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
Yeah, I can understand that. It’s like buying something everyone else’s thinks is great and finding that for what and how I play it’s not for me. Like I love the Nembrini JMP with some guitars, but not others.
It's definitely a personal preference thing. Like humbuckers or single coils. One isn't better than the other, they just sound different. Tonex obviously fits some people's playing style, but not others.
Yeah I did notice compared to my amps (deluxe and twin) that the Tonex spring sounds more slapback like.
I will experiment some more, I think maybe one of the other spring settings run in a separate instance into an amp instance might give something closer to what you want.
I found using a lower input signal to be key with Tonex. I am peaking at -16db and the response is a lot better.
I use an input level in that range...unfortunately, the AU doesn't have input level or output level adjustment that I can find. So, I don't have a sense yet if further tweaking the input level would help me get the responsiveness I can dial in my favorite sims.
In AUM, you could use the built-in Gain module to trim the input level before TONEX.
Or boost the input level. And it is a hassle.
I agree an input/output signal trim would be very handy.
I’m finding that I quite like Tonex. I don’t really understand the IAP model, though. I seem to have access to the “ToneNet” presets with the free version… is that right?. Edit… it seems like it’s 20 user tone downloads with the free version.
Seems like a steep curve from 0 to 180€. I haven’t found any info on the “clean” iap. Can someone point me to some info on what it includes?.
2 days of testing, a Les Paul and a Strat, 3 foot cable, Apogee Jam+, Sony mdr7506, iPad Pro iOS 16.
With Tonex, IK Multimedia has no intention of overtaking the iOS guitar app market. It’s simply an app as an extension of the Mac/PC version of the product. As a desktop user, you use Amplitube 5. Then you purchase a Tonex package which gives you access to factory and user uploaded “captures/snapshots/rigs” of amps. With Tonex on desktop you can also capture your own amp or rig and upload it to the ToneNet or use it for yourself as a digital mobile profile of your real amp. Sure, you can play these captures cross-platform in the Tonex app, which is what desktop and iOS users can do.
But on desktop the entire point is uploading a capture from Tonex/ToneNet into your Amplitube 5 set-ups and chains. It’s like you have a th-u rig player, and you incorporate it into the th-u ecosystem, using all of the onboard pedals, tuner, etc…
But we don’t have Amplitube 5 on ios, so are you kidding me with this? You can create your own captures with Tonex on desktop. You cannot create captures with the app, you can only load your desktop creations. On its own, the Tonex app is just messy with limited functionality. No tuner, no ability to make a chain. I don’t see a way of loading my own IRs in standalone. The Tonex app should have been an IAP inside Amplitube, which is not auv3. On its own Tonex is really just a player or a loader of desktop files with a couple of onboard tricks.
For chains just use it in AUM, use it like a standalone auv3 rig player, one might say. The problem is that several instances of Tonex don’t play well together at all, and there are many bugs right now. For some reason, two instances of Tonex cause incredible hiss and feedback. I also found that loading my own IR in thafknar and bypassing the Tonex cabs made things sound less harsh but more distant. The ToneNet models all have intermittent hiss for some reason. Another bug happens when you adjust a knob on one amp profile, it changes on every single other amp, which is extremely annoying. The app’s layout and graphics are a little confusing.
Without incorporation into an Amplitube app, Tonex on its own is extremely limited and buggy, at this point. It really only makes sense to spend $100-$200 if you use it on desktop and want to play the same captures on your iPad. The free Tonex app gives you a really good taste, so I just don’t see any point for iOS only users to spend any money. Just enjoy the free app!
Now for the good. I found a few factory captures that are incredible. Mostly low-mid to higher gain stuff. Maybe the best I’ve heard. They all have unique pick attack and dynamics, sponginess. There’s a level of detail on the attack and harmonics. For cleans at this point I still prefer th-u.
