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.
Live coding without typing anything
I’m getting interested in the idea of live coding but on the other hand I hate programming, hate the idea that the syntax is not natural, hate that it is not at all forgiving if I press incorrect letters, and hate that it doesn’t look anything like what it is going to do
Is there anything out there which is like live coding but doesn’t require the use of a keyboard to type letters and numbers in?
And by extension, can be used on the iPad
I don’t know how it would work, if it’s drag and drop connecting things, then live coding on the iPad might translate as things like Audulus, Drambo, SnuVox, etc – is that where we are? Maybe, but with live coding there’s access to parameters (same as those modular environments) but there’s also the possibility of almost exponential (or viral) increases in the power of what one can do in a simple-ish set of actions because of iterators and arrays and technical shit like that
I suspect there’s something that isn’t livecoding at one extreme (just characters on a screen) or modular environments at the other (boxes with knobs and labels and connectors) but more akin to those introductory teaching things for kids like scratch, and is very forgiving live
It has to work live, meaning that if there’s an error it doesn’t stop the whole thing working until you fix it – if there’s something incomplete or unevolved the rest of it works until the thing you’re doing is ready to join in
I think the whole concept of live coding is intriguing but the very high possibility of errors because of keyboards, syntax, programming etc make it more likely to fail than succeed in a live context
Comments
Naive question, but isn’t the performance effect exactly contained within and dependent on seeing someone actually typing the code that generates the piece in real time? Like this guy?:
The key for him seems to be Sonic Pi, which is apparently built for ‘performance coding’.
https://sonic-pi.net/
I’m not a coder or performer, so I haven’t got a Scooby. Just in awe of the fact that someone can actually do this.
OMFG what is this?. I’m in love ❤️
I’ve heard it referred to as ‘live noding’! Try VVVV - https://vvvv.org/
This has a free non-commercial licence. I think it’s windows only though.
There are other (more costly) options too, like Notch and Touch Designer, but they do have limited free (TD) or cheap (Notch) ‘learning’ versions.
And there’s also stuff for MAX for Live: https://cdm.link/2022/11/jitter-8-5-and-glcore-max/
CDM is a great site for anyone interested in music tech and there are plenty of articles about live visuals on there too.
EDIT: sorry, just saw the iPad requirement in the OP. The only stuff I’ve seen is browser-based, like Hydra, THREE.js, etc, but that is text-based.
Live noding sounds a good name for it