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.
Comments
Agree. There’s just no contest with the alternatives. Plus, there are no chips now or coming soon from competitors which would compete with Apple’s M1 in the newest iPads. In addition, by the time any competitors come out with anything close, Apple will already be on the next generation. By going with their own chip designs, they have leapfrogged every competitor on the planet.
On the other hand it doesn‘t need a full blown OS to control an IOS (or whatever) app.
http://www.ucapps.de/
shows a large variety of devices based on a straight microcontroller (or a bunch of them interconnected).
That stuff is strictly for non-commercial DIY, but it illustrates the idea.
I hear you.
Minimum amount of distraction.
Maximum output.
The M1 is a very good processor, but it wasn't even the top performing Arm processor or core when it was released. The vector compute capabilities of the Fujitsu A64FX are huge. Sure that thing is aimed at supercomputers, but the vector instruction set is where Arm is heading for mainstream CPU's. Processor wise at least, Apple has plenty of competition coming.
Windows seems to be the futur for digital creation.
Great desktop solution with tactile U.I.
Apple hardware is now far too much fragmented between the many os versions, this leads in very complicated workflow and more and more bugs.
Apple is now what was Microsoft in the 90: an heavy and complicated ecosystem that people choose because the have the largest catalogue of apps.
Just re-code an akai live/one so its not the laggy pile of doodoo it is, and use your tablets and phones via its wifi to have different modules open instead of pages and menudiving on the main screen. All the pieces are there.
Can you do this? I can't find anything about altering the system OS on any of the MPC's.
Im just throwing stuff out there. But as per all these link posted by ocelet here, its just a standard radxa cpu on a custom pcb:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/46088/standalone-dawless-workstations/p5
This link was perticularly interesting:
https://niklasnisbeth.gitlab.io/mpc-internals/
Dont see why it couldnt be done. You wouldnt be modifying the existing, youd be coding from scratch.
Interesting. I had no idea that these were basically a stock Linux install on an SBC. I think before I'd risk mangling one of these that I'd go with the new Pine64 boards that are based on the newer versions of the chips and only cost about $80. Pair them up with some MIDI controllers and an iPad as an interface and it could be pretty good.
Once you go down the XDA road, you will forever be tweaking your phone or tablet and will never actually get any work done, at least in my experience.
Not in response to you specifically, but as a general statement, once I went to iOS from android and Mac from Linux (including AVlinux and some other music distros) I actually got work done. There’s no way I’d go back to trying to get JACK to work, or using the available reverbs, etc. I’m very happy using UAD, logic, etc and letting people who get paid to program worry about those details. Then I can record and mix.
The idea of free open source software is wonderful and for backend stuff like servers and such Linux is fantastic, and also if you want a computer to surf the web, type basic documents, things like that, but for the music person it’s just not there and I don’t see it ever being there. And once you have to collaborate with people on other things, like office work, open/libre office is not compatible enough with Microsoft office.
Anyway, I’m very happy no longer constantly tweaking computers but n instead just sitting down and getting mixes done for clients.
Hows the saying go? Something like:
Mac/Windows users do things WITH their computers while Linux users do things TO their computers
(Its pretty blanket i know)
There's some truth to that. Now matter how great a Linux system for audio you may end up with, you'll definitely spend a lot of time getting there instead of making music
Of course it depends a lot of what you expect. If the available music software on Linux fits your needs then there's nothing wrong with going Linux.
My next playground for audio experiments: An IQaudIO Codec Zero and a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
These guys eat only around 100 milliamps which makes a difference with battery power.
Add the insane amount of cheap microSD storage and Bluetooth MIDI support plus WiFi connectivity for remote control and data transfer, and you have an interesting low cost platform wih a lot of code readily available.
iOS is the best that’s happened to mobile and semi mobile musicians.
I don’t know tech ins and outs but the experience is for most part smooth and definitely stage worthy which is the ultimate test to me.
Going anything other than iOS or bitwig on surface is bound to end up in days and weeks of troubleshooting instead of playing music.
But perhaps most of us like messing under the bonnet so maybe there is a reason why we are even having this conversation. 😂
For sure that's the case!
Fiddling with new gadgets to discover new grounds, then laying back to grab what just works on our iDevices
@NeonSilicon this is a nice device for general purpose tablet and partly laptop use cases. It‘s great being able to run desktop class Linux apps and touch oriented Android apps on a single tablet and I wish them great success. But this device is not good for a musician. It lacks the ecosystem of touch oriented music apps. Android hasn‘t an established plugin standard. Probably the best you can do is to run Zenbeats, Cubasis or Caustic but that‘s it.
I think that @NeuM is absolutely right about the upcoming dominance of Apple regarding personal computing. The M* chips will have quite an edge over the competition. And yes @NeonSilicon, it is correct that Apple hasn’t got the technologically most advanced CPU design. But they will be dominating because of several smart moves they made that saves them a lot (and I mean really a lot) of money, grants better almost exclusive access to top notch manufacturing resources and an extremely reusable CPU design
They cut out Intel from the revenue stream and can do that themselves - that alone is already huge. They booked 80% of TMSC‘s 5nm production capacities and already booked 100% of their upcoming 3nm capacities. ATM there is noone else who can do 3nm than TSMC. The M1 design is so smart because they can scale this single CPU design up and down so that it covers the needs for all Apple devices except the iPhones - from iPads to Mac Pros. It is rumored that for Macs Pro they simply put 4 dies on one processor that then hast got 40 cores. There is virtually Panic in the industry since the M1 had been revealed. Suddenly Windows for ARM gained a lot of care from MS. They recently revealed Office 365 for ARM. Intel themselves use a brand new factory - the upcoming 7nm factory in Arizona - for the first time not to manufacture their own processors but rather ARM and RISC-V. If you ask me that means it’s soon game over for X86. Other ARM shops like NVidia and Qualcomm announced new CPU models aiming at laptops and desktops but they don‘t have the advanced manufacturing of TMSC.