The onboard plate reverb is really great. Tonex having onboard effects, rather than fx stomp emulations, makes it a bit like Rhino. You can use the noise gate, comp, reverb, for quick broadstroke tweaks to your capture. But there’s no tuner, no IR loader. This among many things make Tonex incomplete. Imagine if Amplitube 5 comes to iOS, and then you can load Tonex profiles into it.
The big muff and tube screamer captures are incredible. I tried them before a thu and a Nembrini amp in AUM, awesome. Tried them in front of another instance of Tonex, horrible, noisy. But it’s not like I can make a chain of big muff plus amp inside one instance. So until Tonex performs well as part of a chain of third party apps, it’s pretty useless.
Comparing Tonex to Nembrini, Rhino, Overloud, it’s really apples to apples. I think Tonex sounds and feels just as good as the other best apps. It’s also wildly inconsistent and needs time to iron out bugs. There’s something strange going on with its input and output stages so chaining in AUM just sounds suspect to me.
At the same time, some of the amps are the best I’ve ever heard and played, specifically in the tweed and mid-gain category. So there’s potential here from a tonal standpoint, just lots of improvement that needs to be done to understand and to scale this thing. Entrusting users with bombarding the world with their own variable captures using their own variable gear? Releasing a technology into the wild and just making users do all the work? IK is going after the community market, ie people sharing their collections, as well as the “authentic” market, ie people looking for something that sounds exactly like a copy of a piece of hardware. But this app isn’t going after the iOS market, nor the live gigging musician who needs a stable rig and ecosystem. Not yet anyway. For the home studio recording artist who wants to find a complete tone in 30 seconds and just use it on a track, this is as fast as a preset in th-u or Nembrini. Possibly even better feeling and sounding, but also more inconsistent and confusing.
I went back and forth between all of the apps for two days and will not claim that Tonex sounded or felt worse. But it did pose the most problems. Will revisit in 6 months.
Here’s a list of favorite profiles so far:
Black Angus (stock settings, but to tame the harsh fizz on the decay, use your own IR on this one)
Drive a ‘57 ( stock settings, or Gain/Volume knobs maxed)
Hot Educator (stock settings)
Pushed Oldie (stock settings or Gain/Volume maxed)
Tubescreamer and Big Muff
These sounded and felt the best with my setup. There was also one user uploaded capture from the ToneNet that was amazing, but the rest were mostly horrible. This wild inconsistency makes me weary of spending money. I just don’t see why…
@JoyceRoadStudios : which captures did you you think sounded great?
See above post, those captures sounded great but also felt great under the fingers.
@espiegel123 I can’t get the third party IRs to sound good with thafknar. The Tonex cabs sound clearer and more close-up. As you soon as you bypass and use a third party IR, even at the same output volume, it just sounds more distant.
I also can’t make two instances sound good in AUM, I get huge amounts of noise, as if the input gain or stage is being doubled to 200%.
The white noise interruption happens consistently every so many seconds. I figured that was a “trial” and might go away if purchased.
I spent an hour with it. I tweaked input levels. Played with single-coils and humbuckers. I just don’t hear anything special about this app when compared to THU.
Do you mean you can’t get 3rd party IRs to sound good with a TONEX?
What I mean is the Cab/Vir/IR technology or whatever they’re using, it sounds better than when I bypass it and use a third party IR. Looks like there’s no IR loader inside Tonex so one has to use separate app for that right?
The Tonex presets sound as they should with the included cab, and with the exception of the Black angus preset where a third party IR helps tame the fizz, using a third party IR makes things distant and less defined.
So I think this might have to do with the onboard effects and tonestack in Tonex. I’m not sure though. But the cab inside Tonex is in a different order that a third party IR which would come after everything. Inside Tonex one can chose pre and post eq, etc… so whatever Tonex is outputting into my IR loader, it’s not working for me in regards to improving the sound. The included cabs stuff all sounds brighter, closer, and clearer.
