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.
Helium annoyance after Atom woes. Quantisation can't be turned off!!! (Paul replied!)
![[Deleted User]](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/698a5e0bce7111eda15bbfe05d8cf982/?default=https%3A%2F%2Fvanillicon.com%2F5120af22570b4de4ac4fd1db8a70dc79_200.png&rating=g&size=200)
I was kind of annoyed Atom wouldn't easily let me go into record on a clip at any point arbitrarily down an AUM timeline. A clip will have it's playhead looping with AUM's timeline, and if it's a long clip, like a full verse length, a record command will start at wherever the playhead happens to be in the clip, rather than at the beginning. I'd have to map 2 controllers to do this, one for play (first) and one for record (second).
So I rethought my approach and thought Helium would work for me in a different way with a different workflow, I'd pre-record most of the stuff and have patterns sequenced with its song mode.
Well its interface is a bit creaky compared to Atom, but here's the killer. I knew it didn't have swing, and my song is a swung 3/4. So I thought well I just won't quantise my playing, and I'll play in time. BUT... you can't turn Quantisation off. And there's no quantisation mode that will play my rhythm correctly. I've read through the manual and pretty sure I'm correct on this but I'd liked to be proven wrong.
It is truly unbelievable that you can't record without quantisation.
Helium needs swing, and quant off mode. Feeling grumpy! I'm off to leave some comments on his YouTube videos...
Comments
I see what you mean… I love playing with quantize off for natural swing. Hopefully this is added in a future update.
I asked if swing was going to be added in one of the earlier videos. Sounded like a maybe.
Nothing like some user requests to get features up the pipeline!!
It's a deal breaker for me ATM except for using it to trigger Atom patterns.
Other than that I'm a big fan of Helium. It seems to meet most of my requirements and I like the simpler interface. Some of the more technical grid options in Atom are lost on me.
It does look like max quantisation is 1/128. I can’t see this affecting me personally but I guess when you are trying make a piece sound as human as possible then you need as small a resolution as possible.
@SimonSomeone presumably Atom does capture the MIDI you are trying to record correctly so I would be interested to know if that same MIDI plays back correctly when loaded into Helium.
Well, as human as you are... I certainly hope I’m human enough 😂
I say avoid quantizing when you can. Even if you don’t know shit about music theory when you’re interpreting there’s an intention. A little forward, a little back, a sense of rush.... there’s a human listening (hopefully) and there’s a human playing (unless it’s ambient, that’s always Bram Bros 😜).
Of course it might be intentional, like a Kraftwerk kind of feel. That’s perfectly fine, a human commanding machines.
Record unquantized, for sure. You can correct the notes that are off putting or quantize it all after the fact.
But we’ve gotten to a point where it seems like “making it sound human” is sort of exceptional, like adding Tape emulation to a digital recording.
If I can’t record “my human self” into a timeline I’m not interested. I’m very surprised this is the case with Helium. Definitely gonna skip it if this is the case. For the same reason I’m not getting DrumComputer until I can tap my human self into it. Now that I think of it, that’s got a pass, it’s a Drum Computer after all... good naming!. I think I’m gonna buy it.
Yeh I tried 1/128 thinking it might be fine enough, and it kinda almost is, but not quite. It just throws some of the notes off enough to sound wrong. That's an interesting point about loading an Atom file into Helium, I may give that a try. Atom does record the midi correctly.
Right on, the epitome of “playing”… I almost always avoid quantization like the plague.
Paul replied to my YouTube comment, swing is coming, probably....
"Yes, you can reduce quantisation to 1/128th but you cannot currently turn it off completely. I would have thought that good enough. I will look into adding swing at some point in the near future as I'm sure many people will make good use of it."
So that's good news. hopefully.
Also interesting updates are here which will link sequences in Helium to Multi Track Recorder.
DrumComputer does have a neat “humanize” feature though
So a machine that prevents any kind of human feel or error on input, achieving a perfectly robotic perfection. (Remember it lacks live recording).
Then it pretends to play human on output via a humanizer which is basically an error-introducing algorithm.
This is almost Black Mirror material! 😂
There must be a technical complication that I’m completely missing. I would have thought the straightforward way to program it would have been no quantizing!. As to “good enough” if you get a “proper” musician and limit their resolution to 128 I very much doubt they’d settle with it.
It's not a fundamental technical complication other than a design/coding decision. If the coding approach starts from the ground up as being "sample accurate" as Atom 2 is then there's literally nothing to do to disable quantization. To quantize requires doing something.
But if you start off with the idea that everything happens at some breakdown of the host clock, you end up picking some arbitrary fraction of a quarter note. At that point you've already painted yourself into a corner.
The technical limitation is rooted in the basic approach to timing taken in the design of the code in the beginning. Probably hard to undo now, but possibly not too difficult to divide to smaller increments up to a point, performance permitting.
I think a lot of people that primarily do programmatic music, don't realize that quantization can be a bad thing (along with low timing resolution) for some use cases and can interfere with musical expression.
The accuracy and timing of Helium notes are also heavily affected by buffer settings, and higher buffers lead to much less accurate timing.
This appears to be because Helium is blindly bundling notes together at the beginning of the nearest available buffer window, rather than correctly using midi offset to ensure notes always retain sample accuracy regardless of the buffer size used.
Sadly, the Cem Olcay apps suffer the same problem, so this makes both Helium and StepBud rather unreliable tools for launching atom2 clips.
