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.
iPad Pro M1 8 or 16GB RAM ?
Looking at picking up a IPad Pro M1
Apart from the price difference and storage is there any current advantage on picking up a 16GB RAM model ?
Comments
According to this, up to 12 GB can now be used for an App:
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/17/ipados-15-up-to-12gb-ram-high-end-ipad-pro/
It's up to you if you see usage for that
I think right now there is no use for an 16GB iPad for music production but that might change along Apple's iPadOS roadmap.
Hold in mind that iPadOS16 is the first version of iOS/iPadOS that has true virtual disc swapping, so, the need for 16GB may be a little overkill…
Always get as much RAM and storage as you can afford.
Considering iPadOS16 will finally allow swap-memory I feel 16GB it's only need for very memory intensive apps.
I decided to go with the M1 iPadPro 11" 256GB Wifi version and now when every single app I need and favorite samples etc. installed I've still got >210GB free...
...and to put that into perspective, my MacMini also has 8GB Ram and 256GB SSD (On the Mini one I've got ~60GB free).
Currently we do not have a single music app or plug-in that really pushes the ram usage to its limits...
Cheers guys for the knowledge.
The only reason I've not gotten a new iPad Pro is because of Apple's shortsighted decision to remove the 1/8" audio jack, but I really could use that 1TB of storage! Once you start building projects with audio tracks (versus MIDI tracks), the file sizes balloon pretty quickly. I'm often dealing with files larger than 300 MB.
I think 8GB is solid. It’s kinda like buying 16GB RAM on a Windows XP, then Windows 7 comes out and you need new hardware to use it.
The addition of virtual memory in iOS 16 would make me more likely to go with 16GB instead of 8GB. A page fault is unlikely to happen on an audio thread because no memory creation should be occurring on the thread, but if it did, the resulting read from disk would be very bad for the RT thread.
Apple's docs weren't explicit last I looked, but it appeared to me that the max potential memory allotted to an app would only apply to the iPads with 16GB. The 8GB models will get increased RAM allotments, but it won't be as high as on the 16GB iPads. Also remember that AUv3's get a lower RAM allotment than stand alone apps and the RAM is shared by all instances of a given AU running in the same host. So, the larger RAM might be beneficial to some AU's.
On the other hand, most applications, including AU's, still need to be tuned to run well on the base model iPads. I don't expect that there will be many devs that start trying to use large amounts of RAM for the next couple of years.
I you can afford it and plan on keeping the iPad for a while it is always a good idea to future proof your device.
Save the money or use it to buy more apps or other iPad tools. Upgrade in a few years.
quick hijack to ask, does anyone know of a list of apps that can take advantage of 12GB ram? Just curious for when I eventually have to switch.
Also, how great would it be if any of the iOS DAWs really pushed in for that heavy processing power.
I went with the 8. Same as on Mac Mini.
Got my new iPad yesterday went with the 8 GB 11inch 256GB in the end. Thanks for all the advice.
Wise decision. I have the same model and I absolutely love it. Good compromise between price and power. I could run almost 30 instances of Model D in Cubasis 3 (with multi-core turned on). That gives a lot of headroom.
Just as test and loaded, or in an actual project and running (playing)?
Just a test project. A part playing 8 8th notes in a loop and then duplicating the track until audio glitches appear. As far as I remember I ended up with 28 instances of Model D or 70 instances of SynthMaster 2
Interesting, thanks,
My Air 3 can reach 14 tracks, at 16 it spikes on all cores, at 15 it seems instable.
@krassmann Will have to give that a go and do some stress testing. I’m sure the new iPad Pro is a step up from my old 9.7 second generation Pro which is about 6 years old now.
I upgraded from that model.
You will be amazed at the difference.