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.
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I’ve got that Memphis cred and preference.
BBQ aside… What does “it sounds digital” mean in this context?. I don’t think it makes sense. The delay is making a copy of a digitally converted sound signal, whatever it was. Is it any “mode digital” than the original?. Don’t think so, seems like they want bbq sauce on the cloned ribs. But that’s a different matter. I do miss the bbq/saturation knob on every algorithm.
As an Englishman I’d argue to key to a proper BBQ is using cheap sausages that have been in a freezer for 13 months and are incompletely defrosted, placed on the BBQ when it is still too hot, thereby completely burning the skin whilst the insides remain undercooked. These minor imperfections are then disguised by copious amounts of ketchup and mustard, followed by 24 hours of muscle cramps, sweating, vomiting and diarrhoea.
Sort of the equivalent of using the Alesis Midiverb 1...
I’m having a blast with this new plugin. I really enjoy the effect and texture it brings to my tracks. 👍🏼
That legendary English cooking! Can't beat it.
Still way better than the sugar-laden ‘sausages’ that we get in America.
Can I just briefly interrupt the BBQ discussion with a technical question please? 😆 Is it possible to assign the LFOs to destinations other than the one already selected?
Yes. Every parameter has its own "mix" control for each LFO and the envelope follower. You could have a single LFO modulating every parameter in the plugin if you wanted. There's no central mod matrix or list of assigments, though - you have to touch each control and then look at the modulation panel in the lower right to see how the sources are assigned to it.
I had the original MIDIVerb and MIDIfx soap dish units. For their time and cost they were awesome and got used on everything I did. Couldn’t find a decent pic of the fx. 😆
Ah! Got it now. Thanks so much @celtic_elk !
True, the Midiverb lifted my music-making to unknown heights
when I bought one in 86...but still, they were pretty crappy... 
I need that defeat button to press when my project is just not going anywhere 😂
Alesis Quadraverbs on the other hand are 80s/90s classics. Pretty much anything released on Warp in the early days was smothered in slightly metallic-sounding cavernous Quadraverb laded sound design. I really regret selling mine but make up for the loss with a reasonable Altiverb set of IRs.
Apple refunded ODC app due to its crashing in GB.
I love this.
A banger of sorts eh @TimRussell !?
It has special sauce for sure! 🌭🌶
Can’t seem to get the multi channel for ODC to work. Can someone confirm it’s working for them? Maybe I’m using it wrong.
Do you mean using the sidechain input for the Envelope Follower? It's working for me in Drambo. You need to enable it by tapping this icon, otherwise it just uses the main audio input:
No, I’m asking about loading it as multi out. I may be doing something wrong but the second out of this isn’t doing anything. Makes no difference if I have the 2nd multi out engaged or not.
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I don't think ODC has multiout; if I remember correctly, that's AUM's icon for the second input, which would be the sidechain in this case.
Ah! I had it backwards. That makes sense. Thanks!
I find the sidechain implementation in AUM quite confusing. It does look the same as multi out, plus I never know which one is the “sender” and which the “receiver”.
In the example above, you know that channel 2 is the send because (a) the background of the (smaller) ODC icon in that channel is hatched out, (b) it includes a separate channel notation underneath ("A1:1") to indicate the receiver channel, and (c) the arrow direction on the signal flow diagram next to the icon shows a separate stream splitting off to go somewhere else (note the arrowheads). The fact that it's in the processing-plugin location should be enough to indicate that it's sending to a separate input; if this was the second (or third, or whatever) output of a plugin, it'd be up top in the channel source position.
Reading you explain it, it seems nice and clear. Except when I go back I’m afraid it won’t be that clear 😬
Regarding the “processing-plugin location” you can have multi out plug-ins there too, Koala for example. If side-chain is a specific case a simple “sc” indicator would help, but it’s probably not side-chain specific but a multi out implementation (if that makes sense).
Here’s a screenshot of koala multi out and pro-c sidechain. I’m sure it’s me but I don’t find it intuitive…
Anyway this was totally off-topic and not a desert city at all!. Sorry for that 🙏
Last day with ODC intro price, I think. Maybe time to pick up if you´re sitting on the beta version, who knows if it´ll go black friday or not.
I’ve been doing some research on Pierre Schaeffer and reading his massive Treatise on Musical Objects from 1966. He is such an acute listener and understood so many things about the possibilities of recorded sound. I think most people didn’t understand what he was after because of how it was employed in the school of concrete and acousmatic music (Henry, Bayle, Parmegiani, etc.)
