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.
still no Ensoniq cross wave/ transwave apps
the Arturia SQ80 V is making me envious- Ensoniq synth/sampler emulation is still a huge hole in the ios scene- why?
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I recently-ish dug my old ensoniq EPS16 Plus out again from storage (my mum’s loft!) and installed a floppy emulator.
I was blown away by how good it still sounds in 2021. There’s something special about ensoniqs.
Despite only having 2MB ram loads of my old drum kits still sound great. The fx also hold up really well.
I’m not sure how much nostalgia was involved, but I was not expecting it to be anywhere as near as nice sounding as it is.
I’m sure I will find a place for it though. It is a fantastic sampler. And yeah, the trans wave looping is very cool. Still.
The one big reminder of 1993 is The loading times. oh my god floppies/floppy emulator is soooo slow. Loading times for a 1MB instrument are measured in minutes! :Lol:
My SCSI adaptor literally went up in smoke (luckily the EPS survived) I’ll pass on trying to fix the scsi though. Don’t want to risk frying anything
else and I don’t need it to be quick. So I’ll live with dog slow when I do use it.
Do you have any of the old Waveboy disks? If not, they're worth finding.
I'd love to get my hands on another working EPS16 Plus or ASR-X Pro.
What we need in an iOS sampler app are modulate-able loop windows and/or multiple loop-points like the 80s and 90s Ensoniqs, Kurweil VAST, and Casio FZ-10m. Or envelopes with multiple loop-points. Simple ADSRs are getting bland. Maybe Drambo can do it?
Synthmaster 2 can do MSEGS.
Loving the SQ80 emulation by Arturia. It imports sysex from the original, so I can finally sell mine. It's been gathering dust for a while. The keyboard is terrible but the sound is incredible.
Do you know if the SM2's MSEGs can have more than 1 loop? I took a look at the manual (page 74), but couldn't tell.
Interesting, not sure.
I have an sd-1 is the closet. Needs some work. I think its not worth the cost of fixig it tho
SD-1 is nice. What’s wrong with it? I had an ESQ-1, Mirage and VFX-SD.
Drambo…
Use a graphical envelope, modulator or step sequencer to control the wave table position or any paramter of the wavetable effects, combine multiple wavetables into a patch, or maybe even the loop start and loop lenght of a flexi sampler.
I think the trick here is to study what transwaves actually are and waht they sond like.
(I used to drool over the Ensonoq SQ-1+ and SD-1 back in the days).
Long read, but it explains the uniqueness of the ESQ/SQ:
http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/making-more-of-your-ensoniq-esq1/4505
Later Ensoniqs added the Transwave feature (modulating the sample's loop window), which is different:
Early Ensoniqs had tiny sample ROM; later Ensoniqs had a significantly larger sample ROM with longer samples and the new Transwave loop window modulation feature.
Hopefully Arturia does the Fizmo next.
Oh man…. My eps 16+ is buried in the garage somewhere…. I sooooooooo wish some modern iOS sampler was as cool as it. So many different xfade modes if I recall correctly. And poly AT! Sigh…. But it’s too big for my space and sooooo slow and mine would only boot up half the time.
Yes. I have them all :-)
My most used back in the day by far were the parallel fx. I used them on everything.
Yes the Drambo Wavetable Oscillator can do it, and I've done my first experiments with original waveforms from the VFX and the SQ80.
Some waveforms need to be processed in order to fit into the 2048 samples window size so you can scan through the waves and modulate that like in the original ensoniqs.
Instrument attack samples can be loaded into the Sampler module and presets can be switched and layered using instrument racks with samplers inside.
Drambo also has enough processing modules to get close to the sound the original hardware synths have.
Plus, Drambo has the Graphic Env that can have any shape at any speed.
Go ahead and build one! 👍🏼
I always loved the free SQ8L VST, an emulation of the SQ80 and thought someone should port it to 64 bits. But yeah it seems it's not a synth that people fancy to emulate, unfortunately. So I was surprised by Arturia's announcement. Too bad I'm almost only playing on my iPad now 😅
Thanks rs2000. Can Drambo take the entire loop window (between the loop-start & end points) and modulate it in realtime? Not just the start-point.
And while I'm asking, does Drambo have EGs with loop-able segments. Or better yet, multiple loop-able segments?
Hmmm, I guess using another modulator would work too. I've just been out of sound design and synthesis deep-diving for so long. But feeling the urge again.
If Drambo had all this, plus a built-in audio editor where we could build click-less Transwave waveforms...wow!
Very cool, they were definitely bleeding-edge for their time. Years ago I read on some message board that Autechre had the dev code some algos for their EPS16+. (I wonder what the dev is doing these days?) Those Ensoniqs were amazing machines, but so buggy.
Yes, moving the entire loop window which has a constant length of 2048 samples (that's why I said that some waveforms need a bit of processing) is what the "Index" knob and Index modulation input in the WT oscillators do. You can choose to walk through the different waves seamlessly like in the ensoniqs or hard-cut for more drastic effects.
This is what you would use the Graphic Modulator for. It can have as many segments as you like, loop them and re-start the envelope based on a trigger input which can simply be a note-on message.
If that's not enough, you can stack multiple such envelopes and switch between them or even modulate the switch seamlessly using the n-to-1 switch module.
I've had to learn that only very, very few people invest the time to build their own transwaves or wavetables so from a developer perspective, I would say that it doesn't really make sense to build a full fledged WT editor when there are loads of free, ready-made wavetables available already. If you know Serum, the desktop WT synth, you might know how deep such an editor needs to be to get really good results.
Thanks @rs2000! I like the option to turn off smoothing like in the old WT modules. And that Graphic Modulator sounds ridiculously powerful. I've never made Transwaves but have made WTs starting with MW1 and later MnM, so will need to look more into Transwaves. Never used Serum.
I think it's past time to deep-dive into Drambo (and get the WT IAP and take a look at what folks have kindly uploaded to PatchStorage). Thanks again.
Quick question - when importing 4 or 8-bit waves, does Drambo convert them to a higher resolution?
Sure! Don't hesitate to ask if you struggle somewhere on the way.
Drambo usually doesn't convert anything as long as you don't export, render or save with samples.
For details please ask @giku_beepstreet.