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
Thanks for the feedback and sorry to hear that it doesn't work for you in its current state. We're always working to improve things and I'll reach out to you if there are any significant updates on our routing flexibility. Besides that and pinch zooming, did you find any other show stoppers for your workflow?
I do appreciate your responses and interaction with the community, that’s for sure.
A couple of the bigger headaches I ran into…
1. Needs chord pads or chord input ability. The Chord Designer (type 2) in Roland’s mc707 would be a good model. Or Yamaha’s implementation of chord banks/pads in the ancient SynthBook app
2. AU resizing. Needs better ability to resize au’s and to remember the 100% option.
To Export a standard MIDI file, tap the pattern icon in the MIDI Editor, then tap the Export MIDI Button. This should bring up the file browser on iOS and allow you to save the MIDI file anywhere you want.
No… IMPORT.
How do I bring my own midi file into a pattern?
For LoopBuilder, select an empty cell and tap the Settings icon. There you will find the Import MIDI function
In Timeline View, tap and hold in any empty space on an instrument track to invoke the pop-up menu. You'll see the Import MIDI File option there.
I can't fathom how that affects timing whatsoever. It's just "bouncing" midi off of Streambyter so it can be routed to additional tracks. Streambyter isn't doing anything timing related.
However, Link is supported. It's right there under the BPM setting.
I'm not trying to convince you that Zenbeats is a fit for you though - just putting out information.
Ahhh… I wasn’t doing it on an empty pattern! Thanks!
What I mean is that if I was trying to Scaler2 performances in AUM and sending that midi to ZB I could never get them to sync. I didn’t realize link was hiding in that pop out menu in ZB. That may help.
Thx
Hi @MatthewAtZenbeats came to say thanks for the great work on Zenbeats, really loving it. As a dad with no time for music, being able to do everything on my phone/ipad/desktop is a godsend. And audio routing to my mixer is brilliant.
A couple of feature requests as I cant see any fix.
Midi map Send effects for each channel. Really essential and basic, need to be able to control delay sends etc with my midi controller.
Fix the midi control of filter cut off on the Filter FX, at the moment the lower values jump wildly when controlled by Midi CC. with a low pass filter those are the most important values to have precision over as well.
Decay setting for drums. Again a fundamental feature of any drum machine/sampler!
Pattern sequencer option for sequencing AUV3 drum machines.
Thanks again for keeping up the support.
Hi @katmat,
Thanks for the suggestions!
[edit] see corrected post below.
If you could just route midi to another track from the drum sequencer it would be a start. Also if there was an easier way to set the note for each pad than other than via midi learn, that would be helpful.
What I tried to do was midi learn pads for the needed notes of a drum machine AUv3, then load empty samples on all the pads. I was assuming I'd then be able to route the midi out to an instrument track. Sadly, no dice.
@MatthewAtZenbeats
On the Filter Point, I think the issue is the filter cut off range is mapped across midi values 1-127. But since the Filter Hz scale is non-linear (as in the range increases the lower you go) the resolution decreases as you go down. So the midi values between 1-10 cover a huge frequency range and you get the stepping issue.
It looks to me like this issue affects the Auto filter as well, as a simple sine wave LFO behaves very strangely when modulating the cutoff.
@wim You can actually route drum pattern midi to another track with a drum machine. But it would be so much neater if you could just swap out ZR1 with an AUV3 drum machine.
Well… ZR1 do cover a lot of ground by itself:
It is very easy to sample your own drum sounds, I really enjoy the TR8-style workflow and I’m just waiting for the transient issue to get solved in a future update by allowing the user to toggle it on or off.
Other than that, ZR1 is a fully workable drum machine IMO.
/DMfan🇸🇪
Weird. I wasn't able to do that yesterday when I looked. I could have sworn the MIDI options weren't showing. But today, here they are. 🤷🏼♂️😂
Well, that means it is possible to use the drum sequencer and to set up kits for different drum machines. I have an empty sample that I load on each patch, then midi-learn the notes the drum machine needs - then route out to an instrument track with the drum machine. Not elegant, but can work.
