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.

Video..CTRL running in the effect slot, Cotracks provides the juice....this one worked

Second attempt....this one is fine....

Comments

  • edited March 2014

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  • edited November 2013

    Looks really cool. So with the initial purchase I do get all 20 effects, and 4 slots? And with additional IAPs or unlocking via playing tracks etc I can get more slots. Have I got that right? Or do the effects also need additional unlocking/IAP?

    Edit: Did you get a chance to try what the synths does when used in Audiobus as effect (or whatever), the app info is a bit vague on all that stuff

  • edited November 2013

    Sod it, just went ahead and bought...You ever worked as like a used car salesman or something? :p

    Gonna check out how all this unlocking business works tomorrow .

    Edit: Ok so you get 4-5 effects, and you need to listen to 30-40 tracks to unlock all the effects (whaaat!), and get more slots by doing various missions (like playing two effects at the same time, or doing a slow filter sweep from low to high, or going nuts on the synth and so on). Not sure if buying "slots" gets you more effects/synths. Already unlocked 7 slots, but didn't notice anything different I think.

    Had a few crashes on the iPad Air already. And it doesn't rotate the screen.

    But once all those effects are there I can definitely see this as a good addition to the growing number of multi effect units on iOS.

  • edited November 2013

    @ChrisG you can't play the synths in audiobus and if you use it in IAA in the instrument slot you have to use a song from the supplied track options they've hard wired into the app that have to be downloaded from the internet with the exception of the one CTRL track in the iTunes/iPod section. I've found you need to start CTRL first and you get a lot of restarting the app and lots of instability until you get a stable enough situation to record. If you want to record a track recorded in CTRL, I've been able to play it and record it into GB using IAA.

    I was able to get all 20 effects/synths by playing the app, but it took several hours which I was okay with as it gave me the opportunity test out the capabilities of the app.

    At this point it's most useful for performance as the IAA and AB implementations are very glitchy even on an iPhone 5S. You can't get any track from iTunes or SoundCloud, but you can at least use the effects if you're using another AB app as the input and CTRL as the effect. The synths are what's really nice and expressive to use in my opinion, so until they set it up so you can play them with your own choice of material, the app falls short of it's potential and resembles an Smule app too much.

    Pretty much useless on an iPad 2 in my experience.

  • edited March 2014

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  • Here's a demo of what the synths sound like played at the end of one of the tracks as it's just about faded out.

    I do agree, the playing of the app to unlock effects/synths isn't the best approach for music app users but it seems like they're following the Smule marketing approach and there is always the IAP route.

    The synths remind me a lot of the xy grids in the Korg iMS 20 app.

  • edited November 2013

    Thanks @Paulinko!

    Yea definitely geared more towards a different, or wider rather, audience then just the core iOS musicians. But, once it´s all unlocked, it does seem like a really nice kasspad/turnado multieffect unit.

    I have´nt had the chance to try it anymore yet. But when using it as an effect in Audiobus, is it possible to have it sync to a tempo? All the delays and similar effects needs a BPM to work properly, and I did´nt see any BPM setting last night. Would be a must if one wanna use it as a multieffect in AB or IAA (I was´nt really paying attention to if Cotracks and CTRL was tempo synced in Dougs video?). Using it with complete tracks inside the app i´m guessing it analyzes the audio and sets the bpm, but meeza wants to use it to mess up beats.

    Also, ima put the ipad in the charger and loop some britney spears track for a few hours :)

  • @ChrisG it seems that the track list in the app contains the bpm information so when it downloads a track, it also supplies the app with this info. from it's internal data. At this point I doubt there is any bpm sync going on in AB or IAA but it sure would be nice to specify it even if it doesn't analyze the track for its bpm.

  • edited November 2013

    Yea I just got done unlocking all effects. For the second time. There are issues with the iCloud/GC syncing, so it wiped my effects. So back to another hour or two to unlock it...Also, this app is probably the most unstable thing I've ever tried on an iDevice. iPhone 5 latest iOS, probably 2 max 3 songs before it crashes, the Air got multiple crashes to. Both RAM related, and other crashes due to other bugs. You do not wanna use this app as a performance thing, which is it's intended use. They do use Unity as middleware, but that's not an excuse to release an app in this state. I suggest they temporarily pull it, get it out of early beta stages, and put it back up, before they attract too many 1 stars on the AppStore. Also, the AB implementation is very sketchy (and I'm guessing the IAA as well). I'm done for now with this one, will open it after an update or two since it does show promise, once it is an actual properly working app.

  • Wow, the updated app performs worse than the buggy initial release. Even old recordings that used to work don't. New recordings have the same glitchy CD player about to die audio quality too. Of course this all presupposes you can get through a track without it crashing on you so you can save your recording. I have to agree with @ChrisG that they need to yank this app, get some beta testers and fix this floundering app.

  • Yuli, The primary developer for the app, posted a comment on Discchord in response to the negative comments there and has plans to allow users to import and use the app for their own music including synths. Hopefully he'll be able to eliminate the crashing issues too.

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