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.
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Apps/Scala Files
Figured it would be a nice resource to have a thread that lists which apps support Scala file import/export. I did a search and didn't find a previous thread for this. I know Sunrizer supports Scala file imports.
Comments
Good idea.
There are a few (older) lists of hardware and desktop software that support scala out there:
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/
http://www.microtonal-synthesis.com/
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/scala/scl_format.html (explains the format and actually includes a few iOS apps)
From that last one, looks like the Virsyn apps and of course Thumbjam support them.
Thumbjam might be an app I should have a look.
Z3TA is the other one. Gender can be tuned manually.
VirSyn apps do have microtonality, but when played from an external keyboard this won't work. And no .scl/.tun file support as far as I know. The computer equivalents however have it.
I want WorldScales to have a MIDI output, that would be amazing.
And this is something I've always wondered about. Microtonality cannot be sent as MIDI data? Is it something that a synth has to support internally?
On the subject of Microtonality...one of my favorite videos on youtube:
I don't think the MIDI spec has any way to support anything other than the 12 tones of the standard western scale. To transmit anything else, you have to send pitch bend data with each note to indicate the offset from the closest note. And since pitch bend is a channel level message you have to send each note on a new channel. Jesse seems to regularly help other devs work this out. I've never tried it really so I'm only relaying with I think to be the case!
Good to know, thanks!
4000 free scales here
http://www.huygens-fokker.org/docs/scales.zip
@syrupcore is right -- MIDI messages only correspond to only equal-tempered pitches, and pitch bend is per channel. This is why Ondes does not (and really can't) have MIDI out. I'd imagine that Scala files just include mappings of detuning for each MIDI note that the synth engine needs to know how to interpret. It might be cool to get Ondes to read Scala files for use as guidelines.
As I said in the ScaleGen thread - we will probably add Scala support soon for ScaleGen (and maybe directly in Gestrument as well in the future), but we also have had several requests from developers to see our .scale file format so they might include it into their apps as well.
There are actually two Scala file formats:
.scl - Specifies the scale
.kbm - Specifies the scale to MIDI Note Number mapping. Without support for this file format, your app might have a bug like the scale only sounds right from C0 up to the end of the scale, but any notes higher would be mapped completely wrong.
Might be a good idea to implement both, unless the app already has a selectable root note like Thumbjam.
I've put Jonatan to the task of checking up how and if we can implement Scala in the best way. I'll send him this info as well.
ScaleGen do have a selectable root note already!
I seem to understand now the purpose of the .kbm file. I never need it because I always use 12-tone microtunings.