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
Wow - I inadvertently started this thread when I made a comment about pricing… 😬
It’s been fascinating to see all the viewpoints and particularly some of the more interesting ideas that I certainly hadn’t thought of.
I do know that I really want/need the kind of app Michael is aiming to produce, and I appreciate his skills as an expert developer that can deliver that app. It is therefore in my interest to make sure he wants to keep doing this.
One model I don’t think I’ve seen canvassed…
I am a heavy user of Plex, a home media-streaming solution based on a client-server model. They offer clients and servers on many platforms and have a hybrid subscription model where you get some basic functionality for free (or could be a more nominal iOS app type fee). If you want the full capability you have to pay a monthly/annual subscription fee, however you also have the option to pay a one-time fee for a “lifetime” subscription. I tried the free service, realised I wanted the extra features and moved to subscription and then was happy to pay a relatively significant lifetime subscription as it became a critical app for me. Importantly, the developers were, and still are, constantly evolving and supporting it.
Not sure whether or how that might work for an app like Loopy Pro, and maybe the definition of “lifetime” might need to be looked at, but thought it was worth putting it out there as another idea.
Cheers from Sunshine Coast, Australia
Robert
Part of me thinks you should charge 30+$ for it. More developers should.
Or an IAP based more on user base. Not everyone is gonna use it as an AUv3, and a large price tag will steer the average casual purchaser away.
9.99 for standalone and built in mic only
19.99 IAP for AUv3 and midi controller functionality
I dunno...im just throwing crap out there at this point. I wouldnt even know where to start charging if i were to develop an app. Id probaby have to start at what @NeonSilicon would charge to code it for me since i know nothing.
I understand your reasoning perfectly, devs spend a considerable time on making their content, however the main and primary reason I bought an ipad was becuase apps were reasonabled priced and I could not afford apps for either Windows or Mac. You obviously must be on a good income and by your reckoning those on lower incomes will be forced to make other choices.
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/44368/claim-a-free-app-make-a-pledge-see-spreadsheet-for-latest
I got you.
I second that I’ll also pay easily pay 50 or even more for an app than 2€ per month.
Subscription is a systematic no go for me.
I think this model is the most easy to understand. I would support this model.
Can anyone explain what ”rent to own” means? For me it sounds like subscription
It’s basically buy-now-pay-later, or a payment plan. Rather than pay $xx up front, pay $xx/n per week/month/whatever until the term is finished. It’d be implemented as a subscription with a limited term, after which the app is owned (as alternative to a straight-up IAP).
What would you call it?
Sold my RC 505 yesterday, happy to pay any upfront price for the full app but wouldn’t be that excited about a subscription model 😁
I thought the swam approach was the best one. Open beta , with generous time foot print. Relativly expensive app on release, but the software was so good you wanted to keep it. Also slight extra enhancement on release. Presumably new enhancements refinements will be paid upgrades in the future. Your work and brand is quality Michael, you should anticipate financial reward for your hard and innovative work. I suspect this will quickly become an indispensable app on iOS and desktop, so even if you don’ t rolls Royce it on price point I’m confident it will Volvo, or even Ford when it comes to sales.
Which happens to be one of the default ways of selling desktop software. 🤷 The developer supports the last two or so versions, including offering an upgrade path. If you skip more than that, you pay full price when you join the party again. Don't see any issues with that, it motivates repeat purchases and rewards your most loyal customers. Plus you can still do occasional sales to steer the stragglers back to the fold.
BTW, re: the rent-to-own solution you are considering - I get the concept but does that technically work in the app store? Have you seen other apps actually implementing it?
So the app would still function after term is finished? If so the name ”rent to own” makes perfectly sense.
Rent to own is a good way for those with lower incomes to be able to purchase more expensive software. How does that work with upgrades though ?
Same as the up front purchases, I’d imagine. Next major version has a new arrangement.
I actually agree with Samu. I understand the intentions of a sub model, but with few exceptions e.g. cloud and streaming services where you pay for changing content and infrastructure, I am not a fan of it at all. Most of us don't make money with these apps and the iOS platform itself (hardware and OS) is definitely not pro and stable enough compared to the desktop to justify implementing a subscription model. If it is needed for a business, there is little to criticize, another item in the expenditure and calculation. If iOS devs introduce it anyway, of course the same standards and expectations as for desktop tools in the sense of ‘professional‘ may be applied.
