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.

Microsoft Surface Go

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  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @Dawdles said:

    @Janosax said:

    @Dawdles said:

    @Janosax said:
    I had to repair a Surface Pro 4 for a customer yesterday. I quickly tried Ableton Live 10 demo on this tablet and it was a very nice experience.

    Windows 10 has mainly some issues with big updates, but has reached some good stability and much better security.

    This Surface Go will have an issue IMO with its CPU and our music usage. It has a 1.6 ghz Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4415Y CPU. Should be ok to run Live or Bitwig but will not be able to run lot of VST’s.

    Surface pro 3 isn’t ‘too’ bad. Definitely feels like you’re on a tablet in terms of power but I’d guess it was about as powerful as current iPads? Be interesting to hear reports on these new Surfaces and see what kind of load they can deal with..

    Running Ableton Live on a tablet with iPad price is still really very tempting. I still have my laptop for big projects, but Surface Go ultra mobility form factor is really interesting.

    Do you use Live on your surface?

    Only occasionally.... i don’t really enjoy it though, definitely need the pen and type cover if you’re gonna keep your sanity ;) I rarely use the surface 3 standalone for music, it’s big and heavy enough to make me just reach for laptop or desktop. It’s definitely useable if needed though. But a far cry from the fun vibe of iOS touch stuff. Saying that, it’s probably not ‘that’ much clunkier, if at all, than using something like Cubasis. But the smaller size of this new surface really interests me. And the price too...if some nice touch apps appear start to appear ill probably grab one..

    Bitwig seems to be the best touchscreen experience on Windows tablets.

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited July 2018

    @Dawdles said:

    @Janosax said:

    @Dawdles said:

    @Janosax said:

    @Dawdles said:

    @Janosax said:
    I had to repair a Surface Pro 4 for a customer yesterday. I quickly tried Ableton Live 10 demo on this tablet and it was a very nice experience.

    Windows 10 has mainly some issues with big updates, but has reached some good stability and much better security.

    This Surface Go will have an issue IMO with its CPU and our music usage. It has a 1.6 ghz Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4415Y CPU. Should be ok to run Live or Bitwig but will not be able to run lot of VST’s.

    Surface pro 3 isn’t ‘too’ bad. Definitely feels like you’re on a tablet in terms of power but I’d guess it was about as powerful as current iPads? Be interesting to hear reports on these new Surfaces and see what kind of load they can deal with..

    Running Ableton Live on a tablet with iPad price is still really very tempting. I still have my laptop for big projects, but Surface Go ultra mobility form factor is really interesting.

    Do you use Live on your surface?

    Only occasionally.... i don’t really enjoy it though, definitely need the pen and type cover if you’re gonna keep your sanity ;) I rarely use the surface 3 standalone for music, it’s big and heavy enough to make me just reach for laptop or desktop. It’s definitely useable if needed though. But a far cry from the fun vibe of iOS touch stuff. Saying that, it’s probably not ‘that’ much clunkier, if at all, than using something like Cubasis. But the smaller size of this new surface really interests me. And the price too...if some nice touch apps appear start to appear ill probably grab one..

    Bitwig seems to be the best touchscreen experience on Windows tablets.

    Yeah bitwig feels friendlier than ableton for sure. I don’t think there’s even an onscreen keyboard in ableton? I haven’t gelled with either very well on tablet though, kind of resigned myself to being too used to desktop/mouse/big screen for daw work. Trying to use laptop or tablet for that kind of stuff generally makes me feel like not making music soon after I start! I should probably give bitwig another shot at some point tho. But my main desktop daw is ableton and don’t really wanna additionally complicate workflow things overall by using any further multiple daws :/

    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.

  • @Dawdles said:

    @CRAKROX said:

    I cannot see the Surface Go reaching critical mass sufficiently to persuade iOS only devs to engage in porting their apps to Windows.

    As far as touch specific software goes this is the issue, there simply won’t be enough units sold to make it worthwhile, as for the market to reach that point it will need other manufacturers to make their own Windows Surface machines which will introduce the same problems that android has with the variety of specifications causing headaches for developers.
    This is evidenced by Microsoft themselves making this model with a less powerful processor to cut costs.
    I think unless another manufacturer really splits the market with some unknown amazing development the status quo of iOS for music will stand.

    I respectfully disagree. I think Microsoft will corner the windows tablet market with these models and other manufacturers will struggle to compete for sales. So there’ll be Apple style unity with the OS software and hardware companies being the same company, for anyone seeking that. Android has a totally different vibe/perception and is off the table for me personally except for phones..

    Re the market not being there.... all I ever read on here is that devs don’t make enough money anyway and it’s overcrowded and a labour of love etc....So if I was a dev I’d seriously consider making something mind blowing for windows touch and getting it out there pronto.... if like 15 devs did this and made some good videos of those apps it would be hard not to consider grabbing a cheap surface to check it out. And a market would eventually build....

    its like in some ways the software needs to come first in order to make the hardware popular... kind of the reverse of what happened with iOS. But potentially just as effective route long term and possibly a good place to grab a foothold for small devs.... not to mention that there’s no iTunes costs for small devs to have to deal with. If someone wants to make something for windows touch they can do the whole thing on their own terms. That’s got to be kind of tempting? Though all of this is kind of ignoring how much incredible software already exists on windows and how easy some of it would be to tweak for touch....

