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
Probably should have put it in the hardware category, but it seems you can't edit categories, doh!
I was hoping for 2 usb-otg ports for making a poor man's iconnectivity audio connect , but it's a very special scenario so I wasn't surprised
Right, yeah that would be useful.
The main disappointment for me so far is the lack of full size HDMI ports because the mini ports are more unreliable and sensitive if knocked.
Excited about the 4-lane dual camera ports for 4K video capture and also the pci-e port for lots of reasons!
I don’t see the draw to get this instead of a SFF PC like BeeLink of an older Dell tiny box.
Sure it could end up being cheaper but with the stock problems for the 4, I am not optimistic about the 5.
https://www.zimaboard.com/ or this looks cool
I presume overcoming the chip shortage that drove the availability problems is why they've gone with their own chip fabrication. There is reason to hope stock problems are behind us.
If all you want is a computer BeeLink or a Dell box might be a good option, but for some the IO pins are what it's about.
Googles .... HA! $349 for a base model BeeLink vs. typical RPi prices?? I think you maybe don't get what people are after with the RPi. Or at least not what I enjoy them for.
Much easier to get a Pi now, stock shortage problems are being solved.
Yeah I think this SBC format has some exciting developments so it's good there's increasing competition, but there's still isn't anything else for me which matches the versatility, performance, size, price and customisation capability of the Pi formats, all the competition lacks some of the appealing things of the pi in one way or another so far.
That zimaboard looks quite good, if you don't mind the extra size if you want a server for example, additional cards will add a even more size. No camera ports so you would need to bolt on extra stuff for that, no GPIO etc
So that doesn't work for me. But I can see the appeal for some people who just need something specific
For the newest products, sure! Not worth it.
There are older models that can be had for around $100-150 USD. And maybe I’m not quite understanding why they’re great. I guess the GPIO pins, and it depends what you’re doing. Using ESP32 boards and a small form factor PC suits me.
I realize that everyone has different goals and needs. My bad…
I just like 'em because they're small, silent, ultra low power consumption ... and most of all ... cheap. And you can make things out of them so easily. The idea that my tiny $10 pi zero W can happily run ad-blocking for my whole house or in a minute be repurposed as a Bluetooth MIDI bridge just tickles me.
Currently the pi 4 is serving as the ad blocker with a docker image, but gets swapped out from time to time as an Octoprint server for my 3d printer, complete with browser video feed, and the pi zero takes over for ad blocking within seconds. Docker is so cool and fun on RPi (and any other host).
It's just fun. PC's are no fun for me any more ... probably because I spent 30 years of my life supporting them. 😉
I sounded crabby in that post above. Sorry. I was just caught off guard by the prices. You provided good info @animalelder.
Erm... 2 HDMI ports but still no proper analog audio I/O on board?
No sweat, @wim I didn’t feel any aggression. You’re one of the smartest people on this forum and I simply value your opinions.
Yeh, that's odd and more than a bit disappointing.
Lots of good audio HATs and hardware available, it’s a shame they dropped the audio Jack (bit Apple) but difference is you can add audio hardware easily. The only thing unclear at the moment is which HATs are compatible with 5 or which will need revisions.
I can understand why they don't have built in audio IO other than via usb, it would never be as good as what you can add with customization so it's just gets in the way after that. You can roll your own audio IO
Definitely getting better as a desktop, depends on your needs of course. I prefer using them for non web-browser based things.
This should run loads more audio plugins than a pi 4 which will be good for audio hosts too
I run kubernetes on my pi running all sorts of python slack bots, some scrapers, etc. runs great!
I don't see much use for them as desktop devices, though the Pi4 ain't really so bad. I love them as servers. I generally run them headless, connecting via ssh. They work great with docker - even the Pi Zero does. They never break a sweat for server type tasks at the scale I do things.
What I'd love to do is more synth and sequencer type things. I just haven't had the patience to deal with real-time kernels and the like that seem to be needed to deal effectively with audio. For instance, SunVox, can run on them and you can turn one into a pretty good synthesizer with it. I've just lost interest due to the hoops it looks like you need to jump through to get the audio setup taken care of.
I’ve seen what I consider REGULAR pricing for Pi4 boards on Amazon now (49 usd). So it seems the production issues are (for now) behind us. Im excited about the 5 and the platform in general.
BTW Pi boards regularly with a HAT support HiFi audio and codecs for under 150 - 200 usd
Blokas has one that includes midi ports etc specficaaly for audio production.
I don't think I could ever get myself to pay 4x the price of the computer for a sound board for it.
Pi sound board is 99 dollars
https://blokas.io/pisound/
You don't need to spend that much to get good basic audio I/O, starts around £20 for a 24-bit 192kHz HAT and most usb soundcards will work too. I regularly use my little soundblaster play 3 with my Pi(s)
OK 2x. Same sentiment on my part. Yer talkin to a guy still rockin an iPad Air 2 and the original earbuds it came with. 😎
But thanks for the info. 👍
Totally understand. My old iPad lasted me ages.
But that's the good thing about the pi, there's always a cheaper option to tinker with. You can install the patchbox OS and use any onboard or usb audio solution, so you don't need to use the pisound board itself.
https://blokas.io/patchbox-os/
For me it's more about the size - whatever I need to add will at least also double the size of the whole raspberry.
Although I've just found out that my cheap & beloved low cost TinySine ADAU1701 DSP board seems to have a Linux driver to be used as an i2s 2 inputs and 4 outputs HiFi audio codec.
https://wiki.analog.com/resources/tools-software/linux-drivers/sound/adau1701
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/sound/soc/codecs/adau1701.c
I remembered one reason I wanted to maybe get a pi4. Has anyone tried CamillaDSP? Seems interesting. You could do room correction for a listening room set up among other things…
https://github.com/HEnquist/camilladsp
Here is a tutorial I found:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/rpi4-camilladsp-tutorial.29656/
And as for pi alternatives, has anyone tried a ODROID board like this?
https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-c4
no, but a friend of mine switched to orange pi series and claims they are way better than pi ( but they do need quality power supply )
It seems to be that Orange pi is faster but the Raspberry Pi has better and more reliable software, so I guess just depends what you're needs are. I think that's a big appeal for me with the pi, it's not just about the speed and raw numbers
I think I will get one. I have a 3B.
pi 4 and also the 400 both tempted me to upgrade but I thought I’d wait another generation as Its just an occasional tinkering toy for me.
Renoise (Tracker) has had an ARM build for Pi for a few years now. With 8 gig of ram in the 5… i think it will be an awesome tracker set up… no Mac or Windows nonsense! Much better connectivity too.
If you already have a spare monitor, keyboard and mouse and usb audio interface… a Pi 5 becomes a reasonably cheap thing to run some fun stuff on. For me its an awesome sampler DAW running Renoise (i already have the licence).
Bought the all in one keyboard and pi (4) for some light coding and that one live coding music app who’s name escapes me…
Works great with the iPad over ssh
It's a great companion to an ipad setup I think because it can do lots of desktop OS type things an ipad can't do well, but in an even smaller package.
You can SSH, or VNC into the PI and use the ipad display if you don't have a display for the pi setup.