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
The 4 that already exist are not OK for you?
I like the last version best.
Called "Mela 2"
The blue one at the end is far better and fine for me
It only seems to use 4 colors or so.
Maybe at one time, we can get a setting for each of them from @Nikolozi
Then I would probably use white background, dark grey surroundings, blue numbers and light grey secondary elements ... or something similar. Less colorful, more clean.
So, from what I can gather, you want the skeuomorphic feel, where modules look like actual physical hardware modules?
(As a side note, Mela doesn't work anything like how hardware modular setups work.)
What's BS short for?
Are there any specifics that bother you, or is it just a general feeling?
There are 5 colours. Background, Control Background, Control Foreground, Parameter Title and Parameter Value.
After I shipped Mela 2.0 I was planning to let users set those colours in 2.x update. But soon I realised it wouldn't be a good UI to expose to everyone because it's hard to pick good colour sets, most of the combinations would make things look bad. It requires patience to tweak colours until something decent comes out. Most of the users wouldn't care for that. So, decided not to release the feature.
I made one where it was whitish background and shades of grey... it had a paper-like look, I kind of liked it but didn't feel strongly about it and some people I showed didn't like it, so I decided not to add it as an option.
Having said that, if someone designs a nice colour set I'll add it as one of the options. I can expose the colour palette UI for it in beta builds and anyone who is interested can play with it to find a good colour set. But I will expose this UI in beta builds only just for finding good colour sets.
Just a general feeling when you use dark colors my eyes (not so young eyes) can’t see really the limitations between each modules. I try to explain but not easy.
Cool, yeah, I think having a bright colour theme as an option is a good idea. Just need to find a colour set I’m happy with.
@Nikolozi I understand.
But I don't understand, why this is a reason against offering it as an option - only those people who like it would use it anyways. And you don't need to remove your 4 templates.
I did not write nothing against them, but I totally understand people who don't like them ! I can only use one of them, and I still don't like it.
An option to set colors would be worth an IAP for me!
Your personal color preferences are ... very muddy to me. I need much more clear colors to be honest 😅
Offer it as an IAP !!!
Gives you money, and only people who want this will buy it! 🤗
not inevitably skeuomorohic .. but some background to modules to make it visually more different from rest of app background which is kust black .. now it’s just line border with same background inside like rest of app outside of modules .. background would give it a feel of it’s “some object” ..
look at drambo, it’s a bit similiar concept in some way (a lane of modules) and it makes big differende that modules do have coloured background
Butter Synth :-)
@Nikolozi
Also this one, lane header ..
this takes unnecessary too much space.. what i would do:
[lane name] [input] [output]
something like this (ignore mi mystake rhat i namer second select in lane heater "input" instead of "output)
also all elements inside module (knobs, display with waveform, etc) should have thin 1 or 2px border with same color like border of whole element - so they are better divided from background of whole module
notice that i also used darker color for module border - i think your variant is too bright and it attracts too much eyes ..
Yes, I wasn't going to remove existing colour sets. But would have added a custom setting where the user would create a new theme by selecting 5 colours.
I'm not so keen on adding this feature because every feature adds complexity to the software. And complexity has both upfront and recurring costs. In terms of development/design/testing time, support time and cost users pay for complexity (because it's another thing they don't use that makes a whole app a bit more complex). Features often have non-obvious costs too, like now I have to consider that if some user created a custom colour set a new feature I add may not look good or look confusing in that colour set. And I wouldn't even be able to test it. And you could argue it's on them, but they would email me complaining and now we are into the support cost land.
So, if I'm going to add something it should be something very useful. I don't think most users would want to sit around trying to find 5 matching colours in a colour picker UI. It's hard work. Adding IAP, that's a whole other dimension of complexity for a little gain.
I think I made a great offer:
1. I'll create a beta build where you can pick the 5 colours, using a colour picker UI, to make a theme. Can be multiple themes even.
2. You'll give me the colour hexes.
3. I'll check it out, maybe show it to a few other people, and see what everyone thinks.
4. If it's good I'll ship it in a 4.x update.
Of course, I reserve the right not to ship it for whatever reason.
I extended the sale until Sunday night as a few users were waiting for the bundle and then some realised that the bundle wasn't working out to be cheaper for them. So, I'm just giving people a little more time to decide.
This is a fair suggestion and it's kind of related to trying to make lanes distinct. I'll be looking into this.
Now, this is a great suggestion. I considered the lane headers as a kind of WIP / incomplete because I need to add lane naming, collapse-expanding, bypassing etc. So, your suggestion will naturally work well.