An important if not crucial point (for an individual dev) would be whether the time and goodwill of dedicated iOS music community users for the necessary constant testflight beta testing can be assumed, which I would doubt. A sub model simply changes the expectations and the (business) relationship fundamentally. You pay for the smooth service but you don't test its functionality beforehand. Would any of you beta test Netflix for free?
I would also have a hard time financing a constant implementation of additional features via a sub model if I don't need some or even most of them for my workflow or if they don't fit my expectations. In order to prevent certain misdevelopments in this regard, there would have to be market research and the possibility of user feedback via dedicated public contact points, forums and a public relation info flow, as Samu has already described. Which in turn would drive the effort for the dev quite in a height that he can no longer lift alone. Sounds unrealistic to me if you are not already established in the market with a team for years.
Also, you can't assume that just because you pay for a subscription you'll get constant development without disruption for many years and over many iOS versions because, as in any other business, there are hardly any reliable constants. No single dev can guarantee that an app will be successful in the long term or that his personal circumstances will not change in such a way that the development of the app and consequently the sub model cannot be maintained as expected. By the way, what happens then, can a subscription model app be converted back into a one-time purchase app? So for the user and the reliability of a product over a long period of time, it makes a difference whether you sign a subscription with a global company like Adobe or with a one man show.
I fully understand the precarious situation in which quite a few devs certainly find themselves. Unaware of the earning (or loss) potential of this worldwide and extremely well-known distribution channel, I was often surprised and mostly pleased how cheaply you can get many music apps and have also invested quite a bit over time. But if I imagine what I would have to pay annually if even 20% of my apps were subscription based, I would be out. Still, to do justice to the remarkable skills and efforts of the esteemed devs, I'd rather have the choice of paying for future key features via IAP and due to changes in new major iOS releases for a new app version.
I like the Ableton model. Pay to upgrade if you want and a decent trial period on the new version before you take the plunge.
Yikes, I was wondering how I came up in a thread about pricing. I'm clearly not the right person to ask how to set the price of a a product on iOS and make a living from it. I'll answer @AlmostAnonymous first. If I thought the thing you wanted built was fun and I could learn something from it, I'd do it for free. If I thought it was really annoying and I really didn't want to do it, I might charge you what I've made in the past doing contract work and no one would want to pay that for an app on iOS.
If I wanted to do something that I enjoyed doing but needed to make a living at and feed my family with? That question gets really hard. Apple and international economics don't make it any easier to figure out either. In today's world, I could probably make more money selling the demographic data I have from the AU's I have on iOS than actually charging for the AU's. That's weird enough to me. But, that does bring up one thing to consider about pricing and iOS in general. Lot's of the free apps on iOS are ad supported. You can't do that with extensions (AUv3) per Apple's rules. Combine those two things on iOS and you get some cross-perceptions about pricing.
Speaking about perception, there was a time when "rent-to-own" would have been thought of in the same light as pawnshop, payday-loan, and bail-bonds. Now it seems to be a preferable model to subscription. I think I understand why people don't like the idea of a subscription and it would make more sense to call it what it is -- a lease. From that perspective, there are times when a lease is a better economic choice than ownership.
Thinking about subscriptions, what if Apple did the Apple Arcade thing for all apps on iOS? Would that be fair for the devs? My thought is no -- absolutely not because that would basically be the Spotify model. On the other hand, Apple seems to be really invested in the subscription model and I don't expect them to change unless it fails across the whole app catalog.
I could probably ramble for a long time about all the conflicting considerations, but in the end, if I were going to try to make a living off of a professional tool on iOS, I'd go with subscriptions and advise my users to save out their stems for any project they cared about. Personally, I don't really like this idea, but I don't see much choice.
We all know that there will always be bugs in apps. Therefore, my clear expectation is that a dev tries to eliminate these bugs over time as much as possible to offer his best possible work. And as long as new bugs appear, if necessary forever. I definitely don't want to pay extra for that. Adaptations to new iOS versions are something else. If the effort exceeds a certain minimum, of course money can be charged for it.
Didn’t you read that Michael also pointed out a rent-to-own model by offering a 1 year subscription that would result in the same price than to buy it upfront? I think that is a fair solution for people on a small budget. You can not seriously demand the continuation of the status quo if the developers are unable to cover their development and maintenance costs. I’m sure there will be still hobbyist apps for a few bucks but for those who do it professionally it must pay off or we won’t get professional apps any more.
