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.
New iPad Air - Loopy Pro and drained battery ... is it normal?
Hi, I would like to ask more experienced colleagues for advice.
I bought my first iPad (iPad Air 2022, non cellular) 2 months ago and I found yesterday and today again that combination of external MIDI controller (wired) + 100% display brightness + Loopy Pro on foreground (all the time) with one continuously played donut caused drained battery from 100% to 5% during 3 hours.
I had one instance on Numa Player and Ting in Loopy Pro, that's all. Airplane mode set, no WiFi, no Bluetooth.
Is this normal behavior or could the battery be damaged?
I read this article about optimization but I guess the bottleneck is Loopy or brightness or combination of both:
Comments
Yeah sounds about right.
I would say don't expect to power gear while doing pro audio (and yes also brightness) and have it last like it's just a daily background task going on.
On stage 9 times out of 10 I would not be inclined to even begin without also using mains power or a power bank. 2 controllers, audio interface, loopy pro and all the soft synths and processing that comes with that, battery probably lasts the duration of the show but I wouldn't take a chance.
@Bruques Thank you. If this is normal behavior, I'm fine with it. I was just worried if battery is OK.
Yes that's normal. Not sure what people expect of a teensy tiny flat-as-a-flounder battery the size of a matchbox 😄 battery technology has already advanced tremendously in the past 2 decades... in 2000, your average NiMH battery wouldn't have lasted half an hour in that scenario 😄
@SevenSystems I was hoping that making music was less resource demanding than playing fullscreen video
"This model ran down in 5 hours and 11 minutes of continuous video playback with the screen set to maximum brightness."
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/apple-ipad-air-2022
Not at all unfortunately ☺️ your iPad contains custom hardware that is optimized "in the silicon" for exactly that task (decoding video and bringing it to the screen) and so it uses essentially zero battery. While pretty much everything about making music has custom, highly demanding digital signal processing code that has no hardware optimizations to take advantage of. 🥴
I'll have to search better next time because it looks like my iPad Air 2022 is a real battery loser
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tYUZr77Fih0
Well, that's not really a very relevant test though as no DAW was used, no AUv3 plugins and processing, and no powering of midi controller (and audio interface). As much as I get a couple of hours, I don't rely on getting anything. I will only run it like that without powering the whole configuration, for a few minutes maybe, a song or 2, a short 15 minute jam. Anything else I will power. Powerbanks are your friend.
Just FYI.
I set Appearance to Automatic, Brightness to 50%, True Tone to OFF and I repeated the same scenario.
This time iPad battery had 6% after 5 hours and 30 minutes. I'm fine with that.
Thank you all!
I recently replaced my iPad Pro 2017, because the battery was draining a lot faster the n before. I bought a iPad Pro 2022 and I and not very impressed. The battery is barely better than my old iPad half dead was.