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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Does anyone use browser-based music apps? Looking for opinions

I'm writing another article, this one about music web apps.

Panic has released its browser-based game-development tool for the Playdate console. It has a sound-creation tool inside which is pretty great.

http://play.date/pulp

There's a sequencer, with several oscillators for sound (it looks like sine, saw, white noise, and more) and you can also import sounds (although I haven't worked out what kinds of sounds yet).

Signup required, but here's an article on the Verge about it.

Tahti is another recent browser-based sequencer, with p-locks, that’s so good I wish it was an app or VST.

https://tahti.studio/

  • Does anyone here use browser-based instruments?
  • Any recommendations?
  • Any downsides to using them?

I’d love your opinions for my article, which I’m writing tomorrow. I’ll link to it tomorrow evening when it’s published.

Comments

  • edited January 2022

    I can't really recommend anything, but I've worked with the WebAudio API extensively (among others, made a quite elaborate modular synth in it) and can confidently say that it's very exhaustive and the specification has also become pretty stable recently (and even Safari on iOS finally has adopted the "modern" specification a few weeks ago).

    You can technically create an entire, sophisticated DAW with it, including complex synths, audio tracks, pretty much any kind of effects, spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes, LFOs, envelopes, etc... all with sample-accurate timing.

    The main problems are efficiency and scalability. As soon as you have a few hundred nodes in the audio graph, you'll get frequent buffer underruns even at large buffer sizes, and above a thousand nodes or so it's "Game Over" (a thousand nodes is not a lot for a complex DAW project).

    I've mainly tested this on iOS and there, the WebAudio audio thread also doesn't seem to be properly isolated from the main / UI thread -- as soon as anything else goes on on the web page (graphics updates), it's glitch-o-rama. I also suspect it only ever uses a single core.

    But it's a great specification and I expect to see a lot more sophisticated browser-based audio stuff appearing. Maybe some good souls will spend more time optimizing the different implementations of WebAudio to make it usable for larger projects.

  • Only one I’ve ever used is Audiotool.

    https://www.audiotool.com

    I think it requires sign up now. It’s sorta like that Retronyms app… I found for me the biggest problem was no midi control (got it working but holy latency) and the web UI just isn’t as responsive as any native app.

    Those items aside it’s a super cool concept and the implementation is pretty darn slick.

  • I tried using the Web Audio AUv3 app to put some of these browser instruments into AUM, but I got no sound.

    I think the connectivity is a big barrier for these apps right now.

  • Here’s one from Roland. It has a 303 and 808. Pretty fun stuff.

    https://808303.studio/

  • @mistercharlie said:
    I tried using the Web Audio AUv3 app to put some of these browser instruments into AUM, but I got no sound.

    I think the connectivity is a big barrier for these apps right now.

    Yeah seems like those are more made for streaming/sampling from things like public Roman sites, SoundCloud, radio, etc. I think it says in the description a lot of web based daws won’t work unfortunately.

  • @HotStrange said:

    @mistercharlie said:
    I tried using the Web Audio AUv3 app to put some of these browser instruments into AUM, but I got no sound.

    I think the connectivity is a big barrier for these apps right now.

    Yeah seems like those are more made for streaming/sampling from things like public domain sites, SoundCloud, radio, etc. I think it says in the description a lot of web based daws won’t work unfortunately.

  • I thought I would revive this thread. I would add Bongo Cat to the list.

    Bongo Cat

  • https://www.onemotion.com/chord-player/

    The best chord tool ever, it has midi out

  • @cokomairena said:
    https://www.onemotion.com/chord-player/

    The best chord tool ever, it has midi out

    This is great! There’s a drum machine too.

  • @cokomairena said:
    https://www.onemotion.com/chord-player/

    The best chord tool ever, it has midi out

    OMG, what a fun tool. I think I won’t buy Scaler 2 since I got this now ;)

  • edited June 2022

    @krassmann said:

    @cokomairena said:
    https://www.onemotion.com/chord-player/

    The best chord tool ever, it has midi out

    OMG, what a fun tool. I think I won’t buy Scaler 2 since I got this now ;)

    I prefer it over scaler on PC

    I have an spanish tutorial here:

    you can put automatic subtitles, it's a very deep tool

    at 5:46 I explain how to change the octave where the chords are played, that's the best part of this tool I haven't another with that option.

  • @cokomairena @krassmann Scaler is more powerful for sure, but this is much easier to use. I really like it.

  • @mistercharlie said:
    @cokomairena @krassmann Scaler is more powerful for sure, but this is much easier to use. I really like it.

    I agree in that scaler is more complicated lol, Also I can't believe is more than a gigabyte on iOS, I don't trust software that big, maybe I'm missing what scaler is capable of

  • @cokomairena said:

    I agree in that scaler is more complicated lol, Also I can't believe is more than a gigabyte on iOS, I don't trust software that big, maybe I'm missing what scaler is capable of

    Probably that’s mostly samples for sound playback.

  • @cokomairena said:

    @mistercharlie said:
    @cokomairena @krassmann Scaler is more powerful for sure, but this is much easier to use. I really like it.

    I agree in that scaler is more complicated lol, Also I can't believe is more than a gigabyte on iOS, I don't trust software that big, maybe I'm missing what scaler is capable of

    It can detect your playing and suggest chords based upon midi input, You can select scales, genre styles, or artists presets. In addition to playing the chords, there are several sequencing algorithms (arp, bass, melody, strumming, phrases, sequences, strummed sequences) as well as algorithms to humanize (timing, velocity, quantize, and swing). There’s a chord sequencer and a Circle of Fifths for learning and further chord suggestions. In addition, there’s a pad sequencer and a dedicated tab for Modal Interchange, Inversions, and mediants. I’m pretty sure it does more than that as well.

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