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
Serato Sample?
That would be perfect but for the fact that I don't think it runs standalone, only inside a DAW.
Serato would be my suggestion as well. I considered it when choosing my sampler, but in the end I went for TAL-Sampler, as I found it to be much more of a creative tool for my purposes. Otherwise, I would have gone with Serato.
What about Strokes? Does that run standalone? I'm not sure of it's editing capabilities though.
Do you have Logic? It is a very capable audio editor!
Have you tried WaveBox? That's standalone. You can try it out for free, and it comes for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wavebox-audio-editor/id1577078380
I do have Logic, but it feels heavy and slightly sluggish (see also Wavelab Elements) which is really off-putting when I want to churn through cutting up stems for remixing. When it's really simple, small file editing I've been using Wavebox on desktop which is so fast and simple I can absolutely fly through stuff, but it's less good with massive stem files.
Strokes and TAL are more sample player than editor, and for this is just the editing I'm looking for. Thank you both though!
Strokes does run as standalone. Read this:
https://apps.apple.com/app/strokes-midi-sequencer/id6443816236
You can buy the Mac version for £35, or Mac, and iOS combined, for £40.
I note that this isn't for you @FastGhost, but it might be helpful to someone else.
I use Logic for almost all audio-editing & recording task when I'm on the Mac and don't find it slow at all once it's properly set up for the way I want it to be.
The marquee tool and arrow keys are a quick way to snap selections to transients and if warping or pitch-correction is needed it's there too and almost everything is 'non-destructive'.
It's easy to group select and stretch files/events to fit between locators and if that's something that is done often assigned a shortcut to it.
I took a while to really learn how it works but now it's second nature and I don't have to think at all.
But everyone has their own way of doing things...
...there's not a single app I know of that fits 'everyones needs' to a 100%
This one was really helpful to me a few years back...
Thanks @Samu - maybe I just need to learn to use it properly. I'll watch that vid later.
🙌🏽
Logic is by no means 'perfect' in every regard but learning a few key-strokes and how the smart-snap works goes a long way.
Would be good to know a bit more details as to how your 'desired' work-flow would be?
Don't remember at which version of Logic the 'smart detection' popped up but you can easily import (drag the files to the project window) a bunch of audio-files at different tempos and they will be analyzed and tempo-matched to the project and after that smart-snap with optional snap to x-crossing makes selecting things pretty straight forward.
(The 'smart' part is really neat especially when creating QuickSampler instruments from vocals, beats or instrumental sounds by dragging the region to the inspector area and selecting QuickSampler).
Only thing in Logic I do in the 'file-editor' is destructive trim of regions when needed.
The rest is mostly non-destructive editing on the time-line in zoomed in mode.
From time to time I do use the sample-editor in Renoise for adding loop-metadata to *.wav files.
This can also be done in Logic's file-editor but I prefer to preview the *.wav file as an instrument which I can do in Renoise.
Cheers!
Excellent info, thank you.
Unfortunately WaveBox doesn't have tempo related features.
@Samu was right, once you get into the flow in Logic it's perfect for what I wanted it for. Thanks mate.
If I need bpm support on desktop, it's mainly Ableton Live and Adobe Audition (v1.5 on Windows) for me.
I'm surprised that still only few audio editors have bpm related features and display options.
If you're ready to embrace a DJ style approach to sample editing and arranging, Serato Studio might be worth a look too. Will auto-detect bpm and slices, runs standalone and a free version is available that will only export to mp3, not wav - enough to try it and see if you can get friends with the concept.
I had to read the manual at first but I like the fresh approach that focuses on beat matching.
You should check out this recent thread:
https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/55026/web-based-sample-slicing-utility#latest
This is the sample editor:
https://brianbar.net/2023/04/05/digichain-v1-3-0/
There's some good ones here for free.
https://www.bjoernbojahr.de/software.html