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 iPads Dropping Next Week?
This seems to be a pretty well-founded rumor.
MacRumors: New iPads Coming March 26
I'm kind of in the market for a replacement for my iPad (2019 iPad Air). I wouldn't mind running Logic, but I'm mostly working on desktop now and am not remotely interested in an iPad Pro. Looking for advice on what will be a good value when these come out.
Comments
Probably M2 iPads will be great value when these new ones ship.
I'm interested to see what will become available. Maybe an iPad Mini 7 with more storage. 🙏
I'm still holding out hope for an M3 iPad Air, but its likely going to have an M2 instead. The new Pro models will have an M3 but it look like they'll be more expensive with the OLED screens.
I have an Air 4 and I don't know of I can rationalize upgrading to an M2 for only a 25% single-core performance boost. The M3 is more like a 50% jump, but will probably be out of my price range. My Air 4 can go pretty far but its not hard to max it out with a lot of synths and fx.
Coming from a Air 3, the upcoming Air 6 or buying a used M2 Pro would be a great buy. The jump from the Air 3 to the later models was pretty huge https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/ipad-air-3rd-generation (see chart somewhat down). Pretty much any iPad that came out after your Air 3 is going to be at least a 50% performance boost.
I’d instabuy a mini7 with an M chip init..👍
I strangely found it much more exhilarating trying to combat the lack of power of my older devices to make music. Now I have an M2 iPad and having so much CPU/Ram headroom makes life so much less thrilling.
Of course there’s always the stability of apps, the more of which one uses, the more likely the whole Jenga tower is to collapse. So, that’s still exciting.
there are refurbished directly from
Still on iPad 7th Gen. Wow, that chart is an eye opener wow 😮
My dream iPad would be an 14” iPad Ultra M3 with 2TB and 32GB RAM - dual USB-C ports and also onboard bluetooth MIDI (like CME WIDI Master).
$3500 would be an reasonable price.
Wait, perhaps the biggest dream would be an handhold 16” iMac Touch M3 that could run both Mac and iPad apps - $4500?
Thanks @qqq for the benchmark!
For audio, I'd focus on single core performance.
Funny that the iPad 9 with headphones port still rates quite well in this regard 😉
My dream would be an iPad expander. A port that could link multiple iPads to make them all work together. Therefore, for music production, or anything, one iPad could be a master daw and others could have apps running on other iPads and they all can run audio / midi / video and data back and forth smoothly via usb or some link, basically making them all work together in harmony. Apple would nail it.
My iPad Pro 10.5 inch from 2017 is very long in the tooth and struggling at this point, particularly with battery. Seriously, its meter is mad - it can drain to 0% quickly and turn off, but then go back on and be up to 48% with no charge in between. Madness. And this is the same thing with 2 separate ones in the house, so it's definitely a design flaw. It passed the Apple Genius Bar battery test a year ago too, which was complete nonsense, so I couldn't get it replaced without paying quite a lot, and I knew I was going to buy a new iPad sooner rather than later.
But anyway, I'm in the market for a new iPad this time around for sure. Can't decide whether to get a new iPad Air or a new Pro yet... I guess it will depend on the specs and price differences between them. An OLED iPad Pro would be incredibly tempting! But that will doubtless be way more money than an Air, and the Air is rumoured to be fixing the camera placement so that it works properly in landscape. But the Pro will have better speakers, which is handy for general music and YouTube watching. And the enhanced storage prices for the Air will be sure to push it into Pro price territory, cos Apple.
Lots of stuff to think about, then! But I can't wait to see the new models! My dream is to have a Drambo template which has Loopy Pro and Koala hosted within it, with no issues. Which definitely isn't the case with my 2017 Pro! But then my portable live setup could be incredible. I'm sure the Air could do this, but Apple upgrades are usually not QUITE enough to make a lower model worth it over a higher one, as there will be some compromise that bites and the money gap won't quite be enough. I experienced this with the MacBook Air versus MacBook Pro - it turned out to be worth it to pay the extra for a 14 inch Pro, just because the needed spec bump to the standard Air made it fly too close to the Pro's price sun!
Of course, my most desired new Apple product is a pair of Airpod Pros designed for music producers with near-zero latency that allows for proper live recording/playing into apps. That would be such a gamechanger for us.
Heh, yah, on my M1 with complex projects I pretty much end up in problem town around the same time now but there is a lot more going on when I get there. So many projects where I thought 'Ok, I'm gonna make a bunch of tracks where I do this, that, the other thing' then it all falls apart with various bugs and I just head back to Maschine, occasionally sampling bits of individual iPad apps one at a time. The M1 is crazy overkill for me.
My 2018 Pro does this just fine, still. You'd be good with any M1 iPad for that.
Unless you are planning on using Logic, or Cubasis, both of which can make use of multicore. In Logic this makes a huge difference, I would go so far as to say it's a gamechangier
This makes total sense. Looking at the multicore stats on that chart may be more relevant than single core. I don't have any knowledge on benchmarking Logic/Cubasis with their use of multiple cores. Do they use all cores or just the more powerful cores? Do the max out at a certain number? I'd be curious to see more info on this if anyone has it.
The prediction of "next week" seems to be off, and now the prognosticators are saying sometime later, but there's a $150 drop in the iPad Air at Best Buy right now.
Which seems to signal something.