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
How, exactly?
Honest and serious question.
Now, that's a point!
But then, I never understood why Apps need to add such a feature by themselves - instead of the OS and it's libraries add this to any and all Apps...
That’s very good news! Split View with 25%-50% Xequence and 75%-50% KB1 keyboard could make it possible for me to play the keyboard and get a glance at Xequence timeline at the same time! So this could solve roughly the problem we were discussing yesterday!
I’ve wished for that more than once!😬
So we’ll be able to go lower than 50%?! That’s great to know.
Can we get mouse/trackpad scrollability? QWERTY shortcuts would also help.
I can already imagine creating midi in Xequence and simply dragging it out to AEM, Cubasis, etc seamlessly. I think it’d be pretty nice.
There’s a lot of ways but it would require an essay to type it all out. For one, it made Xequence usable with AUM for me without needing audiobus in the middle of the mix. I did a video on this also. Audiobus kept creating hanging midi notes and made productive sessions very difficult.
I was able to recreate this on multiple iOS devices, so it wasn’t a iOS version, device etc. Also, the audiobus connection was a clever workaround, but it being a ‘requirement’ to quickly flip windows is little outdated at this point IMO.
Sadly, this lead to me abandoning Xequence prior to stage manager because there was nothing @SevenSystems could do about it.
I see your point but many apps weren’t made with this in mind. I think it’s best to let the devs handle how/if they want split screen implemented.
@SevenSystems himself wasn’t a fan of the 3 dots along the top and stage manager changing his well thought out work, initially, and making toolbar options/buttons inaccessible.
Because originally, it was impossible for the window size of an app to change, ever. i.e., if the app's window was 1024 x 768 at launch, it would never become anything else (well, maybe 768 x 1024 if you supported both orientations).
So, many apps will have been designed that way, and Apple can't simply start changing an app's window size, because that would break many of them.
I'm right now in the process of updating Xequence to support arbitrary window resizing while the app is running, and it's harder than most people would assume, especially if you draw everything yourself at a low level.
Take the arranger: The clips are actually drawn at the pixel level, and there's a memory area reserved for drawing. Now if the window size changes, this memory area needs to be discarded and a new one at the new size created, then all clips need to be redrawn. Also, the zoom needs to be potentially be re-clamped to the song length. etc. etc.
That's why Apple has (rightly) made Split Screen "opt-in".
Yes, that would definitely work.
It would of course be much better (actually for MOST use cases) if you could hold the device in PORTRAIT orientation and then have two LANDSCAPE apps ON TOP of each other, but alas, that is impossible (it arguably makes much more sense than the current "two very tall and narrow apps side by side" thing...)
Yes, Apple was correct in making Split View opt-in.
Exactly... suddenly they did the OPPOSITE of the above with Stage Manager and just ignored the app's preference to not have any system widgets drawn on top of it. Presumably there must've been some high-level MARKETING meeting at Apple with the title "WE MUST SHOVE STAGE MANAGER DOWN PEOPLES' THROATS AT ANY COST" or something 😄
I mean, rumor has it it also has a lot of other quirks
Anyway. Done with complaining. Will start coding
@SevenSystems so will this update allow Xequence to be used in portrait mode? That’d be really nice.
And Just to circle back really quick in case you didn’t see this:
Can we get mouse/trackpad scrollability? QWERTY shortcuts would also help.
Thanks
Yes.
I'll see what can be done about those!
Thanks for the explanations, @ipadbeatmaking and @SevenSystems
P.S. What I meant was something like a "regular" window in a "regular" OS and window manager.
You can change it's size however you want - and there is nothing the App needs to do for this.
Why should't that work in general, if rightly implemented in the basic window library?
The problem seems to be, that Apple did not think about and implement such details - or?
Maybe they should have skipped over the X11 sources for some examples?
But then, I am programming too rarely and few to have the gritty details
Apple originally didn't envision resizeable windows, because iOS was made for small devices with fixed-size displays, so there was always only a single full-screen window. In turn, app developers assumed that this would always be the case and thus didn't include any mechanisms in their code to deal with the window changing size.
That means that Apple had to make the resizeable window behaviour opt-in for apps so that they won't break.
