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.
Hack Alchemy Pro to play your own midi files.
I spent a good deal of time (much longer than I probably should have) trying to figure out how to import midi files into Alchemy Pro's little song recorder thing. There's not a way to do it directly, but I figured out I could 'trick' the app into loading them anyway. The way to do it is to find the sample songs that they give you, rename your midi files to match the exact names of the sample tracks in the sample songs folder, and replace them in the folder using iFunbox. You can also do this with a song you created and saved. In Alchemy those tricksy midi files can be imported into a new song under the 'track' menu. It only seems to give you 2 bars of the midi file you imported. I haven't figured out how to get it to play the whole midi file if it's longer than 2 bars.
Anyway, after I figured that out I created over 50 custom songs consisting of just bass and drums. I'm sharing them for anyone who's interested. They use the default Alchemy Pro presets. You can tweak them you your liking, add keyboards, produce a record, whatever. I think they're pretty cool.
To load these in Alchemy, unzip them and copy all of the folders using iFunbox to Alchemy\Documents\Projects
You also need to Pro upgrade in order to save the song files.
Comments
Mighty ingenious and generous of you Sir.
never mind
@Coloobar Cool idea, thanks. Before I go ahead though, am I right in thinking that these will permanently overwrite the original files? Especially in Alchemy's current state.
No problems here. Seems to work well....
OK, I figured out how to get the midi files to play more than 2 bars. If you have downloaded the file already, you'll have to download again, and delete the original files from Alchemy if you already transferred them there before copying the new ones.
@SpookyZoo - you won't overwrite any existing files unless you already have your own songs in that folder with the same name.... 1, 2, 3, 4, ... etc. That directory is where user songs are stored. In that case, rename the folders to something else.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p739ln6wcntsz8z/alchemy.rar?dl=0
Oh ok, I was basing my enquiry on your mention of naming the files the same as the included sample tracks. I've obviously missed something.
To get Alchemy Pro to play >2 bars of midi, you have to essentially do what I mentioned above twice. The first time you do it, only two bars will play. Save the song, re-copy the renamed midi files (or different midi files) into the song you just saved, then open it in Alchemy. Now all of the bars of the midi files should play. I haven't tried it with a really long midi file to see what would happen, but I don't think there's any limit on the song length when recording. Also I'm guessing the midi files should be type 0, or only have one track of music. Not sure what would happen if you tried to use a midi file with more than one track in it.
It's not too difficult at all once you've done it a few times, and you can essentially turn Alchemy into a 4-track midi file player using all of the available presets the app has to offer. I think it's a very useful little trick. I just wish the Alchemy Pro base app had a few other drum kits than the dance/techno/hiphop ones.
Or alternatively you can just connect alchemy to a daw of your choice by midi.....
Did I miss something?
Did Alchemy restore purchases and is not circling the drain?
@RustiK I don't think anything has changed with that. The app still works fine though. I just recently reinstalled the app from my IPA backup and was able to restore and download the Pro upgrade, and get the "50 extra free presets". @BiancaNeve True but it would take a lot more work to get 4 tracks going at once. The 4-track player/recorder built into the app is nice for throwing together quick song ideas without any fuss. Plus I can easily do it on the go on my iPhone.
Thank you. For some reason, after attempting to follow these instructions, when I select "Song" / "Open" in Alchemy I only see the files starting at 41, even after deleting and recopying via iFunbox. Any ideas? Thanks again.
@TrustButVerify No idea. I transferred them all from my iPad to my iPhone and opened them all without difficulty. Are you on iOS 8? Not sure why that would matter, but both of my devices are still running 7.1.2.
I am on iOS 8. Very odd. I will try again later. Thanks again for doing this.
Interesting stuff. I was on the FP iPad Musician page asking this exact question. I have a couple of questions:
1. What MIDI channels are assigned to the 4 parts? Typically Ch10 is assigned to drums in a traditional sound module. I'm guessing this is going to be different?
2. Were I to use a DAW such as BiancaNeve suggests, can I control all 4 parts with 4 tracks and what MIDI channel would I use?
You can't control anything, unfortunately. The tracks work like a 4- track tape recorder. Once they are recorded to a track they can only be played back... Not sure if you can even output the recording as midi to another app while it's playing. If you want to control them you would be better off importing the midi files as arps in Zeta+