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.

AUM recording trouble

(I posted this question on the AUM forum a few days ago but so far nobody's replied...)

"Recording stopped unexpectedly. Error code -1"

I get the above error message fairly often when recording in AUM (preceded by the affected channel number, which is usually several or possibly all of them, each getting its own error message). I've tried, not very systematically and in any case without success, to work out if some particular apps or processes (other than recording, obviously) cause the error. The only thing I've noticed is that it seems to happen mostly when I adjust parameters in one or more apps while recording.

I'm running AUM on an iPad Air 2, latest iOS .... well, I haven't actually updated to the latest, but this error message has been appearing for quite a while, and usually I update to the latest iOS within a couple of weeks.

Any insights and, better yet, a solution would be much appreciated, thanks!

Comments

  • Most probably the device can't keep up with CPU demand + disk I/O. (Unless you actually don't have enough free storage).

    Try recording fewer channels (you can use Mix busses to mix several together), lower the sample rate (unless already at 44.1k), and increasing the buffer size.

  • I have about 10GB of available storage (if that's the kind of storage you mean). I have to admit I have no idea what "disk I/O" is - is there a way I could find out if that is the issue?
    Recording fewer channels isn't a great option for me - I typically record 3 to 5 individual channels plus one mix bus channel, and I like to have the separate channel recordings for what I imagine are the typical reasons.
    I'll try the buffer-size thing to start with.

    Thanks a lot for the input!

  • Oh PS, yes, the sample rate is already at 44.1k. And I just checked and the buffer size is already at maximum (1024 frames, whatever frames are).

  • Disk I/O means storage read/write activity. The flash memory that stores all your content in your device can only read or write a single thing at a time, so the system actually switches very fast between all the read/write tasks that are currently going on. In some cases the device can't keep up, because it has too much to do. Perhaps some other app is using the disk a lot as well? Also try rebooting your iPad.

  • @j_liljedahl said:
    Disk I/O means storage read/write activity. The flash memory that stores all your content in your device can only read or write a single thing at a time, so the system actually switches very fast between all the read/write tasks that are currently going on. In some cases the device can't keep up, because it has too much to do. Perhaps some other app is using the disk a lot as well? Also try rebooting your iPad.

    That is some crazy wizardry you have pulled off with multi-recording then. :)
    This has brought up a question for me. Would using a lot of disk-based samples and file players simultaneously adversely affect the recording of multiple tracks simultaneously? Or do the samples and audio files typically get loaded into memory and read from there?

  • @CracklePot said:

    @j_liljedahl said:
    Disk I/O means storage read/write activity. The flash memory that stores all your content in your device can only read or write a single thing at a time, so the system actually switches very fast between all the read/write tasks that are currently going on. In some cases the device can't keep up, because it has too much to do. Perhaps some other app is using the disk a lot as well? Also try rebooting your iPad.

    That is some crazy wizardry you have pulled off with multi-recording then. :)

    Not me :) It's the operating system that does the wizardry, buffering stuff and switching quickly between multiple disk read/write tasks.

    This has brought up a question for me. Would using a lot of disk-based samples and file players simultaneously adversely affect the recording of multiple tracks simultaneously? Or do the samples and audio files typically get loaded into memory and read from there?

    That depends on the implementation of the players. If they are streaming from disk (like the FilePlayer nodes in AUM) then yes, they could very well have negative impact on multitrack recording performance. There's also some sample players that can read large sampled sound libraries from disk, without loading them into memory, and the same would go for them.

  • I had the same problem on an iPad pro. Was recording two streams, got that error and loosed one stream completely.

    It is not storage, I have 30GB free
    It is not CPU, I did the same recording scenario several times without any problem. Also I closed all other apps before.

    I was monitoring the recording and was at the very end (almost two hours) when I got the error... and I lost the whole stream.

    I think that AUM should manage this errors in a better way, like recovering at least what was recorded till the error popped up.

Sign In or Register to comment.