Personally I don't mind sequencing drums in a piano roll. I never understood why that's so terrible, but I'm the odd one out there.
@DMfan Oh it's absolutely fantastic, Like a TR drum machine crossed with an MPC. incredible. I just wish it had a midi mappable master Decay knob so we can open and close Kick/hi hats/snares etc like an 808 or 909
Well, I guess it’s no secret I like Zenbeats😎, and it’s nice others do too. Thanks @katmat for jumping in! Zenbeats is IMO a very under-estimated DAW, and there are unfortunately way too many jumped conclusions and misunderstandings surrounding it. I’ve chosen it as my canvas for music making on iOS, adding stuff when needed from our wonderful AUv3 world.
Right now I am testing Galaxias and Zenology Pro on laptop, both as stand- alone and inside of Zenbeats as VST. Pretty fun. We’ll see what, if anything, from it will come out of the Roland factory to iOS. Only the developer knows.
/DMfan🇸🇪
Nice!
Zenology is great.
Also ZR1 is serious. Idk man I love ZB3..a little stability and multi core processing and it would be my favorite. It has so many great built in features.
Noted!
A couple more feature requests, hope thats ok:
Cropping audio. Cropping a recorded audio clip down to its loop points. Sometimes I record a long section into the timeline and just want to chop out a 2 bar clip to put into the session view, but it just takes the entire long recording across and doesn't preserve the loop points. Would be great to get rid of excess audio and save file space.
The snap to bars needs a little attention i'm finding it hard to accurately make bar loops, sometimes it will say its a 2 bar loop but actually it can range between a few miliseconds in real terms. Also snapping doesn't strictly adhere to the bar measures so you end up with loops that snap to 2.1 or 1.3 bars for example, and no way to get it back to 2 bars specifically.
Midi out clock to hardware. I'm finding this quite problematic. Sending midi clock out there is a delay, and variation as to when the hardware clock will start making it impossible to record in sync. It seems to vary so I imagine it's the zenbeats clock waiting to get to one bar after hitting play when it should start from 00:00 whenever I hit play. A bit of a shame this doesn't work. I'm on a macbook m1 using either roland duo capture interface or MC101 as midi out and still have issues. For some reason garageband ios can do this perfectly and the clock stays rock solid in sync without drifting ever.
Again just sharing to help make this fantastic software even better in future!
Cheers
Another post (sorry).
Just come across a crippling issue where the project seems to lose samples after saving, I saved a project as a new name and some of the drum sampler files just dissapeared. Midi data is still in the clip but the sample slots are empty. Also audio I recorded in live seemed to disappear leaving blank clip. I found the audio file in my User folder but the project seemed to lose the link to it. When I brought the recorded audio inManually it was double the length with the second half of the file silent. These issues seem to happen when saving a project as a new copy, transferring to another device or saving to google drive.
Would love to know if anyone’s had similar issues and knows a fix?
You don’t need to apologize.
The developer has made it very clear that they want issues reported just like this so they can be adressed. Clear reports with constructive feedback is often crucial for developers to find peculiarities in a software.
I haven’t personally come across this issue, but it rings a bell. There has been something like this in the past with samples and recording. Or I am just imagining as usual. @MatthewAtZenbeats?
/DMfan🇸🇪
Yes I did get something like this at one point. The details are fuzzy, it was about 3 months ago.
I'll look at this issue (and the other issues). Thanks for the report!
I can’t use Loopy Pro inside Zenbeats. The plugin window doesn’t resize the Loopy content, which remains far too small.
Resizing of AUv3 windows inside of Roland Zenbeats is a known issue and is in the backlog. They are working on it.
The parameters can be changed through the Zenbeats UI by clicking on the ”four-square” symbol and pick Show parameters instead of plugin if the AUv3 UI is too small to be workable.
/DMfan🇸🇪
Show parameters with loopy pro , hum…
Thanks anyway , hope it’ll be solved soon.
😁
Yeah, I realize it’s mostly applicable to FX and other plugins but if it helps someone let’s get it out there..
Cheers!
/DMfan🇸🇪