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.
JACK Comes To iOS!!!
JACK Audio Connection Kit by Christian Schoenebeck d/b/a Crudebyte
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jack-audio-connection-kit/id615485734?mt=8
What a day this has been!!! So much iOS goodness!!!
More info here: http://www.crudebyte.com/jack-ios/
Comments
@mocomain Think it through for a bit...
Now, why is this a good thing, given that we can't connect Jack to Audiobus?
.
Well, jack is open source, Audiobus sdk is released, and AAEngine is out...
So,with all that is available hopefully some people smarter than me will "think it through a bit" and make it a very good thing.
For example:
What if jack's output could be made an audiobus input???
@hmtx Then it would improve the situation, obviously. But until they do... Imagine your favourite DAW in Audiobus and your favourite synth app in Jack. From now on, developers have a choice of which system to support. They won't all support both.
Yes, good point. Off I go to find Jack and give him the link to the audiobus SDK.
Hardly the place to discuss it, as it looks like a direct competitor for audiobus..
That being said, I've been messing with their midi wrench, which is very cool.. (take a look at the wierd clock signal dm1 sends).
and it looks like they are using the familiar ms instead of frames to choose latency, and offering a choice of sample rate?!? Either too good to be true, or its gonna be a big clusterf***...
Huh, jack does midi too. Interesting.
I would think that any standard or protocol that allows musicians to make music more efficiently and creatively, is a good thing...and as such, would be of interest to most readers of this particular forum. Am I somehow mistaken in this assumption?
You might want to think about your timing with AB SDK going public today. Sort of like someone else blowing out your birthday cake candles.
Seriously??? This news about JACK was posted today on Palm Sounds & Synthtopia! I can't believe how small-minded some of you seem to be about this issue! I'm a bit astonished actually!
You asked the question, just gave you an honest answer.
Thanks for posting Mocomain. i appreciate it and used jack for a long time on Ubuntu linux. I am a huge fan of audiobus and actually check this forum and their facebook everyday to search for new cool apps to buy. i dont do that for any other site. I've bought almost every app thats ab compatible (some brilliant, some blah). and was one of many ppl who was aggressive in posting on beatmaker's forum to please support audiobus asap despite them (in my opinion at the time) not seeing ab as a priority. I love audiobus. But the moment ppl on this forum stop posting freely topics that ultimately support creativity, Ill just stop coming here. I dont think this is what the audiobus devs want. I will say though that its interesting why the jack dev released their app on the same day. Whatever, im not on the jack forum, im on ab forum and still happily telling every musician i know with an iphone to buy audiobus app
?? Small-minded? That seems funny that you say that @mocomain. You started a thread about a potential AB competitor on an AB forum with boatloads of AB users and supporters...what kind of response did you expect? I'm all for competition, but I think you calling us small-minded here is probably just the booze talking...or, at least I hope that's the explanation.
People really need to evolve beyond the worldview that everyone and everything is in some kind of competition, a winner-takes-all mindset. I have no use for fanboys of any persuasion, be it Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Audiobus...whatever! Of all the forums I've frequented throughout the years, I really thought this particular one could be different. Guess I was wrong...oh well!
I don't see the advantage. Audiobus and virtual midi seem to be working pretty well and provide all the connectivity I need. I just hope more developers continue to adopt them rather than get distracted with some secondary standard. If multiple midi protocols had evolved it wouldn't have been great for developers or end users.
@mocomain - seems like I was wrong too. I don't think it is the booze talking.
Maybe I had too much coffee today...no booze yet...but the night is still young!!!
That's the spirit! Although its already late here, or I'm old...or both. I wish Crudebyte the best of luck, but I hope they've got a niche market outside AudioBus. I'm with you on disliking fanboys, but I have my preferences, as do most people, and I understand that preferences are based on personal expectations. Most fanboys don't seem to get that part. But all that aside, I want to see the AB team excel for no other reason than they have a great product and provide fantastic support through this forum.
I've successfully used JACK on the desktop and definitely see its usefulness and potential in iOS...but it's the release of the Amazing Audio Engine and the Audiobus SDK that has me really excited...and actually taking tangible steps to develop iOS programming skills! I am really stoked about this!