And there’s something up at the input stage too… one instance of tonex overloads the other or the noise becomes cumulative at input/output. This doesn’t happen really with Nembrini/Overloud, because you get digital input distortion or output distortion, as opposed to just a really high noise floor. Maybe “headphone feedback off” option is preventing it from going off the rails where it normally would. Putting tonex before Nembrini/thu for example, no such noise problems.
Another thing I really don’t understand about the app… the profiles are all varying degrees of clean to high gain. Some have pedals baked in and others don’t. But why is it that all the knobs on all of the amps are at noon, regardless of the sound. That is so not intuitive, because then there’s no reference point whatsoever for the range of tweaks per profile. The knobs should at least reflect something no? Imagine if every Nembrini or thu preset had all knobs at noon, regardless of the preset’s initial sound…
Isn't it because all the profiles are captures, fitted to an internal model, like the THU rigs? The knobs let you adjust the parameters more or less than the nominal values. I believe the same is true of the THU rig player; most of the controls have nominal values. They don't represent the settings that create the provided sound.
Yes but in th-u for example, the knobs on the rig player are variable from capture to capture. If you cycle through them, the gain knob, volume knob, definition and tube shape knobs, they all vary. The most important one is the gain knob, because it kind of shows you how much gain the rig can have on tap, or how much gain reduction. In Tonex it’s always at noon no matter if it’s clean or not.
This makes the Tonex skins and knobs kind of arbitrary, kind of as they are in th-u as well. You’re supposed to just use the capture or profile and not deviate from it with too much tweaking, since it doesn’t react exactly like the amps would. Both the tonex and th-u rig player are a one size fits all amp face. Kemper might work this way too. But with th-u, the rig player knobs don’t reflect the actual amp it’s profiling. It looks like Tonex has different skins that do reflect different amp faces, so in theory why wouldn’t it reflect the knobs on the real amp during capture.
It just seems like such a silly design, all knobs at noon with zero relation to the capture, don’t you think?
I'd say it's the skeumorphic prettiness that's silly, since it's wrapped around a generic model. THU avoids this by using the generic rig controls, independent of the captured rig. Just different graphic design choices.
To help clarify this, my issues with Tonex have to do with the app functionality and stability. I have no reservations about the tone and feel, it is great. You just have to sift through a lot of rubble to get to the profiles that are great. Kind of like surfing Netflix and YouTube.
Tonex is not a guitar suite app like th-u, nor is it trying to be. Even it it just had a simple tuner and IR loader, it would be so much more functional. It’s really too bad we can’t use it in conjunction with Amplitube on iOS.
It’s also not a single amp design like Nembrini, not at all. The closest thing to the Tonex idea is the th-u rig player, with the exception that it’s a standalone auv3, rather than part of a larger app. And that’s a big problem for iOS only users. The only app that allows your own rig captures is GE Labs. To capture with Tonex you have to use the desktop version. So why pay $20 or $150 just for access to “premium” captures on iOS? Premium according to whom? Now, creating your own amp captures on desktop, and using them i side a full featured Amplitube 5, that makes all the sense.
Yes and both companies could do better with this amp face/skin implementation. It just screams “look at all the knobs and features!” But then you realize it’s just a superimposed shell, and it’s better to leave the captures alone, deeming the whole design arbitrary. Kemper also, it’s just one amp face. I guess the key is in the inplementation, but I keep hearing over and over with all of these softwares “you don’t want to mess with the captures too much, they’re snapshots and tweaking them deviates too much from expected bahavior.”
So the next step is, which company is gonna give us real captures of a real amp, except take 3000 captures of that amp with minuscule changes, and then put it inside an amp face that could actually reflect the amp’s behavior? I don’t think it’s actually possible since captures don’t really act that way. Then you have to take into consideration tremolo or reverb circuits on an amp…oh yeah, I noticed that some Tonex amp heads have a reverb knob. But it’s operating the Tonex onboard reverb algo, not a reverb tank that belongs to that capture. I tend to overthink. I think if we wait a few months maybe IK will improve upon what they already have.
