one more “this is simple, so you won’t need any instructions”. Thanks for pointing out it is in fact an ambitious undertaking, I will scale back my ambition to match my current abilities.

  • I hope I didn't discourage you! There's still the compatibility issue, but figuring out the Microbit toolchain shouldn't be too hard. Here is a different but well-documented project. This walks through the toolchain installation and walks through building a project and uploading it to the microbit
    https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-makecode-package-for-microbit/all

    My only concern is that issue about this needing to be updated. You might beat your head on this only to be blocked by it being based on out-of-date libraries.

  • @Liquidmantis said:
    I hope I didn't discourage you! There's still the compatibility issue, but figuring out the Microbit toolchain shouldn't be too hard. Here is a different but well-documented project. This walks through the toolchain installation and walks through building a project and uploading it to the microbit
    https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-makecode-package-for-microbit/all

    My only concern is that issue about this needing to be updated. You might beat your head on this only to be blocked by it being based on out-of-date libraries.

    That’s really helpful thanks, a quick scan of that tutorial has already enlightened me. I think I’ll put my time into playing with Glover and MusicKraken for the time being and put this one on a slow microbit burn.

  • If you get something like an irig blue board you can plug in an expression pedal and have a wah that way. I love taking on DIY projects, so I totally understand, but a solution that already exists might work better.

  • You can actually add two expression pedals at the same time...

  • @mrufino1 said:
    If you get something like an irig blue board you can plug in an expression pedal and have a wah that way. I love taking on DIY projects, so I totally understand, but a solution that already exists might work better.

    I’ve already got the solutions that already exist, but I miss the rubber band approach :)

    Using a microbit on the back of my hand with Glover to control a filter in Ableton has been a revelation, I was hoping this might be an iOS solution to do the same... and it would be if it wasn’t for that pesky code.

    I’ve noticed my guitar practise suffers badly when I go down these rabbit holes, so I’ll try and put it aside until my next hand/arm/finger injury.

  • I have some bizarre electroharmonix thing where you put some sort of light tube in your mouth and control the wah from that. The producer I was helping last year had it in his apartment and I inherited some great when helping him move out. I don’t really want to try it...

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