    Of course there’s also the piracy element on windows, but if software was priced similarly to iOS apps I think most people would rather just avoid risk of viruses etc and drop a few bucks on something...

    Good post.

  • edited July 2018

    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 :smiley:
    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 :smiley: 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.

  • @gonekrazy3000 said:

    @ErrkaPetti said:
    It's Windows, so, NO NO NO...

    Have struggling with Windows to much in the past...
    Although it's Win10 now, perhaps better, but, no more Win in my life...

    i genuinely dont have probs with windows since 7. been using ableton for years.

    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.

  • @raindro said:

    @gonekrazy3000 said:

    @ErrkaPetti said:
    It's Windows, so, NO NO NO...

    Have struggling with Windows to much in the past...
    Although it's Win10 now, perhaps better, but, no more Win in my life...

    i genuinely dont have probs with windows since 7. been using ableton for years.

    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.

  • @skrat said:
    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 advise: 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.

    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.

  • @raindro said:
    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.

    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 ;)

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited July 2018

    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:

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @Cib said:
    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).

  • edited July 2018

    @rs2000 said:

    @Cib said:
    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.:

  • @Cib said:

    @rs2000 said:

    @Cib said:
    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.

    What exactly do you need?

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • edited July 2018

    @Dawdles said:

    @AndyPlankton said:
    I'm certainly keeping my eye on how this goes and what reports come out about its use for music, at those prices they are a very serious contender for my next hardware upgrade.
    Being able to run FL Studio 12 on one of those would be pretty hard to resist.

    Yep, not to mention Bandlab Cakewalk, Reaper and Vcvrack.... All free and destroy iOS equivalents atm in most areas... Not super touch friendly tho :/ But maybe that will start to change...

    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.

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @Dawdles said:

    @Multicellular said:

    @Dawdles said:

    @AndyPlankton said:
    I'm certainly keeping my eye on how this goes and what reports come out about its use for music, at those prices they are a very serious contender for my next hardware upgrade.
    Being able to run FL Studio 12 on one of those would be pretty hard to resist.

    Yep, not to mention Bandlab Cakewalk, Reaper and Vcvrack.... All free and destroy iOS equivalents atm in most areas... Not super touch friendly tho :/ But maybe that will start to change...

    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.

    Yeah, unless the hardware and guts turn out to be junk it’s entirley down to devs....they could make surface a great iPad alternative, or not... Will be interesting to watch.

    If I was a small player Windows dev right now I’d be re-working a bunch of my GUi’s for touch and throwing everything I could in the store or on my own website for sale at cheap iOS style prices... Seems worth a try, still a really niche/neglected corner of the market on windows...Lots of potential opportunity...

    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 :)

  • edited July 2018
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @Dawdles said:

    @CRAKROX said:

    I cannot see the Surface Go reaching critical mass sufficiently to persuade iOS only devs to engage in porting their apps to Windows.

    As far as touch specific software goes this is the issue, there simply won’t be enough units sold to make it worthwhile, as for the market to reach that point it will need other manufacturers to make their own Windows Surface machines which will introduce the same problems that android has with the variety of specifications causing headaches for developers.
    This is evidenced by Microsoft themselves making this model with a less powerful processor to cut costs.
    I think unless another manufacturer really splits the market with some unknown amazing development the status quo of iOS for music will stand.

    I respectfully disagree. I think Microsoft will corner the windows tablet market with these models and other manufacturers will struggle to compete for sales. So there’ll be Apple style unity with the OS software and hardware companies being the same company, for anyone seeking that. Android has a totally different vibe/perception and is off the table for me personally except for phones..

    Re the market not being there.... all I ever read on here is that devs don’t make enough money anyway and it’s overcrowded and a labour of love etc....So if I was a dev I’d seriously consider making something mind blowing for windows touch and getting it out there pronto.... if like 15 devs did this and made some good videos of those apps it would be hard not to consider grabbing a cheap surface to check it out. And a market would eventually build....

    its like in some ways the software needs to come first in order to make the hardware popular... kind of the reverse of what happened with iOS. But potentially just as effective route long term and possibly a good place to grab a foothold for small devs.... not to mention that there’s no iTunes costs for small devs to have to deal with. If someone wants to make something for windows touch they can do the whole thing on their own terms. That’s got to be kind of tempting? Though all of this is kind of ignoring how much incredible software already exists on windows and how easy some of it would be to tweak for touch....

    Of course there’s also the piracy element on windows, but if software was priced similarly to iOS apps I think most people would rather just avoid risk of viruses etc and drop a few bucks on something...

    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.

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • Would Linux be ok on this, I wonder?

  • edited July 2018

    @CRAKROX said:

    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.

    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)

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • @Dawdles said:

    @Multicellular said:

    @CRAKROX said:

    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.

    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)

    Something like this? I’ve never used it and only skimmed the description so I’m not sure exactly what it does, but seemed maybe useful for something like the Surface Go for use with existing non touch-friendly Windows software?

    https://touchinnovations.com/emulator-2/

    Um. Wow. Nice. iPad is working well for me right now, but I'll have to bookmark that.

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