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.
Decent Sampler - amazing samples
Why hadn’t I heard of this before? Came across it on fb group and it’s just so good. Are there any other gems like this people know of on iOS? Miles better sounds than any of the strings stuff bar swam.
Comments
Define gems like this. Samplers?
It's great but it crashes way too much atm. Check Pianobook for free instrument samples:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:pianobook.co.uk/library+(%22DecentSampler%22+OR+%22Decent+Sampler%22)&sxsrf=ALeKk00EbKowekqHB4MnrClI9CfYn55ZTw:1615886633575&ei=KXlQYPLSItr4sAf24p-oCg&start=0&sa=N&ved=2ahUKEwiyi6rmvrTvAhVaPOwKHXbxB6U4RhDy0wN6BAgBEDo&biw=837&bih=568
Not samplers but really nice quality samples. I never saw this come up on the forum and it’s really cool. Yeah reminded me of piano book stuff.
Here’s a previous forum thread on DecentSampler.
This one is really special with a incredible array of user interface controls:
The instrument is freely available in Decent Sampler format here:
https://www.pianobook.co.uk/packs/pandrum/
I like it more than the PianoTeq8 handpan instruments because it provides more controls to re-purpose the samples… of course, PianoTek8 is rock solid whereas Decent Sampler is free with a volunteer support organization that doesn’t use email.
This is another demo of this amazing sample set:
And another:
And just one more:
Holy Bedpans, Campers! There’s a 3.4GB organ sound set:
I heard that there are some good felt piano samples for Decent Sampler. Anybody have a favorite?
Compare the demos of:
Flannel Piano by Christian Henson
SoftHammer by OrcheStone
There are more too but those are my current fav’s but PianoTeq8 moved into my heart and threw out all the sample-based storage and RAM hogs.
Well-spotted, that looks pretty cool!
I’ve tried to dl this twice, both times it failed. Stops at 2.44gb (?) I have 5 gb of space on my iPad (6th gen 2018), which I assume is enough? Any ideas as to why it isn’t coming down? This does look very tasty 😊
Ooooo man. I’m a sucker for organs. I just downloaded the Organteq soundfont for bs-16 and it’s excellent. I need to get back on pianobook. There’s just so many good samples and so little space.
Download worked for me, sounds great and just looks so beautiful too.
I felt your pain and finally just went to the Apple Store and got the largest storage option they had. Pushing up against the limits was annoying. But I had the remove least recently used so everything would download. Try again and do not move away from the downloading browser until it done. Just watch.
The user interface design on this is insane. Decent Sampler files are exposed for reading how the UI is implemented in text format. Sometimes I change them to add extra FX or make the samples cover more notes. The format is documented and wide open except for many of the “for sale” products which can have encoded samples to prevent reuse.
I wish Decent Sampler got more love here since it’s really the best open source project that also serves IOS users. Too many critics of a free app with hundreds of free instruments.
So you think I need to free up space? There’s probably a whole bunch of apps I can temporarily offload. And a whole load of recordings in AUM that are shit….
It downloads as a 3.4GB Zipped file enclosure. Then you share it into Decent Sampler and it’s another 3.4GB or more if file compression worked on the audio files enclosed so… you’ll need around 8GB free to download and install and then you can ditch the zip file and be back to 5GB free. But the download should have worked into 5GB free.
Thanks for this. I didn’t know that Christian Henson was releasing samples on his own that aren’t connected with Spitfire Audio.
Edit: Ah, I see that Pianobook is a subsidiary of Spitfire Audio. I knew about LABS but not Pianobook. And I see that Henson has left Spitfire anyway.
The all-drawbars version of this is so awesome, thanks for sharing McD. Even on a 2TB 5th gen ipad I can’t manage to run two instances at once without DS crashing, it also can’t handle much polyphony, but the sound is gorgeous.
Gotcha. Makes sense. Cheers man!
Wow, that's fantastic, thanks a lot! 😃
Edit: Well, it's a bummer that there are only so few hand and mallet articulations. It's certainly a nice library for fans of effected and processed sounds.
I don’t know if this would help but Roland Zenbeats . It is a DAW but it has Sampleverse. Actually some of the instruments in zenbeats are as good or better than some of the cheaper modeled stuffs for $8 you can’t go wrong as you get the very Best iOS daw and a drum machine and so many instruments
Sharing the file doesn’t increase the storage needed. iOS essentially creates aliases to the original file when copying from one local directory on the iPad (or phone) to another.
After downloading the 3.4GB Zip file and sharing it with Decent Sampler… I deleted the 3.4 zip file. Notice, I never unzipped it.
And the “Voltage Controlled Cassette Organ” is available within Decent Sampler. So, I think it’s safe to assume 3.4GB for the Zip and some storage for the installed instrument were required for installation. Most apps to not access files outside the apps internal storage area for IOS security benefits, right?
Thankfully, Decent Sampler imports from zip files so I wasn’t required to unzip and consume more space but with Decent Sampler it’s often a good idea to unzip these instruments and use an XML capable editor to look into the *dslibrary file and see how the instrument is defined for layout. This organ must have the most complex dslibrary file of any instrument I have installed. I’d love to know how the sliding drawbars are defined in the XML description but I just deleted the zip file to test my assumptions about storage consumption. I can download it again when I’m ready. In a few cases I have change the dslibrary file to spread the samples across more keys and added extra FX that Decent Sampler supports like a delay, reverb or ADSR controls.
Another nice find. Very few velocity layers on the pan drum, and all the patches here, so I definitely can’t agree that it is better than Pianoteq, but nice pads here! Again though, those also have far too few velocity layers. I’d probably rather use the Pianoteq hang drum and add my own fx, as I really value velocity response.
It seems people are really upping their game on their DS UIs, great to see, I wonder if Venus Theory’s Patreon vid on making DS packs had anything to do with that.
Absolutely loving that Cassette Organ you posted about!
Ok, I’ve downloaded it. Opened in single drawbar mode and it sounds amazing. However, it crashes before it even loads up when I select multi….Tried DS in standalone mode, and in AUM , but same thing each time…
I have a 6th gen 2018 iPad. Running os 15.1.
Wouldn’t make sense to have a 3.5gb app on my iPad for only one (albeit beautiful) sound, so might just have to sample the single drawbar mode and then delete. What a shame.
Any thoughts, suggestions? @espiegel123 @McD @Gavinski ?
Like I say, I can't open 2 instances of this even on a 5th gen ipad Pro with max ram so it is just super heavy on the system. You can definitely get slightly similar sounds from an additive synth like Virsyn Addstation, and the harmonics controls in that can basically be thought of as drawbars
@Kashi : I can’t really advise as I don’t have decent sampler because I have an iPad 6 (running ios16.x) and my impression has been that DS has memory management issues on devices like mine. So I use AudioLayer which has worked well for me though I’ve not run an instrument larger than 2 gb.
Thanks @Gavinski .
Yeah it just ain’t gonna happen for me. Got the “all” drawbar version to work….briefly, but then it crashed, then I reloaded it and half the gui was missing, then AUM tells me I have a “bad signal” (see pic) , then it crashed upon loading again, twice…..blah blah. Way too resource-heavy for my lil’ iPad. Bummer.
Yeah that's a bummer, the all drawbar version is much more interesting than the single one
i> @Kashi said:
For the interested sampler… these Decent Sampler instruments download as Zip (with one producer using Rar’s).
Unzip that file into a folder and examine the contents. There are wave files to look through.
There will be a Dslibrary file that can be reviewed and edited with an XML capable editor. I use Textastic, as I recall. There may be more options.