This doesn't look anywhere near as straightforward as Audiobus, but I'm sure there's a market for JACK on iOS. Crudebyte will have to convince app devs to add support for it, though, and that might be difficult, considering Audiobus has been out for less than 4 months and it's basically already the standard for chaining music apps together.
@mocomain is it me you're calling small minded?
Lets hope increased competition leads to increased innovation.
So...
1) JACK is an Audiobus competitor
2) If I were Sebastian+Michael I would lose zero seconds of sleep over this
To elaborate:
1) Yes, definitely an AB competitor, no doubts about it. The app description clearly tries to call out things JACK can do that AB can't (yet), like MIDI, freeform routing, inter-app sync and data sharing, "open standard", 2ms latency (128 sample buffers), CPU usage view, etc. Oh yeah and it's free. Boom
2) I downloaded the app. You get what you pay for. The experience sucks. The first screen, I had no idea what to do. There currently seems to be no compatible apps. Their flexible-routing philosophy seems to be very wild-west which may appeal to some of the geekier folks around here but far from ready for the average music app user.
Note: AB app devs don't have an exclusivity contract with AB. I wouldn't hesitate to support JACK (in addition to AB) if I felt that guitarism would benefit from it. Given what I've seen though, I'm not even going to bother downloading their SDK to try to verify their "one hour integration" claim. This thing needs to go a long, long, long way to catch up with Audiobus. It's a shame really, I was hoping to see some actual competition.
TAAE though - that's a game-changer. If I'd had that thing 2 years ago I wouldn't have had to hack my own audio engine.
Unfortunately vhs & betamax springs to mind (for those old enough to remember)
@mocomain, @PaulB: Please, gentlemen, this is not the place for drama.
I don't think competition applies here.
The relative prices are irrelevant to the developers thinking of implementing support.
The feature sets may be relevant to both the developers and the end users, but will have no impact on the prices of the apps that support these systems.
What applies here is segregation.
Regardless of reasons for doing so, some devs will implement support for Jack, some for Audiobus. Not many will do both. Those that do both will spend more time implementing and supporting than they would have done otherwise, which takes resources away from new development.
We will then have two sets of music apps that can't easily be combined, unless someone can come up with a way to patch the two systems together, an iPatch or Bus Pass app maybe. Lol.
Additionally, although Jack has MIDI support, I think it's Jack app MIDI only, other Virtual MIDI ports don't show up, so ironically, in not supporting MIDI, Audiobus is more flexible at the moment.
Just so we're clear, if anyone does come up with an interconnect that works between Jack and Audiobus, then I will be the first to dance in the streets. CMP Piano is a beautiful, beautiful piano app and I'd love to have its audio output feed into my DAWs.
No drama, Sebastian. I'm just not sure who he was referring to.
@PaulB Relative prices are hugely important to developers. As a developer I want to throw my weight behind the platform that I think will get the widest adoption. A free app tends to get 10-100x the adoption of an equivalent $1 app, much less a $10 paid app. So if JACK were, at Free, even close to AB in terms of quality, that price point alone would make me stop everything else and work on integrating it into guitarism right this very minute.
IMO unless this thing magically gets huge user adoption (not holding my breath), a handful of curious devs will support it and a handful of technically-minded and curious users will tinker around with it, but everyone will support Audiobus.
@jsb This is not VHS vs Betamax. This is MP3 vs Sony ATRAC. This is Mike Tyson (ha!) vs a rubber chicken.
That said, if their claim of "1 hour integration" is true, it'd probably be pretty trivial to create a connector app between the two systems. Some iOS devs might already be hacking together something like this right now.
I know I would be, if I had an apple machine and a dev account. :P
Mike Tyson vs a rubber chicken.
LOL
I actually don't believe adoption of apps like Audiobus by consumers is dependant on price, not at these price levels. It's dependant on which apps support it, specifically Killer apps. In that sense, they are more like operating systems, so if you wanted the desktop publishing apps you got an Apple, if you wanted over bloated spreadsheets you got Windows, etc.
Ok, I took a look at Jack because it was free, but if I was after that Jack supporting killer tambourine app, then I'd have paid any reasonable price, provided there was somewhere for the audio to go.