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.
Comments
Are you spying on me? 🧐
I had to get the idea somewhere! And it is so much fun I do it myself as well!
I've had rtpmidi connection working between my Raspberry Pi and iPad. Both were connected to a home router in the same room via wifi. There was some latency playing the keyboard on the iPad, I'm sure, but at the time I thought it was probably less latency that I'd get with bluetooth. You can see video of it here, with me briefly playing the keyboard at around 2:57 in, sound is coming from Pianoteq VST on Raspberry Pi feeding output to my stereo amp. Warning: My video skills are really bad.
I think there are a couple different "USB wireless Midi" systems out there that have much lower latency than bluetooth, and also maybe more reliable connections. But they're more expensive, too. Here's one of them, $450 for the system (receiver and transmitter):
https://www.patchmanmusic.com/MidiJetPro.html
I’ve never felt like latency is an issue with Bluetooth midi. It can’t handle MPE mode from my Sensel Morph, but for normal stuff it’s fine.
Bluetooth MIDI (not audio which is a whole different thing) has very low latency.
I can confirm the experiences of @wim and @espiegel123, BT audio and BT MIDI latencies are like night and day.
Bluetooth midi is much more reliable than rtpmidi, tried for years to get latter to work and the latency is intolerable.
[Deleted post regarding test that I thought showed bluetooth midi lag, but which actually only showed bluetooth audio lag.]
There is indeed something really bad wrong there. I don't know what, but that definitely isn't normal BT Midi lag in any way.
Thanks! You're right. I'm an idiot. I was actually illustrating bluetooth audio lag. I somehow didn't realize that I was listening to the iPad from a bluetooth audio speaker (in addition to driving ipad synth via bluetooth midi) so the lag I was hearing was the audio lag. I tried this once before, the same way, a long time ago, and I've avoided bluetooth ever since because of that mistaken test. Actual latency is quite good; I can only barely detect the difference between the FP-10's built in sound and the sound on the iPad, listening with a headphone speaker from FP-10 in left ear and headphone speaker from iPad in right ear. Good to know!
Updates firmware of the Yamaha midi Bluetooth dongle:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/md-bt01-ud-bt01-utility/id1063901794
Midi connection problem solver:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/midimittr/id925495245
I think it is quite good. I was pleasantly surprised by latency of my nanokey studio but I still find it quite bad for percussive stuff.