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.
Cubasis - really?
I want to say first up - I like using Cubasis. There I’ve said it.
OK, so does anybody know how to automate AUv3s that are inserted on a track? Is this even possible as I can’t seem to find a way to do it?
Secondly, how do I change the project sample rate from 48 to 44.1 on an M2 Pro? It doesn’t seem to let me do this. Saying something about the sample rate being locked to the hardware sample rate…really? WTF Steinberg? I seem to be able to run it on lower sample rates in other programmes (I’m not going to start naming ‘em for fear of starting a flame war or something).
Anyway, if anybody knows the answer to these questions I am keen to learn more.
Thank you heaps in advance.
Comments
Automation recording for AUv3 effects work when you enable W in the plug-in window and tweak the plug-in UI.
Currently the only way to switch sample-rate in Cubasis is to connect an external audio-interface.
I guess they chose to lock to hardware sample-rate to avoid re-sampling the entire project on the fly to hardware sample-rate and save some CPU cycles.
Thanks for the info. It doesn’t appear to record turning the insert on and off….which is what I was attempting to do. Oh well, I ended up duplicating the track and did some editing to the waveforms.
Thank you to the wonderful Audioshare for the sample rate conversion capability. That is one app I’m glad I purchased so long ago.
I don’t think the sample rate issue is just Cubasis. I think it’s an iPad thing. When using the iPad speakers, the sample rate defaults to 48, if I’m not mistaken.
I think this is the case - AUM won’t switch from 48 on my M2 unless I have my interface plugged in. Same on my iPhone SE 2020.
I have a vague recollection of people saying turning Siri off changes this, but I haven’t tried it, and it might be spurious.
From my small testing Siri has no effect on enabling or disabling ability to change from 48k to something else.
What is quite interesting is that any app can work at 44.1k on '48k hardware locked' devices if they go thru CoreAudio which will re-sample anything to the actual hardware sample-rate during playback.
CoreAudio only re-samples if it can't switch the hardware sample-rate to match the playback rate!
GarageBand and iMPCPro 2 as examples always work at 44.1k and even the MiniSampler in Cubasis 3 samples at 44.1k even on a 48k sample-rate locked device!
LogicPro for iPad can independently set the project sample-rate to anything and re-samples to hardware sample-rate during playback.
I'd say as long as it sounds good I personally don't really care if it's 44.1k or 48k
What sample rate audio software uses internally has nothing to do with how it OUTPUTS its sound. Any software on any operating system with any audio hardware can use any sample rate it wants. I'm not sure why Steinberg would say it somehow depends on the audio interface.
Maybe, but all they'd need to do is resample the final output buffer for each hardware audio channel they want to output. On nowadays' hardware that's essentially free... maybe 1% additional CPU usage for 2 channels. That would be made up for by at least an order of magnitude by the cycles saved due to doing EVERYTHING ELSE (all instruments, all FX, etc.) at 44.1 vs 48 kHz.
Or am I completely dense now?
In the early days of AUv3 there was an issue with many plug-ins being optimized for fixed sample-rate (44.1k) and these sounded 'out of tune' when played back at say 48k or even 96k with an interface connected.
For example ZenBeats offers an option to re-sample 44.1 to keep the older plug-ins in tune on devices with 48k hardware locked sample-rate (yes, that is a thing on the iPhones and iPads, maybe some silly optimization thing to avoid resampling when playing back video, but that would not explain why the built-in camera records video audio at 44.1k on ALL devices?!).
Nowadays most AUv3 plug-ins work quite well with the sample-rate the host provides to them like it should be.
In the Case of Cubasis this becomes an issue when switching the playback interface (USB Audio-Interface at 44.1k to built-in speakers at locked 48k and back) it triggers Cubasis to re-sample all audio-content to the new sample-rate instead of doing on-the-fly sample-rate conversion during playback...
In general playback and mixing 48 works well. Sometimes you need to convert the files to different formats and sample rates and Cubasis is actually really capable when it comes to exporting into different formats. So, if I use Cubasis for what it’s good for and then use Audioshare to do the sample rate converting when I need it I am a happy camper.
Yes, I noticed that BM3 is the same with it’s sample rate locking to the system so I guess it is a general thing across the board. Now that I am clear with that I am OK with the set up.
Thanks @Samu for your quick response and clear explanations - it’s appreciated.
I'm of the same mindset. As far as I go personally, I usually render my unmastered audio at 48kHz, 32-bit. When I master it, I can render it to any format I decide (which is still usually 48kHz, 32-bit, lol). The reason I render at a higher quality is the audio can be downsampled to any format. My clients who pay me for beats and/or remixes appreciate that I send them a higher-quality audio file. They can then convert it to whatever format and sample rate and bit rate they so choose.
("Upsampling" may convert a rubbish low-quality audio file to a higher-quality format, but it doesn't improve the quality at all. It'll still sound rubbish, just at a higher sample and bit rate, lol.)
"Optimized" is a big sign of good-will there 😄 I'd call it a bug as they just wrongly assumed that any host would always use 44.1k, which is a bit of a stretch 😉 But yeah, early adopter days...
About the "lockedness", I think this might have a simple explanation: The D/A converters are probably just cheaper on the newer devices and simply don't support any other sample rate than 48k. i.e., it's a hardware limitation, not a deliberate choice by Apple. (Wild guess though).
About recording at 44.1k -- maybe the A/D supports multiple sample rates!
My guess is that CoreAudio does on-the-fly resampling from the hardware sample-rate to the sample-rate requested by the app when the hardware doesn't support the sample-rate the app requests. Same for playback, if the project uses 96k sample-rate and the playback device doesn't support it it will automatically be down-sampled during playback.
As long as it sounds okish I don't really care...
...but when the app does constant destructive re-sampling of the audio files when changing sample-rates I start to go a a bit like "Fck this pice go sht software".
Regarding Automation in Cubasis.... Are there Cubasis experts out here who can confirm for me that Cubasis doesn't always send automation data on time? For example, in the attached pic, I don't receive this automation data on the first beat until a little bit after the beat occurs, when the data is actually already ramping away from the start point. I realize this is an "in the weeds" question, since I'm a developer and working on compatibility. As far as I can tell, I'm doing everything correctly to receive the data on time, on the audio thread.
Please make sure to contact @LFS over at Steinberg to make him aware of it...
...one 'work around' is to start the project at bar 2 instead of bar 1, oh the wonders of having to 'normalize' bad app behavior.
Even more strange is that Logic (iPad) doesn't even send automation on the audio thread ;( Mostly it's a bummer cause I know that I'm going to be the one fielding support requests.
Ahhhhhh the joys of AUv3 and dealing with murky specifications / documentation and a million different resulting implementations 🤣 I totally get why some developers choose to create "in the box" DAWs without plug-in support 😁
(shoot me now)
Sorry to hear that Ben , that’s very weird….ive come to learn that samu knows a LOT about Cubasis and I’m sure Lars will get into fixing this
Yeah, I will def send the info along to them... I just wanted to do a sanity check with some people who've used Cubasis a lot before I send in a bug report.
I've had zero issues doing AUv3 automation in LogicPro for iPad for a plethora of AUv3 only 'automation recording' can sometimes fail when plug-ins don't send parameter release events when tweaking the knobs.
I never bought Patterning 3 and stupid me never signed up for the beta on it either (was too busy testing other apps).
Are you trying do automation a regular AUv3 Instrument instance?