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
I don’t own a desktop at all, and just pointing a tiny cursor and clicking a mouse on one parameter at a time does not inspire me or feel hands-on enough for making music after working with hardware for a long time in the past.
The tactile surface of an iPad and the possibility of interacting with multiple parameters at once with my fingertips, feels closer to using real hardware.
I love the portability of the iPad. Literally a whole production studio carried around with me everywhere in a shoulder bag and the opportunity to create or work on something anywhere at any time. Saves a lot of space around the around the house too compared to having to allocate a permanent space for a desktop setup. Also, being so mobile, different outdoors locations can be very inspiring to create in.
It’s also definitely more comfortable and relaxing to slump back in a comfy chair with an iPad on my lap than having to sit up straight at a worktop for using a keyboard and mouse.
Because that’s what I have. My personal computing devices are a 2018 iPad Pro and a 2012 Mac Mini; the latter is relegated solely to streaming video and storing my iTunes library.
Auria is a conundrum. It’s still miles ahead of anything else on iOS even though it seems like it’s stalled development. Personally I think the UI is wrong. Feels too much like Protools and to me it doesn’t feel “touchable”. But you’re right, it’s the only option for decent editing. Plus it’s got great bussing. Why hasn’t anyone caught up in all this time?. No idea. I wish Auria would join forces in some way with some other daw and port over all its superb features. It’s a shame but I feel like it’s lost pace.
Anyway, even with Auria, I don’t think audio editing is anywhere close to desktop. Its a lot faster and more robust. If you want that level of detail I’d say you’re probably better off finishing mixes on a desktop daw.
Initially I was expecting the multi-touch capabilities of an iPad to allow apps to be written that could be a lot more engaging than the equivalent on a computer (and at that time I didn’t use a computer at all for music, during the 90s I’d avoided using computers for anything beyond simple sequencing or syncing a simple computer-held sequence to my hardware sequencers – for example, I didn’t own any high-end computer sequencers on my Macs, only very simple cheap ones).
A computer (back then, as it is often now) tended to be a thing that you use one finger of one hand to perform the whole project, nudge by nudge, click by click. Just one finger – one axis at one time.
It turned out that although there is some evidence for iPad synths written to take advantage of multitouch, this hasn’t really become the ‘show-off’ feature.
I used to make stuff on Amigas back in the 90s, then spent many years not making anything. I got back into it because I wanted a creative outlet unrelated to my day job, and given that my day job involves working on a desktop all day I didn't want to do it on a desktop. I also very much wanted to avoid gear acquisition syndrome so try to stay away from hardware as much as possible. I find the limitations that I've imposed on myself kind of freeing, almost my entire studio is inside that one iPad and I can make music anywhere.
I find this incredibly frustrating with regards to DAWs, which is why I subject Cubasis to so much opprobrium and hold such a love for NS2 which is touch-input perfection. Most AU instruments I use though I find are pretty good at touch interaction, though maybe not so much multi-touch.
There are users that work on an iPhone but I prefer the iPad for better usage of onscreen touch controls. I think an iPhone is probably good for dabbling on the go. Most apps sync projects and presets with iCloud, so you can quickly add a new take using your iPhone while being on a train and then continue the track later on your iPad. That's actually quite cool.
Probably with a mobile controller I could also be more happy with an iPhone as my main device. For instance if you would use Gadget 2 on an iPhone with both Bluetooth controllers from Korg (nanoKeys Studio and nanoKontrol Studio) you wouldn't have to touch the screen often, probably only for editing and browsing presets. Several apps also allow exporting the project as Ableton Live Set (.als file). So there is also the scenario to use your iPhone as a sketch book for Ableton.
I had been quite disappointed with the limitations of iOS DAWs, that's why I decided to buy Bitwig. But honestly although I love Bitwig, I keep coming back to my iPad. ATM Drambo is my preferred "DAW". Since 2.0 it really is the best package for me, even if I don't use the modular stuff but only AU plugins. I love the workflow.
For me, a touch screen is the closest I can get to hardware. Compared to desktop/mouse, I feel more distance. To have a whole studio in a small package. And the cheap app prices opens so much possibilities. Back in the 90ties I must have spend thousands on hardware, (vintage) synth and fx I can buy now for just 10 bucks, or less..
Thanks, so Tactile screens, Quality/Price ratio, and the fact that Apps have a more creative and fun approach are the main reasons why mobile/tablet music making is becoming so popular if i understand well.
@Slush , @FastGhost , @u0421793 , @Spidericemidas Can you share what's your current Mobile Apps Setup and what's your workflow using all those Apps?
I suspect this @LouisH character is carrying out market or develpment research, he's certainly got a good group to do it on
A little bit of background about me :
15 years as touring Dj mainly in Europe
Same amount as music producer (mainly Desktop and Hardware)
Record store dealer in Berlin for some years, built a recording solution for Clubs, festivals and concert halls.
Now working on musical Apps, that's why i'm very interested in knowing what could motivate one to create music on Apps instead of producing on Desktop.
I mainly produce on Desktop myself.
