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.
Jens Guell (JAF/JAX) Decimator support
I was playing around with JAX Decimator and found bugs that I won't enumerate here. I was thinking that I would email the dev but then I started poking around to determine what the status of development is. These are the types of bugs that anyone using IOS 15 with AUM would discover in about 5 minutes, so an active developer should have long since fixed them. I hesitate to call these apps abandonware, but telltale signs abound. No maintenance updates in 2 years, apparently across the board. Copyright notices not updated since 2020 both on the App Store and on the website. Basically no signs of life in a few years on a rather large catalog of apps.
Anyone else want to opine if these are sinking into the abandonware category? Some developers can be absolute geniuses and push out a bunch of cool tools and then find themselves overwhelmed (or completely disinterested) by the maintenance tasks that go along with publishing software. This seems like one.
Comments
You could be right. Past a year or more since an update and either a developer is rolling in profits or they may have moved on to greener pastures. It’s very competitive in the app game.
I find it odd that a developer would invest clearly much time in rolling out an arsenal of apps like this one has, almost out of thin air, and then not continue to develop them. Surely the initial investment in development far exceeds the incremental cost of updates to keep them fresh.
According to the site this was a partnership of two, so perhaps the relationship soured or one of them had life circumstances that got in the way. I also wonder if developers like this have stars in their eyes at first and then see their dreams of making bank quashed by the marketplace after a few years and decide f* it, not worth any more of my time.
Only 20% of new restaurants succeed. I’d make a wild guess that number might be consistent for developers also.
The old 80:20 rule is probably in the ballpark for failure rate, but definitely can't attribute it to location, location, location.
He has a YouTube channel which was active as of six days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfaJ2quPH3AJrUGDx-HY49w
There were also a few apps on TestFlight recently.
Ok, that's good to know. I will take the time to email and file a bug report. I changed the topic header to be less inflammatory.
The big thing is if you disable / re-enable Decimator in AUM it does not kick in until you adjust one of the parameters, which makes it really hard to A/B compare by sliding left right or tapping the on/off. Just did a quick check on some of their other plugs and they don't seem to suffer the same affliction. Also I finally discovered that the snowflake overlay button locks the multitouch size/move interface and solves some of my other problems.
Yea they recently had at least 2, maybe more apps on TestFlight. They were like pitch or Time shift Type apps so definitely still in action.
Can confirm. If you haven’t communicated with Jens yet, be prepared for an unusual experience. The guy is undoubtedly talented, his filter collection is fantastic, but interpersonal communication isn’t his strong suit.
isnt this guy problematic or something? i vaguely remember some anger towards him from the community
Be prepared indeed. The filter app is fantastic but he's..... Let's just say..... a very unique individual. A genius, perhaps, but so was Nietzsche...
He is a big fan of AudioBus Forum members:
Yep.....did not want to go there but there it is. I'd still recommend the JAF filter to anyone. UI is not great but the sound is amazing
Yea I have the mini free filter that I think is no longer on the App Store, and it definitely has a nice warm curve to it.
I want to hear some hating triads now
That's right. I remembered there was some kind of dustup, but couldn't quite put my finger on it. Haha.
I've had some direct communication with him. I think he's just very sad that his apps didn't get the love he expected. Definitely communication could have been better, but we all know that devs aren't always top notch in that department. Such a pity because he's clearly very passionate about sound.
The JAF filter is fully worth the money at whatever price
Phase84 by Retronyms still works on my iPad, but it hasn't been updated in a while. I hope NFM gets an update too.
Nfm will be integrated into Mela 🎉
And that is something I do look forward to when it happens
This could potentially also allow some other weird stuff to be done between the oscillators.
I miss really proper fully programmable FM/OPL synths on iOS...
I don’t remember any official rewards. > @Gavinski said:
Really, I’m guessing you heard this from @Nikolozi ?
Just like he integrated the other synth (I forget the name) into mela?
I mean if your a small operation, maybe one person who codes, it’s hard to be savvy in all the areas needed to run a business. It’s hard for anyone to be well versed in so many different aspects. That said, besides the actual coding, and maybe finances, customer relations has to be up there in terms of importance.
That has to be BS. Last time I asked Nikolozi about whether NFM would be integrated into Mela, he said that it would take a lot of work, make the app more CPU-intensive, and other risks. The other synth in question was NPD.
Yes NPD, thanks.
I’ve never known @Gavinski to bs.
As much as I love Mela it is already a little on the heavy side. Wonder how this would work…
As for NPD most if not all of its oscillator functions are already in Mela and that is why NPD was discontinued.
NFM is the 'heavy one' and I would not be surprised if we get 'NFM Like' routing options for the 4 Mela oscillators.
(I for one wish to be able to do some 'cross-breeding' between the Mela oscillators add, subtract and multiply and fm/x-mod)
Time will tell where things go though...
He's not far off the mark there though. 😂
Jens responded within hours and was very clear. He is definitely still in business and I should have gone there first. To paraphrase the response:
JAX Decimator codebase has been rewritten from the scratch. No update forthcoming, and likely to be discontinued.
Plans to replace with a Selective Range Series and/or Multiband Series version with very similar functions, adding ability to apply parametric rate/bit reducing to one or more separate frequency bands with individual adjustments.
Considering how to provide a special upgrade for existing users.
I suggested a bundle with the current one and the new one before discontinuing. Apple does make it difficult to offer a discount for upgrades.
p.s. Didn't realize the history and can of worms I opened up. The UIs are janky but worst? And actually once I figured out how to lock it, they were fine. He didn't feel any love from the forum. I actually give him props for calling it like he saw it and not shrinking or hiding. I for one welcome the new multiband bitcrusher. I suspect with new codebase, there is also a new UI. He took it personally.
Finally someone. Thank you, Wim. He makes some pretty incisive observations, I would say.
Insulting your customers doesn’t seem like a very good marketing strategy, unless you’re an ‘insult comedian’ and that’s what the customers want.
I never had a problem with him or his apps. I like the apps of his I have. I think it was only a small issue between a couple people that most likely got blown a little out of proportion. Plus Text is a terrible way to communicate, so it’s easy to miscommunicate using text only.
Thanks for finding some answers about this. Cheers.