I just need to make sure that what we discussed previously all work well together, i.e. lane separation / hierarchical feel, module background and now the lane header change play along.
btw, the "top header" may still need to be scrollable when the user is using iPhone in portrait mode or when the plug-in window is not wide enough. Alternatively, it could become double-triple in height to fit all elements for those cases. Anyway, this is another detail that I can work out during experimenting.
I will create a Mela Feedback feature request for this and I'll link it here for reference.
I found borders around controls were adding too much brightness. Waveforms already brighten things a bit too much (might tweak that at some point). Duller borders might work but I'll have to see. It's always worth trying out ideas.
But I will add that you are using Mela 1 theme, which is somewhat extreme where the control background and the main background don't have much contrast. In other themes, contrast is more obvious.
I'm happy to tweak this a bit. It's already slightly darker than the control foreground colour but probably could be made darker.
Thanks for the feedback.
yeah, it always needed to find right balance between multiple UI changes .. some may work great on it's own but not that well when mixed together
just the dark borde.. like the border of whole module on my screenshot or even a tiny bit darker .. just to give feeling to the control elements then are contained "inside the module", that they are like "imprinted" into it and not just lay over it randomly ..
Ok, color scheme is unimportant, i just grabbed first screenshot i saw in thread here
) Also somebody mentioned it would be nice to be able to choose from multiple color schemes - that is pretty good ide and should be not that complicated to implement if you use SwiftUI .. definitely reconsider it, especially some bright scheme (with birght background, something like light grey) may be interesting when you use mela in sharp sunlight ..
you are welcome
glad to help .. looking forward to your changes, it may be huge leap forward 
I bought Mela4 to support a very nice dev guy and lern more on modular
Thank you for support 🧡
As promised here it is: https://mela-feedback.nikolozi.com/improvements/p/make-lane-headers-horizontal-and-place-them-above-lanes
Anyone, feel free to add comments to it or post here. Whatever is easier for you. I'll probably make this change part of the 4.2 update. I think the 4.1 update is getting too close to shipping time.
Let know your thoughts. It’s possibly my favorite iOS synth right now.
Because of Logic ios I had no time to use it , it s a pity but too much apps coming at the same time for my little brain 😂
I understand that lol and there’s more coming! How are you enjoying logic? I really like it a lot so far.
I feel better with Logic ios . I need to be very focus on learning it. Haven’t try yet AUv3 as I want to be focus first to stockplugins
Very glad if my comments will actually help you to make improvements ! 🤝
That’s what I’ve been doing. Sculpture and Retro Synth are my favorites but the ES2 poly synth is really great also. It seems to be similar to the DW8000 or something. And can’t forget the effects. All of the stock plugins are really cool actually.
As far as color combinations go, check out any of the Toneboosters plug-ins. They have a lot of preset color combinations for users, both light and dark.
@Nikolozi Please, please take the time to add preset import and export (or just iTunes file sharing and Files support) for NFM.
I'm not a Mela user and NFM is just perfect for doing pure FM sound design.
Been patiently waiting for quite some time now and I trust in you
Thanks!
As promised, I did look into this, but there's a major issue that prevents me from adding this feature. I explain this in comments here: https://mela-feedback.nikolozi.com/feature-requests/p/nfm-preset-importexportbackup
I'm happy to explain in more detail if not clear from the post on the site, but a super short version is that because the app was transferred from my old developer account to a new one, it somehow didn't transfer the ownership of the thing called a group container ID, which is a way of accessing shared files between the app and its AUv3 extension. And in the case of NFM, and all my other apps it's used for the app and AUv3 to have access to the directory on the user's device where presets are stored. What this means is, if I push an update NFM users may gain import/export functionality but all users will use their existing presets. So, I think for now it's best not to do an update. Maybe one day NFM stops working because of some iOS update and as part of that fix that I'll need to do, I'll include import/export functionality.
Update: So, the one day I mentioned earlier, might be today lol. I was just testing NFM inside Logic Pro for iPad and it seems state saving is broken. Are you a Logic user, can you reproduce it on the iPad? Could be Logic's fault, but could be an issue on the NFM side that needs resolving. One solution I can think of for you is to save all your presets in AUM, i.e. AUM will hold the NFM preset files. Then once I push the update you can "re-import" them from NFM, by opening them one by one and saving them inside NFM. This is a manual process, but better than losing the presets.
And hopefully part of this fix I can add import/export. Keep in mind these are all theories in my head, I haven't tried to debug anything yet, so these are just ideas atm.
Cool idea! And yes, I could live with that
Thanks a lot!
Edit: I only have Logic on Mac, sorry.
Sweet
Not to worry, others have confirmed this issue for me.