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
Bitwig seems to be the best touchscreen experience on Windows tablets.
I agree with you, less is more!! I don’t like to learn new workflows too, except for apeMatrix recently which really leads to create another way. Tried Bitwig too but I’m so used to Ableton, it hasn’t clicked for me.
Good post.
I don't know if you folks have any real experience with Windows tablet and music production, but my experience is very bad. I have originally bought Windows 10 tablet for music production before the iPad. I was experienced Windows user, I kinda liked it and were doing music production for years in FLstudio, Reason, Ableton,... Started to play around with Bitwig studio recently. Bitwig studio promised great touch experience, so I wanted to try it out. Well, they really did an awesome job with the touch interface (and some great ideas that I would love to see finding their way to iOS apps) but unfortunately, Windows is simply an inferior platform for touch devices.
Fist thing is that the touch response is just not as "snappy" and fluent as on the iPad. The animations are often stuttered, the response is laggy and you don't feel like you're touching the application interface, but more like you're "drawing" gestures by your fingers on the glass and hoping that the display of the device will reflect it correctly... It's hard to explain but once you use it, you will realise how much better iOS is in this manner. Even simple tap on a button often needs several tries to be successful. It's pretty frustrating and annoying. Originally I thought it has something to do with my device (it was some i5 with 2gb ram, nothing fancy but without any app running there shouldn't be such serious performance problems). Then I have tried surface pro and it's more or less the same. Still stuttering and lagging, only on higher FPS
I could continue with virtual keyboard not popping up if you focus on text field (sometimes it's impossible to invoke the keyboard so without hardware one you're pretty screwed) or fullscreen mode being more problematic than useful (e.g. sometimes in fullscreen you can't invoke task bar, which is quite vital for windows to work). But the web is full of rants on windows tablets (and also on surface specifically), you can find hundreds of similar problems everywhere...
The other thing is the fact, that most of other apps are not adjusted to touch control and often very simple tasks like adjusting a value of a knob is impossible. So forget about using your collection of fancy VST plugins, you'll be lucky finding one that's controllable by touch without problems.
Over the time I have realised that there was not a single session I haven't dealt with some windows-related problems instead of working on music. Updates required nearly every week, sometimes taking an HOUR to update. And after one update my tablet ended up in a boot loop (quite common problem, just google "microsoft surface boot loop"). Then weird problems when the battery got completely drained in few hours, even if no application was running and the tablet was turned off (again quite common problem with windows tablets).
In the end, I have spent more time solving or investigating problems connected to the tool (tablet and OS), than using it for what I want. When I finally decided to buy an iPad and wanted to do a factory reset on the windows tablet to sell it (using standard built-in function), it ended up in boot loop again Fortunately I already knew how to create recovery USB drive and recover the system...
It was a true relieve to jump into iOS music production world. It's limited, it's immature, but it's FUN. And I am spending time doing something creative, instead of working as a tech support. I've got enough of solving problems in my daily job as a developer...
Just my advice: if you want to jump into windows touch devices world - really try it first before buying the device if you can. And expect rather the bad than the good.
I wish I could say that. I'm about to buy a MacBook pro for the first time ever and it's a bummer having to buy something that's less good than my current computer spec wise. I have an Asus that is almost great but routinely crashes when I try to use asio drivers. I've tried everything but the problem persists.
I would try to solve the Asio / audio interface issue than buying less powerful laptop .
(Not using asio4all are you ?)
What is the most "amazing" thing is that Microsoft (compared to Apple f.e.) does allow comments on their you-tube channel and even responds to some of them.
The surface go is maybe comparable with the cheap iPad 2018 but i think the pro are far more powerful but still NO multi-core support for single apps (like on windows and mac).
10" for not multi-touch optimized apps must be terrible.
I like Microsoft as company more than Apple these days when i see their commercials, channels and events but i still just prefer macOS with core audio and Logic.
But then there was a thread i remember at KVR that microsoft was searching for developers etc. for a DAW or something similar....i might misunderstood it.
Great post @skrat ! 👍
I couldn’t agree more. Don’t expect to much using touch in Windows...
But with the right tools it could be nice too.