What I’m noticing with Tonex is a lot of pleasant harmonics and distinctive character on the attack, and it’s unique to each amp. Nembrini and Overloud have a more homogenized feel on the attack. There’s more variation in sag and squishiness from amp to amp with Tonex, and that has to do with feel. Where th-u still wipes the floor with Tonex and Nembrini is the digital fizz and distortion on the decays. With th-u they really figured out how to smooth it out so the zappy decay sounds dissipate into the overall amp tone, like a real amp. With the other apps, the fizz kind of sits on top of the sound. I’m referring to the emulation of diode clipping or amp distortion, not digital fizz from signal overload. The th-u amps sound like smooth jfet clipping, and the others more like diode clipping on an overdrive pedal. Anybody ever notice this bug zapper decay, and how th-u smooths it out somehow?
I believe that it actually is possible to do captures that way ... I don't know how kemper works but it is more than just capturing the response at one setting of all the knobs...and I believe that is true of all the modeling amps to some degree. At least some of some of the do try to capture the response curves of some settings knobs (such as tone controls) and gain changes.
@chowdsp did some work with machine learning of settings for Chow Centaur which is what the neural mode uses and had ideas for how to improve it.
The same in theory could be done with amps.
Imagine being a guitarist who’s totally new to iOS guitar or music production, getting the Tonex app for free, finding 3-5 captures that sound amazing, and just using those on guitar for years without any tweaks or option paralysis. The cheapest and most ideal option…
I hope so and that would be a next-level development for sure. Like having the design and full functionality of a Nembrini amp head, but with the capture a Kemper like profile. I’m not sure it’s ever been done on desktop even… and maybe not even necessary since there are so many great options.
This is sort of the point. Isn’t it?. I love the immediacy of it, and it does sound good. It’s confusing cos it sounds like you’re criticizing Tonex but at the same time praising it’s main reason of existence.
Well, is it more consusing than a Nembrini + Thafknar + tuner + pedals?.
I’m glad you mentioned the intermitent white noise on the ToneNet models, it also drove me crazy. I thought it was one of those “noise on demo until you buy” things, but if you download the model, there’s no hiss. Weird indeed.
I also agree with you in that I don’t see much in buying the whole thing at that price. I might be interested in the “clean” pack for 24€ but I’d like to see the exact model list.
Give me the immediacy and the sound but in a better functioning app, that’s my point. I don’t see any incentive to buy, as an iOS only user. I’m only critical of the app because it sounds so good, I wouldn’t care if the tone wasn’t there. The users and customers are the beta testers and concept provers here. It should all be more clear after a few updates.
Agree with this. It also feels like the knobs have a limited range, that is, turning bass from 0 to 10 doe not reflect a full range like in other apps. Looks like it’s just minor tweaking for a given sound, which makes sense in this “model” scenario. If a tone was captured with real heavy bass it wouldn’t have info about that sound with no bass… does that make sense?
To be honest the fact that all Nembrini presets are set to unusable high input gain where there’s no cleans until you trim the gain is, to me, a much weirder decision.
That’s true but at least the knobs reflect the behavior of the amp and the design, even if they’re set extreme. That’s the traditional way anyway. The Tonex skins and the rig player are largely arbitrary, but at least the rig player reflects the gain knob properly on the capture. So I think they’re able to map the entire range of the gain knob across the several rigs.
With Tonex you have a totally clean capture, or a super high gain one, with the knob at noon for both. So that’s silly.
Actually if you think of the Tonex skins or Thu rig player as a Tonestack or an eq pedal (pre or post), separate from the capture, and applicable to your whole chain then that makes a lot of sense. But an amp face that doesn’t reflect the capture, that’s a compromise, and it has been with th-u since it came out.