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.

Audio-to-Midi News?

I researched the forum about apps that convert polyphonic audio to midi in real time and only found topics from 3 to 4 years ago. Has there been any novelty since then on this subject?? That is sad :'(

Comments

  • Audio to midi conversion is problematic and some lag will be necessary, especially for low notes, and polyphony is nearly impossible to get working properly and reliable. That is not because of people not developing on it, its an inherit problem with doing such a thing.

    Audio to midi works by measuring how long the waveform is, lower notes are longer waves as you might know. You can measure just one cycle to determine the note properly, but you need to measure few to make sure that the cycle was not an overtone or some other irrelevant sound that wasnt the actual notes waveform. Now when you play multiple strings at the same time, the app shouild be able to differentiate between different notes and all the overtones and decide which notes you just played. This isnt something that can be with 100% accuracy at all, let alone in real time, especially when low notes require a lot longer measurement than higher notes.

    Audio to midi is simply not a reliable thing to do in the first place, but it is the only way to do that without special pickups and such. Even hardware midi mics have some inherit latency on them, and that technology is suited to midi conversion 1000 time better than audio to midi.

    So, you shouldnt even waste your time by hoping a reliable audio to midi app without latency and just get a midi guitar or something like that, and dont expect it to be 100% accurate and without latency either. There are some really expensive midi instruments, like a bass that has a sensor under every fret and the frets are separated to each string. But i bet the price is in the thousands.

  • Hi @ToMess
    yes, I had a Roland Gr55 and sold it shortly. I'm trying something slower with music apps. Thanks for the feedback.

  • Have you tried this?

    https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/midi-guitar/id523095780?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo=4

    I tried the free demo and was impressed. It is definately better than I expected, and better than others I previously tried.

  • Perhaps not helpful here, but I just found out last night that Infinite Looper has mic to midi features.

  • @Martygras said:
    Perhaps not helpful here, but I just found out last night that Infinite Looper has mic to midi features.

    Nice. But is polyphonic? works well?

  • I have bought midi guitar 2 a few days ago,and i must say i' m really disappointed.
    Too much lag! Just unplayable( for me,anyway).

  • Even Live's is pretty horrible, but I don't rely on it. I use it's quirk's to my advantage by extracting unexpected rhythms and melodies out of samples.

  • edited October 2017

    I think MidiGuitar 2 is pretty usable on guitar. Not on bass unfortunately, though. It cuts off any note below the guitars low E or D. But for some pad sounds or anything that doesn't have to be very quick it can be okay. There is latency, of course, but it's not that bad IMHO.

  • @flo26 said:
    I have bought midi guitar 2 a few days ago,and i must say i' m really disappointed.
    Too much lag! Just unplayable( for me,anyway).

    I think it really depends on what you are playing. Fast and staccato does not translate well at all.

  • I've got audio-to-MIDI in Infinite Looper, and will switch it to polyphonic at some point. The code is a subset of what I have in MIDImorphosis; that may get a refresh at some point too.

    Audio-to-MIDI is non-trivial; fast Fourier transform, and then all sorts of weirdness to deal with harmonics and pick noise. Plus, not everyone tunes their guitar, and bending strings is what makes a guitar fun to play. MIDI is not an ideal match.

    That said -- check out Jam Synth -- free, and a great deal of fun.
    https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jam-synth/id732618765?mt=8

    I use the audio-to-MIDI in my apps when I'm just goofing around, but when I'm serious, I switch on my Fishman TriplePlay -- very happy with the tracking and latency on that (but I'm not a speed demon -- I don't know any MIDI solution that would make Yngwie Malmsteen happy).

  • I think Melodyne has this down to such a fine art that nobody is going to try to take them on. They have been busy with this task for decades! If it was easy to properly implement we would see it in most DAW software already.

    It's a bit like Izotopes RX being the industry standard at audio repair after years and years of focused R&D and I can't see the landscape changing anytime soon

  • @SecretBaseDesign said:
    I've got audio-to-MIDI in Infinite Looper, and will switch it to polyphonic at some point. The code is a subset of what I have in MIDImorphosis; that may get a refresh at some point too.

    Audio-to-MIDI is non-trivial; fast Fourier transform, and then all sorts of weirdness to deal with harmonics and pick noise. Plus, not everyone tunes their guitar, and bending strings is what makes a guitar fun to play. MIDI is not an ideal match.

    Hello SecretBaseDesign, I'm taking this opportunity to thank you for your work with MIDImorphosis. I'm using it to much profit and fun in a non-conventional hybrid software and analog hardware setting with feedback and a lot of happy accidents and sudden genius out of automatic self-playing, picking up harmonics from filter resonances as notes and such stuff. I would call it a central piece of my setup. Sometimes it is just perfect as a musical alien machine intelligence. So, whatever you are about improve in the algorithm, could you possibly add a switch with a 'legacy' setting? I wouldn't dare to update otherwise. (will link some example later).

  • edited October 2017

    The analog synth is the semi-modular M.F.B. Microzwerg, some gated long delay applied.
    No sequencer or arpeggiator used, all note triggering is coming from the app.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7h7ozjp7s7o07y/170526_0829a-self playing MIDImorphosis.m4a?dl=0

  • edited June 2019

    Not sure how good this is but it is on Windows

    https://www.digital-ear.com

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