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.
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ipad pro ram limitation
hi,
I read that ipadOS limits every single app to 5Gb of ram use on the (new) ipad pro with 8 or 16Gb ram, of course.
So, if you are running AUM (or Audiobus, etc.) and various Auv3 apps inside AUM,do you have 5Gb ram max. for AUM and 5Gb for each Auv3 app or do they share 5Gb ram max?
|-does the ram limitation affect the host app and its Auv3 clients together or separated?-|
Comments
It's a bit more complicated than that. The AUv3's run in a separate process space from the host, so they have their own RAM that doesn't count against the RAM limit of the host. But, the AU's don't have 5GB of RAM. The size of RAM available to the AU's is much less and it is shared among all of the instances of a particular AU running in a given host.
The RAM limits are also not guaranteed. It depends on the current state of the system and all of the applications running. The application, AU or host, makes a request for the RAM, but it may not be able to get any if the OS doesn't have any way to get RAM by compressing the RAM already in use or ejecting/reclaiming some RAM from other apps.
The main thing to know is that in almost every situation, RAM isn't the limiting factor for performance of audio applications or AU's. Another thing to consider is that audio apps, either hosts or AUv3's aren't going to start trying to use up that 8GB of RAM on the new iPad Pro since the new iPads are a tiny percentage of the devices the software is going to run on.
Thanks for your answer, I understand how iPad RAM works now but still have some questions about audio performance. Please let me throw in some keywords/questions and you let me know what you have to say about it:
better run some apps interapp-audio than AU? biggest audio performance killers? the iPad DSP/ polyphony/ audio+midi interfaces(Audio4c+MioXM in my case) / buffersize/ flashdrive reading speed / background activities / ableton link . 8GB of RAM is easily enough for audio production- no need/use for 16GB?
thank you in advance,
cheers
The thing to remember with iPads even iPad Pro’s, is that they’re designed to be used by your grandmother. Not literally, but the whole sandboxing, memory management, application update strategy is designed so everyone from a toddler to your grandmother can get around the device without any previous knowledge or need to look at a manual.
The knock-on effect is that they’re not particularly good as serious computing devices. An M1 MacBook Pro runs rings around the M1 iPad Pro.
But all that said, the M1 iPad Pro is the best and most enjoyable computing device I’ve ever owned. You just have to roll with it’s limitations and glory in the entirety of the experience. And use it in the right way and those four performance cores will deliver more than was ever possible before in Cubasis 3. Just remember not to attempt not to run Cubasis 3 at too low a latency and that the multicore aspect (Audio Engine Latency) needs to run at twice the Device Latency amount. This doesn’t have to affect recording live instruments (tracking) you just drop the latency in those instances and disable or freeze cpu guzzler plugins.
As for memory limitations. If you have a lot of audio material (samples, multi-track stems etc), it’s best to play it back via your host (DAW etc). As was already pointed out, AUv3s share memory with each other and it’s not a very generous allocation either. There’s nothing wrong with using IAA apps, other than the fact that you can only use one instance. In fact, as I understand things, they get the full app memory allocation. Just remember the majority of them don’t report latency to the host so you’ll have to manually adjust for that. The amount of latency very much depends on what the IAA app is doing.
You’re right to highlight all the peripherals of iOS audio production. These all have an impact on performance to some extent or another. Even down to the USB C hub you’re using and the power unit that provides pass through charging to the iPad. You need to make sure your power supply has enough juice to both power the iPad and any peripherals you have connected to the hub. And always try to ensure you’re using a powered audio interface. Get yourself a fast USB 3 stick drive rather than SSD drive (SSD drives require more power that stick drives).
Anyway not sure if any of that of any use. I’m aware the Cubasis stuff may not be specific to your needs but whist its on offer at 50% off, it’s worth knowing the performance benefits if you set Cubasis up correctly and you have the right support gear to make the most of things.
My thoughts on what the biggest issues on the iPad versus a Mac are in this comment, https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/comment/987683#Comment_987683
That thread has good information relating to your questions about doing audio work on the iPad.
Audio/DSP wise, there's not much difference between an IAA app and an AUv3. This is especially true now that Apple has introduced the audio workgroup threads API. It has variants for both standalone applications and hosts and AUv3. On the other hand, I'd rather write IAA apps than AUv3 but that isn't practical anymore as IAA is deprecated. I'd rather work on IAA apps on the iPad and iPhone because of UI and workflow considerations.