There’s a passage in the Treatise where he describes the components of his studio and describes a machine called the Zeitregler, Tempophone, or “Time Regulator” that allows changing the pitch of a recording without changing its speed or change the duration without changing its pitch (timestretching). This is Schaeffer’s description of the machine (Treatise on Musical Objects, p. 337-38):
“The pitch and duration of a sound recorded on magnetic tape are proportional to the speed and duration of playback, respectively, which are, of course, in inverse proportion to each other when an ordinary tape recorder is used. If we change the speed at which the tape passes across the playback head, we will, in effect, have what we have called a “total transposition” of the sound under experiment, which becomes lower the slower (and therefore the longer) the playback and, inversely, higher the faster (i.e., the shorter) the playback.
“The device thought up by Springer for his Zeitregler, and that forms the basis of the “universal phonogène” constructed and used by the Groupe de recherches musicales, enables the speed of playback to be separated from the time of playback—that is, the pitch of the sound from its duration. This is how it is done: four playback heads are placed around a small cylinder which turns one way or the other at an adjustable speed on a tape recorder, where the speed at which the tape passes through is also adjustable. The tape adheres to the “playback head” cylinder at an angle of 90 degrees; there is therefore always one head out of four, and one head only, in contact with the tape. The device works in three principal ways:
“(a) As an ordinary tape recorder: the heads are motionless, one of them is working, and the tape passes through at standard speed;
“(b) To transpose the pitch of a sound only: the speed at which the tape passes through remains standard; thus, the duration of playback is unchanged. But the playback head cylinder is rotated. If this is in the opposite direction from the direction the tape is passing through, the playback is, in effect, at a greater than normal speed (thus, the sound is transposed up); however, the four heads coming one after the other into contact with the tape has the effect that each one replays a part of what the previous one has already played: through these partial repetitions of the sound it is possible to make a sound played back at greater than normal speed last for a normal length of time.
“A similar compensatory mechanism comes into play when the playback head cylinder is turned in the same direction as the tape, which reduces the actual speed of playback: in effect, only noncontiguous fragments of tape are played back, and it is by juxtaposing pieces that are only part of the sound that we can manage to make a sound played back at less than normal speed “keep” to its normal duration.
“(c) To vary the duration only: the speed at which the tape passes through, and therefore the duration of playback, is changed. Then we rotate the playback head cylinder in such a way that the relative speed at which the tape passes through in relation to the playback heads equals the standard speed—hence the pitch is unchanged. The compensatory mechanisms that here enable us to lengthen or shorten a sound without the pitch being transposed are the same as those described above.
“In practice, with a device like this we can obtain the following results: as pitch shifter, several octaves lower, and about a fifth higher; as duration shifter, we can change the normal duration of a sound by (plus or minus) 25 percent. Of course, these results depend on the sound being experimented on (held sound, word, music, etc.).
“It is clearly possible to carry out the full range of adjustments between pitch shifter and duration variator and thus obtain modifications of pitch and duration at the same time, which leaves the experimental musician a great deal of freedom of innovation . . . but is occasionally likely to bring some confusion into his manipulations!”
So, as I was reading this I realized that the “Mirage” algorithm in Other Desert Cities follows exactly this principle!
So I looked at the manual to see if they referenced the Zeitregel, but to my surprise they refer to another machine from the same time, called the Eltro Information Rate Changer from 1967 (Schaeffer’s book was written in 1966 so he had the machine before that).
And instead of Schaeffer, they mention the fabulous Wendy Carlos and a post from her website where she describes the Eltro, and she drops another gem: this is the machine they used to record the famous scene at the end of Space Odyssey where HAL breaks down singing “Daisy Daisy”! (There was a post on the Make Noise Instagram account where they reproduced this using their Morphagene, which is a device also inspired by Schaeffer). Perhaps it can be reproduced using Mirage as well.
I never cease to be amazed at the fact that we can carry so many of these technologies with us every day. A HAL 9000 supercomputer has nothing our iPads today…
@dvi that was an amazing read. Thanks for sharing!
@cokomairena glad you enjoyed it! There is a pdf of Schaeffer’S Treatise on the Russian servers (pm for a link if you want it). There’s also an old abridged translation in Spanish, and the French original can be purchased as epub (haven’t found it online). I think some of his stuff is essential read for us sound-tweakers and there’s so much that can be adapted for our devices.
This is very interesting, thank you! I am currently reading the book Audio Culture, which is one of the set texts for the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening classes (which sound fascinating but have a several year waiting list) and is a collection of essays and extracts by various thinkers including Schaeffer. Probably something you have read already, if not, i highly recommend it.
https://books.google.ru/books/about/Audio_Culture.html?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&redir_esc=y