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.

Elastic FX is now Universal (iPhone & iPad) and got lot's of new features

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Comments

  • edited February 2019

    I created a topic with a link to the Quneo preset. Thanks @aaronpc for the support!

    I setup the Quneo so that the top four pads act as 4 touch-enabled ‘x & y pads’ for the 4 different simultaneous effects allowed in ElasticFX.

    When you map the top four Quneo pads to ElasticFX, they are touch enabled which mean they are engaged when you press them but the effects ‘turn off’ when you let go.

    You can only manipulate 1 effect at a time inside of ElasticFX. With a Quneo you can control all four effects simultaneously using MIDI.

    Four fingers, Four x y pads, & four effects for extensive live audio mangling.

    I setup the first pad as a ‘full mix’ ideal for the distortion group effects, as well as the repeater and stutter effects.

    The second & third pad are set for a 50/50 mix when pressed, these are perfect for space effects such as reverb and delay.

    The fourth pad is another ‘full mix’ pad, perfect for the ‘Other Section’ of effects (gate, stutter, repeat, strobe, etc.)

    This is great because, now you can leave your iPhone/tablet screen on the ElasticDrum sequencer screen, but you can still manipulate the ElasticFX using the Quneo at the same time.

    The ElasticFX section is defined in the below image by the red rectangle encircling the top four square pads numbered ‘FX1-4’.


  • @klownshed

    "But when you can have multiple instances you don't need the complexity the stand alone app requires."

    --> that's exactly the point, yes :)

  • Thanks for the update. I have to be honest, I hadn’t touched it since purchasing either because it is not an AU but just playing with it again and I can see it’s a really nice multiFX. I am going to see if I can bring it into my workflow.

  • Thanks much @Dr_M I will save this down and try it out at my earliest. I already have a hand rolled ED template, so it will be interesting to see how they compare.

  • _ki_ki
    edited February 2019

    @elasticdrums

    " I'm not sure I'd want Elastic Fx as an auv3 as it is" 

    --> that makes no sense imho, even though every second is asking for it. Elastic FX is rather a "standalone app" than a "plugin" effect and I don't know if the automation features, which is what makes Elastic FX different from all other effect apps, would even work as AUv3! It would at least feel pretty differently.

    There is no problem at all with the automation of the FX - the AUv3 would look and feel identical - its just inside a (near fullscreen) window and needs to scale its UI accordingly. Which i must admist may be a big problem if the app is designed differently.


    Apart from the fact, that there are zillions of great AUv3 effects already. What makes Elastic FX different, is that it HAS 4 channels, and that you can automate these 4 effects and store all of this in the app itself.

    There are several multiFX AUs, so having 4 FX channels is no special case. If needed, one can even programm AUs with several audio inputs / outputs (though this is not yet widly supported in the hosts) .


    This would not be possible to do, if Elastic FX would be an AUv3 unit. Maybe I am wrong, but ideally you would store the app presets AND the automations in the host app, therefore it would work completely different, if not to say it would not work at all !! 

    The automation data for each Fx belongs into the stored AU settings. There is no problem with that as you (as AUv3) can specify the data blob that is saved. This blob is stored/recalled by each host - but ideally you would additionally offer an own preset system to allow host-independand presets/animations.

    In your conception presets and automations are separate - but they don“t need to be. The default presets could contain empty automations and if one adds an animation one would store a new preset with the automation included. The app/au could offer to copy/load/save/apply automations with automations stored in the apps internal data space - but to keep the au settings data complete (so that whole sessions can be shared between users and devices) the automation needs to be included in the AU settings.

    It would not work to just store references to the app internal presets and automations in the AU settings, since that way a used would be forced to save the current automation before saving the AU session in the hosts. And this just is what makes using IAAs so inconvienent nowadays...

    The AU settings always should contain the full current state of the AU, we are sharing these settings between devices and users.


    Can you store automation data in AUM? I don't think so.

    If they are stored in the AU settings they are recalled. This is done by several AU plugins.


    Can you store automation data in Cubasis? Maybe, if an AUv3 fx unit gives out automation data as midi controller data to Cubasis. But then the automation data is stored in Cubasis, and not in the effect app itself. The automations are bound to that one Cubasis session and "lost" for other DAW's

    Thats why nearly all AUs offer an additional internal preset store mechanism. These store the identical data as for the AUs and with these your are host-independand.


    BTW several of the hosts (AUM, ApeMatrix) show their stored AU presets in the Files app, they are XML/JSON files of plists in both cases and i suspect that one could copy them from AUM to apeMatrix and vice versa to make them available in the other host - no magic in there.

  • Okay, thank @_ki you for your detailed answer. Are there any effect apps that already offer that kind of automation saving? I quickly opened Sugar Bytes Turnado yesterday, but could not see anything like that. Do you know of any app that has that in there already?

  • I assume that you store your automations as a list of x/y/timestamp (in beat divisions) triples.