One thing that is true about audio interfaces is that at this point manufacturers can't write drivers for iOS. This has some fairly significant impacts on some interfaces. The class compliant drivers on macOS and iOS are good, but for some specific hardware the custom drivers are better. It is possible that this may change in the future. Apple has moved to running these types of drivers in user space on macOS and this would enable that possibility on iOS too. I have no idea if this will actually happen though.
Audio buffer size impacts are similar on both iOS and macOS.
There's lots of background processes going on in both iOS and macOS. The efficiency cores help here a lot on both. On both iOS and macOS the audio threads are running as high priority soft real-time threads. This works very well on both OSes.
Biggest advantage to iOS/iPadOS is the touch interface. Animoog is still the most fun I've had using an audio application on any computing device.
Hi,
I dropped synthmaster1 and 2 and both instances of Thesys, LK and EG Pulse off my AUM live setup. I use Drambo and Pure Acid instead and the overall performance improved a lot. Drambo seems to be very processor friendly, way better than eg pulse when compared to as only a sampler, and Drambo wavetable synth and midisequencer are great. I think performance also depends on how smart the architecture and programming of the Audio Unit (apps) is— Sugarbytes Fx and JimAudio products are my favourites in that case…
EG pulse was a big disappointment, started making problem when playing 5 samples together with no fx, I guess eg pulse isn‘t reading the ipad flash ram fast enough.
thanks for your answers,
cheers!
iOS 15 removes many of the RAM limitations
Yep, up to 12GB now.
more details here: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/17/ipados-15-up-to-12gb-ram-high-end-ipad-pro/
The increased RAM possibilities are special entitlements. They aren't the standard RAM limits for most applications running on iOS. Under iPadOS 15 on an 8GB Pro the reported limits from the OS are about 5.3GB for a normal application and 1.6GB for an audio unit. I just tested this using the release candidate for iOS 15.
Apart from loading romper samples to a ram-cache what practical use would there even be for 1.6GB ram for an AUv3 Plug-In? (pre-calculated tables for synthesis, delay, reverb etc?)
Not much for an individual instance of an AU and you couldn't depend on having that much RAM available anyway since it will be a lower limit on most devices. But, I'm pretty sure that this is the limit for all running instances of a given AUv3. So, it could be helpful for big projects with lots of copies of an AU running. That would go along with expected usability too since users would expect to be able to do bigger projects on bigger devices. That's the way I view it anyway.
What ram can be expected for an ipad 9 or ipad air 5/6 (8gb)
With m1 and 8gb of ram how high do your meters run? What’s the average and what’s the maximum of a project in Cubasis or BM3 or Drambo or whatever you use for a project?
Cubasis is the only host that currently makes proper use of multicore so you’ll likely get best bang for your buck there. I think it’s very hard to say anything about ‘average’ performance in any host though, as it depends so much on the plugins and also your buffer settings. As mentioned above too, running lots of instances of different plugins might perform better than running lots of instances of the same plugin. Running very low buffer sizes you could still run into problems using a few extremely heavy duty apps. But with larger buffers on the 16gb ram M1 5th gen pro I can run an absolute shitload of instances in AUM of something demanding, like drum computer, for example.
Thanks @Gavinski . I did get Cubasis 3. Should I get the Waves bundle plug in for $10 while it’s on sale?
Also, running lower buffers (128 and 256) are better generally speaking? What do you usually set your buffers to in Cubasis 3? And what do you set buffers to on AUv3?
I don’t actually use Cubasis 3, I stick to AUM. The Waves bundle for $10 sounds like a good deal - how much is it normally?
Low buffers are better for playing live - 256 usually seems ok for me personally. If hosting AUv3 apps in a host you just worry about what you set the host buffer to. If buffers are high, there will be noticeable latency when playing live. If you’re just running a bunch of midi sequencers etc into some instruments, you don’t need to worry much about higher buffer sizes and they’ll allow you to run more apps in a session without risking crackling etc.
Ah ha!!! So that’s the crackling! The buffer. Thank you @Gavinski I will now pay attention to buffers knowing the crackle is from that most likely
And it is usually $20! Thank you. It looks like it makes mixing and mastering much better but idk, so i ask