Develpment research is for good in my opinion, that's how you build great Apps for everyone
Really? You do all of your patch designing on the iPad? That is fantastic.
To get a sense of the history there are a few apps that turned everything upside down making the iPad the greatest platform for musicians.
Thumbjam*
Alchemy*
Loopy*
Korg MS20*
Animoog*
Samplr*
Thor*
Sunvox
iSem
iVCS3
PPG WaveMapper
Nave*
then Audiobus happened
Gadget*
iOdysee*
MonoPoly*
Zeeon
Layr
AUM
Mozaic
Model15
KQ Dixie
Drambo
Loopy Pro
If I forgot some of the greatest apps ever made please chime in.
Most apps are still for sale. Some never became an AU plugin though*.
Alchemy was bought by Apple and now lives inside Garageband.
PPG has retired.
Of the old starred apps I would still buy Thumbjam and Samplr.
Mostly on my lunchbreaks at work! 😁
You are a very productive person. 👍
I left desktop years ago after tracking how many minutes it took to get setup and get playing or music-making.
So setup time has been very important to me.
Lately, though, I have been looking at my output as the ultimate factor. I tend to get distracted by too many apps and learning curve.
That is why I favor GarageBand. Fewer distractions. More time for actually making music.
I was an ipad junkie for about eight years back when I worked in an office and had a twelve hour a week commute. Now I work from home and use desktop / Maschine. It is night and day. I made more/better stuff with Maschine in one year than I did in eight years on iOS.
Still, iPad was fun and I kept limber/creative in that time. It was great for practice and learning.
Sunrizer
Yep all apps made by made by Beepstreet are great. And Sunrizer is an AU plugin now.
Guess owning a JP8000 made that one stand out less to me.
Drambo is the masterpiece though.
Over 300 synth and music making apps on my iPad. I’m not constrained to one particular workflow. That’s the beauty of this platform. It’s very modular. So many easily affordable and quality apps offer different ways of doing things, and their different designs and UIs provoke different inspirations to create, but they are all connectable in different ways.
One example of a workflow I’m using at the moment is to load the ZOA sequencer into AUM and drive a number of different synths all routed through a couple of fx and accompanied by a synced beat from Hammerhead also in AUM. I then record a live jam of the setup in AUM and save that recording to Audioshare. I then transfer that recording from Audioshare onto an audio track in Cubasis to act as the main structure and continue to overdub other bits and pieces as I want on further tracks in Cubasis to complete the project.
But I could also record perfectly timed loops of the setup playing within AUM and export the stems to Loopy Pro and jam them in there along with other things loaded into Loopy Pro.
I’ve also used Korg Gadget a lot in the past. People said it was a “closed box” because it cannot accomodate other apps, but actually it’s not such a closed box at all if you get to know it, and you can get the sounds from other apps into it in various ways and workarounds if you have the patience and the will, if you really want to.
Part of the fun for me is finding ways around things and incorporating all sorts of apps and their different workflows together to complete a project.
Good examples of really inspiring hands-on playable apps well designed for the touchscreen interface are: KRFT. Borderlands Granular. Spacecraft. TC-11. SamplR. Loopy Pro. Anything which includes X-Y pads and modulation linked to finger position and movement on the screen keyboard, like Animoog.
The first app I downloaded onto a new iPad when I decided to explore the iOS platform for music making was Sunrizer because I owned and still own a JP8000. When I heard how Sunrizer sounded on iOS, I was pretty happy and convinced that the platform was decent enough and good things were possible in software.
It’s solely because the apps designed for iPad are more fun to use and have more clever things going on in them, generally, than desktop bullshit which always seems to abide by the same design principles over and over again. In my humble opinion of course. Number two, if I want to record live midi on desktop, I gotta have a midi controller. With touch screen, the keys are right on the screen, with many amazing and unique touch instruments to choose from. And number 3, obviously a lot cheaper than desktop.
Hi @LouisH and welcome to this great informative, friendly, mostly non critical forum with a lot of super members (both musically and technically). You can ask any question as a beginner (I did) without fear of a snarky response and many veterans give you generous, priceless, info and support. So, the forum itself is a major reason for me. We do occasionally discuss sensitive topics and that is, with a few exceptions, always done in a civil manner.
As to discographies, I’m one of the guilty parties. I’ve made over 640 tracks, yielding 52 albums over the past four years. All done in Cubasis. Could my tracks be more pro quality? The answer is, of course, yes. And it would be more pro still if I were in a studio with a professional engineer.
Though some might consider me a pro player, I am in no way a pro producer. The chief problem I have is that my mixes sound best over headphones and worst out of iPad speakers. I think that’s pretty common, but it may not be the platform’s shortcoming as you can hear positively incredible produced tracks from iOS producers.
I justify, in part, sticking with the iPad because, until I am better than the iOS tools I use, the lack is in my ability, not the platform. I think each of us has to ask ourselves that question. Am I professional enough to be that concerned with what, a 10% improvement in production quality if I used desktop? Where are you at, Louis? Can you fully utilize the pro power of desktop (and the expense) or are your production skills still evolving? Also, are you in it for fun or to launch a professional career?
