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.

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

Need midi control over tempo

When playing live I often have to make on-the-spot tempo changes. I play music for a dance group, and most of that is during rehearsal. A frequent instruction from the teacher is "ok, let's repeat that, this time a little faster/slower please".

If I'm not playing with a backing loop, no problem. But I like my loops, so I'd love to be able to quickly change playback speed without having to adjust tempo via the iPad's screen. (And some metronome controls are downright annoying, either with hard to control jumps, or slow scrolling.)

So, I'd need a midi control, ideally using a foot pedal. But twisting a knob would work too.

What playback apps would allow me to do this? AUM doesn't seem to have this, and if Launchpad (my current loop playback app) does I have not yet discovered how.

Comments

  • I know audiostretch and audiostretch lite have playback speed features. There’s others too. Blocs Wav does it I believe. Not sure if these are the best solutions but they all have that feature, sEGments does time stretching and pitch stretching, koala does time stretching. Maybe someone else has a better suggestion.

  • Gauss let’s you adjust the play speed of any loop inside it.

  • @MarkR said:
    When playing live I often have to make on-the-spot tempo changes. I play music for a dance group, and most of that is during rehearsal. A frequent instruction from the teacher is "ok, let's repeat that, this time a little faster/slower please".

    If I'm not playing with a backing loop, no problem. But I like my loops, so I'd love to be able to quickly change playback speed without having to adjust tempo via the iPad's screen. (And some metronome controls are downright annoying, either with hard to control jumps, or slow scrolling.)

    So, I'd need a midi control, ideally using a foot pedal. But twisting a knob would work too.

    What playback apps would allow me to do this? AUM doesn't seem to have this, and if Launchpad (my current loop playback app) does I have not yet discovered how.

    Midi loops or audio loops, or both?

    Loopy pro for sure for audio loops. It will take care of all time stretching on the fly. Can be used for midi as well with add in apps like Atom2, LK, or Helium.

  • @wim said:

    @MarkR said:
    When playing live I often have to make on-the-spot tempo changes. I play music for a dance group, and most of that is during rehearsal. A frequent instruction from the teacher is "ok, let's repeat that, this time a little faster/slower please".

    If I'm not playing with a backing loop, no problem. But I like my loops, so I'd love to be able to quickly change playback speed without having to adjust tempo via the iPad's screen. (And some metronome controls are downright annoying, either with hard to control jumps, or slow scrolling.)

    So, I'd need a midi control, ideally using a foot pedal. But twisting a knob would work too.

    What playback apps would allow me to do this? AUM doesn't seem to have this, and if Launchpad (my current loop playback app) does I have not yet discovered how.

    Midi loops or audio loops, or both?

    Loopy pro for sure for audio loops. It will take care of all time stretching on the fly. Can be used for midi as well with add in apps like Atom2, LK, or Helium.

    Ok thanks. I'm using mainly audio loops, and I got Loopy Pro a week or so ago and have not yet spent time with it.

  • I’m convinced that can be a good solution. You can make each song a separate project, and can even smoothly transition between them. Large tempo changes will degrade the quality a bit, but normal changes such as you mention should be fine.

  • AUM 1.4.0 will have improved MIDI control over tempo.

    There's no timestretch in the built in FilePlayer though, so it will change pitch as well, but there are other plugins that can be used for loop playback.

  • @j_liljedahl said:
    AUM 1.4.0 will have improved MIDI control over tempo.

    There's no timestretch in the built in FilePlayer though, so it will change pitch as well, but there are other plugins that can be used for loop playback.

    I thought so, but wasn’t sure. Can’t wait for this update!

  • wimwim
    edited May 2022

    With Link enabled in Loopy Pro AU, you can control the tempo of the Loopy Pro instance and it will change the tempo of AUM. This is a good way to sync AUM to to variable audio loop tempo via MIDI.

    A favorite starting point for me in an AUM session is to let Loopy Pro detect the tempo of my first riff, which gets AUM off and running in sync with no need on my part to set the tempo at all. I use that when I want to work in AUM for most of the session rather than working mainly in Loopy.

  • @wim said:
    With Link enabled in Loopy Pro AU, you can control the tempo of the Loopy Pro instance and it will change the tempo of AUM. This is a good way to sync AUM to to variable audio loop tempo via MIDI.

    A favorite starting point for me in an AUM session is to let Loopy Pro detect the tempo of my first riff, which gets AUM off and running in sync with no need on my part to set the tempo at all. I use that when I want to work in AUM for most of the session rather than working mainly in Loopy.

    Ok, very cool, thanks for that!

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