I really believe in the next 5 if not 10 years there won‘t be a better laptop for the money than a MacBook. I am an not an Apple fanboi and I still like my Android phone but I clearly see this happening.
Well, I am an Apple fan (and a NeXT fan too). I develop for Apple platforms because Apple provides what I consider by far the best libraries and system for getting applications for creatives built. I freely admit that this particular device is probably going to fail. So, why am I interested in it?
No, it's not 5nm for the CPU, but it is 12nm and that is more than good enough. That's better than the RasPi 4 I've got attached to an Elk audio board and in some ways for audio that Elk setup can outperform both of my new M1 based devices. I'm guessing that this particular tablet is the first of a wave devices at this level. If I can choose what to run and more importantly, what won't run, this device has the potential to be plenty good for live audio work.
I'm not worried at all by the current TSMC dominance of 5nm etc. This will play out over the next couple of years but at the moment, I give it 50/50 that by the end of that period, Intel and maybe Samsung are back up with TSMC and the process issues will be over. Intel is positioning themselves as a foundry for other processors now too. Besides that, 7nm and 12nm will be more than good enough.
It doesn't run AUv3's, but it does run both LV2 and VST3. Anything that moves to ARM on Linux or BSD will be able to use LV2 and VST3 based plugins.
It may be able to run Reaper already. Ardour for sure (my M1 iPad Pro can't). It can run Blender (my M1 iPad Pro can't).
Faust, Haskell, SuperCollider, etc. There's a big world of music related software that Apple locks out of iOS for corporate interests. I've been holding out hope that they would open this up. iOS 15 seemed like the do it or won't point to me. It's feeling like didn't and never will. Certainly, from a dev's perspective, iOS has a user base that is really huge (bigger than most people realize I think) and that makes it fun and interesting to develop for iOS, but there are other users that Apple just doesn't allow for.
I like to think about it this way, even if this device and others like it fail completely, they'll still have a bigger user base than the Atari 1040ST did and in some ways that's what started this whole audio/music computer thing.
Yeah, that sums it up well. Less chance of breaking too I hope.
One of the things I need is a sort of main controller board that has ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth to handle the communication from my iPad to all of the smaller devices. The Zero W is likely what I'll go with for this. I've been experimenting with this a bit and it looks like it'll work for what I need.
Interesting, I'll have to try this out on one my RPi's I have setup for audio and see if can get it to work.
@NeonSilicon I agree that iPadOS is the major blocker for iPad music software to evolve. I disagree on the 3/5nm vs. 7nm. The size of the structures is absolutely key for the energy efficiency. So that means chips with smaller structures will be able to deliver more processing power while running at an acceptable TDP and power consumption. That is especially an issue for mobile devices but also for laptops. Customers do want longer battery life and do not like fans and hot devices. I also have my doubts that the competition is able to keep up with TMSC any time soon.
Yes, the smaller process sizes have efficiency advantages, but if the chip is twice as efficient but is doing 10 times the work for things I don't care about, then the 12nm device wins in that setting. The SoC in this particular tablet is rated at 5 Watts. Benchmarks put it around an A10 or so level. That could end up being a better audio experience.
My RPi 4 running the Elk audio system board has a <1ms latency. If I remember right, that CPU is 28nm and has nowhere near the processing power of even the processor in this JingLing tablet. But, for some tasks, it can do more audio processing than my Mac Mini.
In the end though, it doesn't really matter to me if this tablet or others like it are as fast as or as good as my iPad Pro, there's no way these will be anywhere near the quality of the display for example. I just want something that will be good enough to do some music stuff that I can't do now on any portable device.
I predict Apple will use 3nm chips in their rumored AR (Augmented Reality) Apple Glasses and possibly other on-body computing and health monitoring products. Chips of that scale should sip such a tiny amount of power and provide performance no other fab can match and deliver another huge competitive advantage for Apple.
If the AR stuff is released in the upcoming year, I'd expect that it would be running on either an A15 type chip or one of the Apple watch S6 type SoC's. So, that would either be 5nm or 7nm depending on if they do all the processing on the headset or if it is paired with a phone. I think Apple will be keeping as much 5nm and 3nm capacity as they can for M1's and maybe M2's.
The Pencils run on Cortex-M3 MCU's. That or a Cortex-M4 would be a good choice for any sort of sensor that ties to a phone. Those are around 40nm to over 100nm. They are still incredibly power efficient.
Chips inside AR glasses will be driving dual 4K (or higher) resolution displays in real-time, so there is that.
I don't expect that they will be that high of a resolution. The Quest 2 is pretty good for VR and it doesn't need to be that high. It is running at a 120Hz refresh rate and that is really important. The Quest 2 is running off a pretty good spec Snapdragon and that's part of the reason I think Apple could do an A14 or A15 level chip to drive an AR headset if they want to do all the processing on the glasses. If they do a tie in to the phone and are only streaming to the headset, I think they could get away with less and save weight and heat. It all depends on what their vision is for AR/VR and I don't have the slightest hint as to what they are thinking beyond what they've put into the iPhones and iPads up to this point. I am really interested to find out what they do though. It could be really fun.
As we’ve seen, the A.R. treatment on the overhyped Magic Leap turned into an over-promised and under-delivered mess. I suspect Apple will not fall into that same trap. Will Apple’s display be opaque simulating transparent? That might be one way to avoid the many display problems of Magic Leap.
Whatever they do, I don't expect that Apple will put out something half-baked or smoke-and-mirrors. They've been rolling the tech into place to support it for a long time now. They have to have something planned.