When i saw this in the NanoStudio forum and heard this nice sounding demo track...
"Again no samples just pure synth 16+ tracks and a hell lot of FX (and still just 40% of CPU on iPhone 6 !!!)"
...i think you can do wonder if things can be optimized. This seems a rare thing these days sadly as well.
Try these debugging tips before throwing away windows laptop:
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209071469-Optimizing-Windows-for-Audio#debug
DTP latency is often the case, although not well known. The bad news is, there is no magic cure for that. Often you need to find alternative drivers for some hardware or uninstall it completely (which is not very usable if it's caused e.g. by GPU drivers )
Anyway, if you can afford it and don't want to deal with endless problems on windows, macbook is more reliable solution
Looks interesting but i would think it is going to be underpowered for any serious music work or anything CPU intestive. They say it’s faster than the Surface 3, not SP3 in speed.
I think if your interested in a windows based mobile music solution it’s best to go with SurfacePro 3 or SurfaceBook2...the Go looks nice but i think ultimately it will fail the minute you push the CPUs to do anything meaningful.
Looks like a great Book reader and Note Taker...great for school work and Office Document management.
This of course is just my opinion coming from using a really nice QuadCore i7 2.4 GHz Sony Vaio Canvas Z running Ableton Live, zBrush, Photoshop, Cinema 4D...while it’s highly usable, the fans kick in once i push it.
I’d stick with an iPad Pro for music if you want mobility and power or just go with the SP3 or SB2 if you want desktop quality mobility on Windows.
But at least you can´t get these tools f.e. for iOS sadly....maybe one day:
Virsyn HarmonyVoice (for processing) and iVoxel (for vocoding/synthesis).
Sorry but that is lightyears away from this. Until vocaloid 4 it was O.k but v5 is great.
It´s about writing your own lyrics without singing and/or that vocoder effect (only if you want that).
And you can add expression, emotion etc.
F.e.:
What exactly do you need?
Interesting and I will keep an eye on this area of development.
But somewhat oddly perhaps, part of the reason my band is using an iPad for live use is _because _it has fewer capabilities.
I regularly use Reaper on a PC and it can do anything. Does it efficiently, easily customized.
But with so much power, comes I feel, higher probability of things to go wrong. I could go through and erase all the buttons I don't need, but I'd still worry I guess. Contrast with something like Modstep, for example, all your needs and options are basically 1 click away.
Obviously, Ableton is a bit more suited and we explored that too, but we felt like, if we were going to learn a new app, the portability of iPad was a boon.
I still don't foresee moving away from Reaper for mixing and mastering. We are coming from a vocals, guitar, bass, some 'real' drums perspective, so there are things iPad cant do nearly as well, or easily, as our outboard gear.
I guess there isn´t really a big market for touch tools outside of iOS for music.
On a laptop touch isn´t really great to use. On a light and small tablet it´s great.
Still on an iPhone with 3D touch it´s the best
I disagree I’m afraid on a number of points, as far as piracy is concerned you have to think that it will be a similar situation to the android market and people are pirating their apps without feeling the need to buy them and support developers.
Also I can’t see many developers spending time and effort to write software for a currently small potion of the market hoping that it will grow to compete with iOS or Android, just think if you write an AU or Universal app for iOS it can be run on three tiers of devices, IPads, iPhones and iPods so you can access three separate devices and markets, from serious musicians using iPads to kids beginning to experiment on their iPods and everything in between.
As for Microsoft cornering the market, I think that’s unlikely, they didn’t manage it with their phones as they were too late to the party and I imagine this will be the same, however even though it’s unlikey maybe they will drop something amazing and turn the tide, only time will tell.
Would Linux be ok on this, I wonder?
What would be a game changer would be someone to develop a high quality touch screen control or overlay for existing VSTs. There are vastly more plugins for Windows than any other OS.
(lol I was cracking up first time I found Retronyms list of iOS AUs that says at the top "The world of Audio Units is vast" (No offense to Retronyms apps) there are like 100 on there. KVRAudio lists 7000+ Windows VSTs, 4000+ Mac)
Um. Wow. Nice. iPad is working well for me right now, but I'll have to bookmark that.