You can test this yourself by playing a loop of 16th notes at 2048 buffer and increasing the tempo until you hear the note timings become erratic. (Compare results with Atom2, which is incredibly accurate at ALL buffer sizes and tempos).
Technical weeds, but informative when it comes to staying out of them. Thank you
I concur, not everyone needs or wants quantization. We need an off switch, seems like standard operation on most MIDI sequencers.
Hmm. I have no idea if that's good enough, I just know that it's not my decision.
Being able turn quantization off is pretty much mandatory for me. For me I absolutely need to tap in notes real time. Man I hope this is something that will be in a future update? Swing would be great as well in my opinion.
Like buying a car and not being able to turn off the AC.
I wonder if the 128 quantizing is noticeable or not. Has anyone tested quantizing a GrooveMonkey (or similar) midi file?. I just tried with some artist drum loops I had around, has some jazzy vibe to them. Added them to Atom2 to A/B original vs quantized. Can I notice the difference with 128 quantizing engaged?. I really don’t know, I think I feel some difference but I can’t really “hear” it. Then again I’m not a drummer.
The note shifts are so minuscule they’re hard to point out. But I’m sure it would be very, very noticeable if applied across many instruments.
If I quantize a guitar in Logic, for example, it’s hard to tell the difference on its own, but when you unmute the drums it’s very noticeable.
Straight 1/128 quantize is still noticeable if the original groove is 1/8t or 1/16t.
Non-Destructive Quantize is something even GarageBand has so it's not 'rocket science'...
It definitely can be, It would depend on what your doing I guess. My track had swung 8th notes in 3/4 time. It's possible, I'm not sure, that If I played them perfectly they'd fit on a 128th note grid.
But I didn't play them perfectly of course, and the track sounded maybe 70% ok, but some of the notes were probably quantised in the wrong direction, and it sounded bad.
You could think of 3/4 swing as a bar divided into 9 subdivisions, with beats falling on 1-34-67-9.
128 divided by 9 is not a whole number so I think that means my notes are not going to fall on the right subdivisions.... I think.... Not sure if my mathematical reasoning is totally sound there.
Plus degrees of swing are pretty variable so that complicates things,
I’m pretty sure if you were a robot any time signature would fit in a 128 resolution. That is, quantizing would work.
Like you say, the biggest problem is quantizing in the wrong direction. If your playing has a nice “laid back” feel, like pulling on the tempo, it’s very possible some of notes are gonna end up being quantized in the wrong direction. If it happens enough what was human will become unpleasant.
Did you manage to test this with the part you had trouble with? It will be useful to know if playback is accurate even if recording is not, or whether some extra processing is done on the loaded MIDI.
Hopefully someone will chime in to check my working but I think in theory increasing the tempo for recording purposes will also increase the resolution available, up to some internal limit. If my working is correct then at 800bpm in 4/4 (quarter=beat) you should be looking at about 2.3ms resolution between 1/128 notes, assuming everything behind the scenes is also able to keep up (see PPQN below). Clearly though this would be impractical for most projects.
I don’t know any of the deep technical details and how this relates to sample accuracy but aren’t sequencers also limited by their supported PPQN value? I seem to recall Cubasis has something like 48 ppqn (this may be incorrect/out of date) meaning 192 subdivisions in a 4/4 bar, which is not a massive amount more than 128.
Sorry not yet, I might have a chance to try that tonight. My recent post on the Atom thread shows the very clip, and while Atom records (and quantises) it fine, the UI freezes up pretty bad. I made this video.... Not that that answers your question. I'll get on to trying that.
Actually I just did a search on this and I don't know how accurate it is, bit someone on the Steinberg forum stated Cubase had a resolution of 1920 ppqn back in the 90s. I saw a search result for Logic at 960 ppqn. I dont think a value as low as 48 would be feasible, it seems unlikely.
I get the same feeling when an entire piece stays in the same key and same chord throughout. Traditionally, most cultures don't do that in their music at all, yet it seems almost standard in Soundcloud songs. They are often cool things though, and some are probably recorded unquantised, but still don't quite sound human any more. Maybe we just reached that point. Or maybe I'm just getting old
@MisplacedDevelopment ... Well, I exported my Atom clip into Helium and it sounded fine. Then I thought Id do a video comparing that with my quantised playing in Helium, and I'm embarrassed to say that sounded fine too... tried it a couple of times and I did get a few slightly off notes, but I was trying to play sloppily at that point. I think But I think I must have been playing pretty badly out of time yesterday when I did my test. Whoops.
So my apologies for making a big fuss about it... but the fact still remains as others have said, you should be able to record unquantised, and swing should also be there.
If you have an unquantised midi clip you want tested in Helium feel free to send it to me. My test seems to have been rendered inconclusive by the fact that my rhythm was able to fit ok into a 128 note grid, if played with a little accuracy.
@SimonSomeone Thanks for testing this, it is good to see that the Atom clip sounded the same in Helium. 1/128 is still a limitation but will be more or less of a limitation depending on what you are trying to record. Sounds like you need a little more breathing room to get down what you are trying to record for in a reliable way but the gods of quantisation smiled on you with the latest recording
Garageband is full to the brim with things that seem somewhere on the border of 'rocket science' and 'magic' to me. I wouldn't take it's minimal-to-some feature set as an indication of it being programmatically simplistic. Indeed, just the opposite is likely true.