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.
Dev shout-out: An app I’d like to see - ambience generator?
My recent experience with ‘auto generating’ my wind chimes piece ‘At Clouds Hill’:
reminded me of a long standing wish of mine which has yet to be fulfilled by any app that I am aware of on IOS, though I know of a couple of things like this in web apps and on pc.
Very simply: 8 channels of user uploaded looped samples in a standalone/AUV3 player, with built in /cc addressable LFOs for fader levels, and maybe some ‘snapshot/preset/morph’’ functionality.
Like 8 mixable AudioShares of arbitrary length on loop simultaneously.
For extra coolness, the ability to create self playing ‘packs’ incorporating a simplified player-only version of the sample machine and a particular load out of samples you had uploaded to it, so I could make my ‘At Clouds Hill’ pack, and email the whole kit and caboodle to someone with no music apps who could just click on it and have it play an endlessly changing ‘remix’ of the fixed piece.
Doesn’t need any onboard wave editing or anything else, just the ability to loop whatever samples are fed to it. If these can do that asynchronously/polyrhythmically, using long samples of arbitrary length, all the better. If it can run as an AUV3 inside Loopy Pro, AUM etcetera, I can go to town with fx there, and dub off remixes of the remixes at will. Sure it’d be nice if it could host AUV3s itself too, but that feels like feature creep.I’m not trying to reinvent a DAW.
I can just imagine crafting an (ahem) ‘soundscape’ - random clanks, distant howls, wind noise - into the emailable ‘crashed on an alien planet’ self-playing atmosphere pack. Or hooking it up to a YouTube Livestream and running it 24/7… A ‘rain’ pack. A ‘sleep’ pack. A ‘sound effects for your D&D session’ pack. A ‘Halloween party’ pack… A ‘remix your own version of my album’ pack… the IAP options are obvious.
I could also imagine this having utility for installations and theatrical performances and similar…
I can obviously achieve the same effect inside AUM, or Koala or similar, just for myself, as I did when I made the original piece, but this would be primarily a standalone thing leaning heavily on the random/happy accident button, that would constantly evolve without requiring any other software or user intervention beyond the initial creation. A bit like Eno’s 77 Million Paintings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77_Million_Paintings
Any dev fancy taking a crack at it, I wonder?
Comments
Post hainbach vestax thing video I’ve been meaning to make a drambo setup that kinda does this, using a MIDI fader board as the controller…
This sounds a bit like Hainbach and Audiothing's 'Noises' on PC and Mac... If you want something similar on ios there is Playpits for Drambo by @childofthecorndog It's really really good and allows morphing/fading between 4 samples on an x/y touchpad. It very nearly stops me from using Noises, except I can't figure out how to connect an LFO to make it cycle automatically...
@sevenape @Krupa : thanks both, interesting… but it’s really the standalone app-in-itself aspect that I’m interested in.
I do have a saved AUM template which can generate At Clouds Hill - The infinity mix, for as long as I want, (comprising AUM with a sample-loaded Koala and ShiftBud mapped to the Koala slots, plus Alteza), but it’s much more the whole idea of an app which allows me to use my own curated samples, to create a little standalone soundscape ‘toy’ that can do it’s own evolving, organic thing once made, without reference to any ‘container’ program other than it’s’ own integral player, which appeals..
That's 'Noises' you're describing! I would love for it to come to IOS!
Yeah noises is very much like that, beautifully simple to use as well… there’s that new ‘BromBach HainBos’ collaboration in the offing that someone speculated could be a replacement for the Vestax thing; Big H mentioned that it’d lightened his load when travelling for gigs…
I’ll have to check it out - somehow missed that, and I’m a big fan of all things Hainbach.
***Update - @sevenape, damn, you’re right! Noises is so far up my street it’s moved in and taken the guest bedroom.How did I miss that?!?
I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a Hainbach bundle Black Friday time (too strapped right now) and hopefully snag it then.
Sadly AudioThing have shown zero interest thus far in porting to IOS, and Noises looks like it would have hefty storage needs for the preset banks, so can’t imagine we are going to see it our side of the fence any time soon.
that would be a really great tool, and they have a history of working with loops!
Have a lil gander at this, Mr Richards already did of the dirty work 🫡
https://patchstorage.com/audiobus-faderboard-v-05/
It's so good I agree and making little sample packs is very addictive.
And yes it's sad it's not coming. It's a perfect fit!
Madness, that’ll be a solid check, thanks!
And I’m not sure if I’m ashamed or not that I haven’t actually played any of the noises preset sounds, I watched the demo, bought it and loaded my own nonsense straight in, forgot to even look back 😅
Yeah I never use the built-in sounds (sorry big H)
I hate to be the one to always bring up the obvious answer, but GarageBand has a ton of sound effects built-in and it would be trivial to set up looped effects on multiple tracks as you’ve described them.
@Svetlovska You don't have Drambo, do you?
@NeuM @rs2000 : yup, there’s a gazillion ways I can do it, including the way I actually do do it, as described above, but the point is not ‘how do I make an evolving soundscape?’ I think I do know how to do that. It is:
“how do I package my own sounds in a portable, completely standalone package that someone without any other music software or skills can just double click on and have run?’
Also: yes. I have Drambo. In the same way that an un-contacted tribe in the Amazon could have a laptop.they found in some plane wreckage.
To me, Drambo is that sufficiently advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic.
Ah @Svetlovska, got it.
The only solution I could think of is a web browser based player because everyone has a web browser on their smart phone and every browser supports Javascript, UI elements and audio.
No need to install an app, just network/internet access and a URL.
@rs2000 : Ok, interesting. But still a role surely. for a ‘feeder’ app on the end of that URL, that can save ‘scenes’ or packs locally, a kind of mini server, includes tools for auto mixing them generatively, holds and runs your samples and handles all the internet hookup stuff invisibly in the background? (As you can tell, I know nothing about programming.)
With something like that you could even run a 24/7 YouTube streaming ‘service’ providing work/study/sleep ambience/ radio station style, and maybe even rack up some monetisation into the bargain… a bespoke jukebox, only it creates endless, infinite remixes of as many individual stems as you stuff in it…
If it let you corral these into specific, coherent scenes, you could create a field recording ‘walk in a forest in a thunderstorm’ preset, next to a ‘crash landed on an alien planet’, next to ‘orcs attacking in a steelworks’, and so on. A sound designers’ mixmaster/audio mood board.
Each user curated set of samples appropriate for the particular scene, but with preset, modifiable volume, pan, filter, (and maybe fx send and return, and eq) settings all handled automagically by LFOs, to create an endless, evolving, but coherent set…
All possible, yes, and there's a number of helpful repositories available on github.com, stuff that a developer would understand.
Excellent! All we need to do now then is find a dev… and ‘JukeAmbience ™️‘ is a thing…
Ooh, Ooh… and as well as the LFOs, speed, pitch, and probability sliders, so that bird tweet in your forest walk scene sounds at different, random intervals/pitches…
Good tip. I always forget about GarageBand.
Sounds a lot like Wotja, because they are some pre-defined rules and samples and it can basically run forever. Something similar could be achieved with a generative patch using Mirack.
Wotja, from here to infinity.
Hmm. Guess people aren’t noticing the bit of my wish-spec where you can package up a player and a set of samples and send it to someone who without buying anything or owning the ‘maker’ app can just click on this mini applet and have it play autogeneratively forever…
At the risk of my repeating myself, I can think of at least half a dozen existing apps and combos which can do the autogenerative bit, including the one I actually made in AUM.
It’s the standalone self running package which is missing from all these solutions.