That was One of his options, people are proposing other alternatives.
@NeonSilicon
Its a digital woopie cushion that uses lidar to detect when youre sitting down.
Interested?
I could probably handle the audio part, but it would involve booking time in some very expensive studios to record the samples.
Actually i was thinking of getting some celebrities to record. So we can offer monthly soundpacks with the subscription.
One problem for the subscription model, in my humble opinion, is that it could (probably will) end up making it worse for small developers. I think we're at a crossroads whereby some Indie's will make good money with subscriptions now in the same way they made good money in the early days of the appstore. Eventually the big companies swoop in and take it all for themselves.
People often compare the prices of iOS apps to coffee/fast food. I agree. Psychologically the purchase itself is also similar to buying fast food-- You buy it, you consume it, you forget about it. (unless it's a Happy meal in which case my digestive system will remind me of it for days to come and I'lll feel like I’ve personally cut down a tree in the Amazon ;-) ).
I find it easy to justify spending a tenner on an app I might never use in a project, just to play around with for a couple of hours. But if that same app was £1 a month, I'd find it much harder to justify.
I buy nice things for myself as and when I choose and only when I can afford to or can justify the expense. Recurring costs are for council tax and bills. And netflix.
Subscriptions would have stopped me from spending money on all those apps I've bought and will never use again -- to the detriment of the indie developers that made them. Most of the DAWs I have purchased aren't even installed anymore, but the developers got paid regardless of how much I used them.
I'd be much more careful choosing what to buy on subscription. It completely removes the impulse purchase, which is the way the bulk of my apps were bought. Conversely, I'd end up saving a lot of money overall. But all my subscription money would go to the biggest companies. And probably all of that money would go to apps on the Mac.
I don't really want that.
Excellent.
I agree with this and think it applies to the majority of apps, audio or otherwise, on the app store. But, what about the applications that sit in a more professional context and have a much smaller potential user base? In the non-App Store controlled world, there are lots of different sales and pricing schemes available to try and it's still hard for companies to figure out. The App Store is much more restrictive in what it allows as options to devs.
I read in diagonal this thread. A lot of great ideas. Just my feedback here :
=> Have bug fixes updates for free
=> have a preferential price for the 2 next major version to come (with a one-a-year major release)... let's say 25/30€ instead of the 50€.
=> If i wait 3 years to ugprade, then the N+3 version will be out... and supposedly will have to much improvements for me to still be able to have a discount.
If/when the high-tier rental apps drop for iPadOS the quality expectation will go thru the roof...
...I would and could never ever accept a flakey bug-ridden app and pay $9.99-$24.99 per month, never, nope, won't happen!
Even though the apps are currently 'cheapish' it's not viable to support every single indie-dev tat pushes out apps.
I'm still recovering from severe case of app-o-holism (way past >$3000 over the years) and do not plan to go back to that h*ll hole and with subscription that could easily happen $1 here, $1 there and ooops a few hundred apps and well, just NO!
I'm not against paying higher prices for the apps but if they don't work as advertised and are full of bugs and sh*t the situation will change and I vote with the wallet and don't get them.
For the 'cheaper' apps (for me up to $19.99) I can accept some glitches and annoyances but for the >$29.99 mark the bug-tolerance goes down. For apps in the middle-range I expect at least the more severe issues to be sorted out within 2-3 months after release but that doesn't always happen.
Time will tell where things go...
Cheers!
Can you actually do option 2 in a way that converts a subscription after 12 months into 'owning' the IAP? That's what I'm not so sure about - surely it's one or the other at the moment, unless Apple have changed something. When your subscription lapses, isn't that... it? It's a great idea, though, I hope there's a way to do it. I think that Serum has had a lot of success with the 'rent to own' model on PC/Mac, which dialled down massively the piracy that was affecting it originally. That's not a problem on iOS, of course, but still!
A bit like a subscription then
I get the subtle difference though, once you have paid for that version you can stick with it if you wish at no further cost.
Another thought, say you start rent-to-own over 12 months, and then at month 6 a new major version is released, what happens then ? Do you cancel rent-to-own and then start again on the new version ? or could you transfer the balance you already paid against the older version towards the purchase of the newer version ?