For an app to support resizeable windows is a non-trivial task in non-trivial apps 😎
(iOS always supported any window size. They were just locked deliberately to full-screen before Split View and Stage Manager.)
Yes, this exactly was my impression!
Of COURSE Apple knew that there would be devices with ever-changing display sizes and ratios!
But they did NOT think or plan for this - this is lazy behavior and we all have to pay for this now
Let's not detoriate this X2 topic any further - peace
The bigger "sin" for me is this whole "The operating system draws an arbitrary amount of stuff on top of your app window and you have to deal with it" thing, or "your window isn't square, but has rounded corners and a notch, and you have to deal with it". But yeah, fortunately iOS app development is VERY WELL PAID so it's a non-issue 😂
Agreed!
So true!
@SevenSystems is copy/paste from iOS clipboard any easier than drag n drop? If so It would help us with the workflow moving clips back and forth without the drag n drop incorporation.
I'd say they're about the same
The main thing is adding code for one specific OS, which means that this code can't be re-used for other OSes should Xequence ever get ported to other systems. But at this point, I guess it's just an excuse for me being "lazy" -- It's not currently looking like I'll ever start porting it to a different system anyway ☺ (fingers crossed still. Who wouldn't want a Mac or Windows version of Xequence!)
Honestly, without all the keyboard shortcut luxuries and efficiencies that those platforms expect (including drag, drop, copy paste) vst/AU hosting etc I personally feel like just focusing on iOS is probably the better play.
You’re app is special there, but we still would like some of the current goodies, some of which you’re currently adding (slideover, side by side etc).
We keep asking in every other way to get Xequence to be a stand-alone total solution (host etc) on iOS. It’s got so much potential.
Edit: and theoretically whatever you code for iOS goes to silicon macs too right? @dwrae AEM works there with drag n drop etc
The main thing is that adding other platforms would probably also add more income, which is desperately needed to justify future time investment in Xequence!
Understand!
Yes that's right, but even if people just want to run Xequence on Silicon Macs, that would still mean they would immediately expect a lot of "standard" desktop features, even though they're essentially running an iPad app. Like keyboard shortcuts as you mentioned, etc... that's why I've disabled Apple Silicon for Xequence, for now! 😭
Isn’t it cool ! Splitt screen with Loopy Pro
Great 🤗🤗🤗
Awesome! Very fun to use with Loopy's timeline sequencer and X2 sending clock+absolute sync.
For fixed tempo songs at least.
Thanks for the feedback guys! Happy to see some find the update useful.
Before anyone rightly complains: Yes, just scaling the toolbars down when the buttons don't fit horizontally is not the best way to do it -- I have various ideas on how to better handle narrower toolbars (make buttons appear in multiple rows, make toolbars scrollable horizontally, group items into menus, etc.) -- I'll see what I can do!
I really like how you've padded the top bar to make room for the multi-tasking "..." at the top. I've already logged a feature request for that in Loopy Pro. LP requires constantly shifting around the split point to get to controls blocked by it.
You're welcome
To be honest, I can understand how developers get so frustrated by Apple constantly intruding into an app's rectangular window in non-standard ways and giving up on it 🤣 but yeah, I tried to workaround it as best as I could. It looks ugly, but gets the job done. It would be "better" to move the center controls away from the center horizontally, but I stubbornly refuse to change my app's UI layout just because the operating system doesn't provide a proper, fully usable rectangular area to work in...
Congratulations @SevenSystems ! Even as it is, it's convenient as a slide-over in AUM to get a quick glance at what's going on in Xequence. That's a great update! Thank you for doing it.
Thanks for being a loyal customer 👍
@SevenSystems or others
Is it possible to start the AUM file player with Xequence as I feel like I have set it up correctly ( fingers crossed)
But I can’t activate AUM file player to start
Any help please
Enabling Ableton Link with "Start/Stop Sync" enabled should do the trick I think?
@SevenSystems
I will take another look
But thought that might be on as everything else is working
Sending midi out to AUM apps
And my start/stop is working on AUM and Xequence
But will have another look
Thanks
Maybe someone else can chime in too -- I'm not sure if AUM's file player is supposed to automatically start with the transport. Or maybe if there's some setting in AUM or per fileplayer that toggles this.