I use the iPad because I loathe working with a mouse or track pad. I use it because I love the aesthetic and tactile experience. It’s very sci-fi to someone who remembers the world of a room filling Univac.
I use it because I can work lying in bed. I use it because of the envelope piercing evolution of the device and it’s devs, and the types of technological creators I get to hang around with here. I mean, a 2T 16gig 12.9, M1 tablet…. that’s something I look forward to (tho by the time I upgrade from a pro2 it will be M2). Until then my pro2 is perfectly satisfactory and inspires me just from the experience.
All my tracks are made in Cubasis3. I produce jazz, synth and classical tracks. For acoustic I rely mostly on PurePiano, Ravenscroft piano, HouseMark1 EP, NeoSoulKeys EPs, BASSalicious 2, SWAM horns, PureSynthPlatinum, BeatHawk, iSymphonic and Korg ModulePro. My favorite synths lately are Aparillo, TeraPro, LaGrange, KASPAR, Continua, Magellan2, DRC, MOOG Model D and a few others. FX are few, Kleverb, MicroPitch, MixBox, Cubasis FX.
Once again, welcome and stay as open as you are now. It’s a great ride. Here’s a link to my BandCamp site…
https://michaelalevy.bandcamp.com/
I have to agree. Specially true with DAWs. You can’t treat a finger tap like a mouse click. Say you’re splitting an audio clip, or moving a midi note, with a mouse it’s click and drag. With your finger you’re covering the area you’re working on. Unless you have transparent fingers. I’ve never used NS2 but I hear the midi editing is like Xequence’s, where you have a dedicated touch friendly way of moving notes.
SAMPLR is still a masterpiece of a fun and extremely well made touch instrument/tool. Loopy Pro is up there on being greatly touchable.
I’ve seen some videos of Bitwig on a touch-screen windows and it looked very well made, it had a nice menu system. @krassmann are you using a touch screen with Bitwig?
We talked about Auria before. Such a complete and powerful app, but it makes you wish you had a mouse. I guess the new generation that was brought up with touch screens is gonna have the whole thing interiorized and will make great apps. I think we’re still mainly in the “think desktop translate to iPad” era. Musicians like to touch, tap, slide and bang stuff. A mouse is just a pointer device, there’s no feeling there.
Btw @LouisH we tend to drive off track easily in this forum! 🙃. You might ask about quantizing an Euclidean sequencer in Drambo and end up on Putin and Bitcoins.
Pencil?
💣 🤯
You know what?. You might be right and defeated a long-ass argument with one word.
I’ve never tried a pencil on an iPad. I don’t know, it doesn’t appeal to me… I have this silly feeling that pencils are either too geeky or too snob/yuppie.
Why not both? I routinely begin composing on the ipad because of all the reasons put forth by the others here but, for midi composition at least, I usually transfer my ideas to desktop for refinement that I find easier to do there; larger monitors, etc..
The ipad has become the most useful sketchpad / idea generator for me.
Sometimes the touch pad can be a little problematic for me when trying to fine tune things. For example, the frustration when I'm turning a dial or slider with my finger, trying to reach a specific number, and when I move my finger from the screen, it jumps to the next number. That kind of thing makes me appreciate the mouse.
@McD is a pencil fan, maybe he’ll chime in. I donkt use it myself, preferring my greasy fingertip.
I used the pencil a lot in Auria. I used the pencil a fair bit in iOdyssyeyey too, to attempt to get the VCO tuning roughly where it made sense musically, but I’m still part way through the attempt, which started in 2018, then I’ve got the other VCO to do. I resign myself that being in tune is a bourgeois concept.
I am fading out of using the iPad as the place where music is made.
I’ve never understood the “AU” thing where you can run more than one app at the same time, I’ve never really needed to do that. Pre-pandemic I was using Gadget to write tunes on the tube 🚇 on the way into and out of work, and did a couple of “Albums” that way (now that’s a pointless concept these days – just release tracks, one after the other). I had them all taken down by cancelling my Distrokid account which increases the rarity value of my music – nobody can find it now, so it must be worth a fortune.
Each Gadget song was exported to separate audio tracks one at a time and then collated in Auria where I sang vocals and mastered it by mostly watching Auria repeatedly crash (funnily, never used the midi features of Auria).
Now, since the 2021st year of our pandemic, I started remaking a ‘greatest hits’ collection of those songs from the Gadget midi into Logic Pro X and using whatever hardware synths I had lying around – SH09, three Matrix 1000s, ARP 2600, Behringer Cat, Korg NTS1, Korg Opsix, you know the sort of thing, just whatever I can find in the attic and bring down. This has resulted in vastly better output than what I was doing in Gadget, sonically and arrangement-wise. I’m still in the middle of one of the songs lately, so that project is nearing the wrapping up.
Not sure how I’m going to approach a new phase of post-pandemic songwriting, but I’m tempted to just use generative music techniques to keep myself at distance from any authorship, but then I must remember that maybe I might want to play these songs live in front of an audience, so I’ve got to remember how they go and generative music doesn’t actually go like anything at all, it just burbles on. How will they recognise when a good song comes on?