    I looked through my AUs, all of them seem ‚outsource‘ the main automation to the host, but some have small internal ‚automations‘ like Perforator which offers up to 2* 32 levels which are applied. Or Rozeta x0x, Cells, Bassline store eight settings of fixed sized notes/velocity arrays. In principle this does not differ from storing longer, user input list of automation triples.

    The AU settings itself support variable sizes, i have already encountered stuff stored as json. And there is probabbly no size limitation as the SpaceCraft dev thinks about optionally including the data of the wav file into the AU settings.


    Offering to store own automations (in addition to drive the x/y of the 4 fx via host automation when no internal automation is running) would be a very big KSP for your plugin:

    There are many musicians jamming using AUM or apeMatrix setups instead of the more rigid DAWs. And for these setups the automation part is lacking. There are things in development to store/replay CC animations - but one would still need to connect boths AUs and do a lot of settings, while your ‚internal automation’ would work right out of the box without the need of host automation or extra automation AUs.



    Nevertheless, AU conversion of an existing app is hard labor as can be seen by the time it takes for the AudioKit devs to convert their base library to AU. I can easily understand why for some apps this does not pay off ( to many man hours to spend for too little profit) - but it‘s not the lack of features of the AU eco system.

  • Thank you @_ki for your informative posts above.

    @elasticdrums Thanks for the update. ElasticFX is an awesome app!

    As an AU with multiple instances would be helpful for adding automated fx to an instrument performance, as well as ElasticDrums. Right now we choose which channel, and cannot apply 1 instance of ElasticFX on every track.

    We could also layer four ElasticFX apps in a row for 16 effects that could all be controlled at once using a Quneo in 16 XY pad mode.

  • Thanks for the update @elasticdrums it's awesome! I particularly enjoy the repeater and the kaoss style touch option.

    I personally don't care about AUV3 if the app works as intended.

    If I was to suggest something though:

    Any option for a faint grid for some apps like repeater?

    Also, it would be nice to be able to ‘touch’ and modify more than one effect at once on the grid but maybe that's too much of a finger acrobatics. Not sure.

  • Hey all, just a reminder ELastic FX supports AudioBus state saving. That is worth major points in my book.

  • Ah, it's you, I didn't now that ;)


    Good to know, that it's possible to store all data, also bigger automations data in AUv3's.

    But, to use Elastic FX as AUv3 we have to literally rewrite the app from scratch, as it's build with PureData at the audio backend side, which is not yet (100% sure) ready for multiple instances, and it would also eat too much processing power for multiple instances.

    So we might rather pick some of the best effects, rewrite them from scratch and create a new app with rather only one or 2 effects channels instead of 4.

  • I was starting 2 already with a gid for the repeater, but then I though it looks stupid, when there is a grid all of a sudden with at some effects. But I hear you, I will reconsider again, it might be really helpful indeed.


    At Multitouch I will also have a look, it might be confusing, while recording automation, but let's have a try

  • edited February 2019

    I’ve just attempted to use elastic fx as an external effect unit with Novation Circuit and noticed that there is degradation of quality when all of the effects are disabled. When I bypass it in Audiobus or AUM the quality improves.


    This makes me believe that Elastic FX is not true bypass (using guitar effect terminology). If this is true, what is causing it? Is there a limiter on the input by any chance? If so can this be disabled?


    I have exactly the the same issue with the old (and very cool) Live Fx by Elephant Candy but unsurprisingly not with FluxFx.

  • _ki_ki
    edited February 2019

    @elasticdrums

    Ah, it's you, I didn't now that ;)

    No, no - i am not the author of the Rozeta suite, thats Brambos - also a regular on this forum 😀 Your comment made me notice that my post could be read that way „i checked all my AUs ....“ and then only presenting examples of Brambos apps. Sorry for beeing misleading.

    In fact i meant that i checked all of my approx 80 AU fx if they might contain variable sized lists of data.


    But, to use Elastic FX as AUv3 we have to literally rewrite the app from scratch, as it's build with PureData at the audio backend side, which is not yet (100% sure) ready for multiple instances, and it would also eat too much processing power for multiple instances.

    PD is a cool beast of audio programming language, i did“t find time to learn it yet. With a PD based audio backend i can imagine that AU conversion would be a sisyphean task, since PureData follows its own rules.


    So we might rather pick some of the best effects, rewrite them from scratch and create a new app with rather only one or 2 effects channels instead of 4.

    Thats understandable and a good idea - thanks for beeing so open and also for updating your existing cool apps with new features 😃


  • There’s 3 tabs, on the ‘VOL’ tab there is an eq, pre-amp, and compressor. I’d start there, I have not noticed any signal degrading using ElasticFX after ElasticDrums.

  • edited February 2019

    All of the units under the volume icon are off. Try a sound with good amount of sustained bottom end I.e. 808 in patterning,

  • Haha, I actually though you are him 😂

    Well, doesn't matter. You were as helpful as Brambos, who is very active and helpful in different tech forums indeed.

  • Hi @supadom, I did some a lot of comparing about this, also with hardware where you can truly bypass the audio sound of the device, but mainly with guitar recently. When you activate the "bypass all fx" button, there should be no difference, as it is a true bypass, letting all audio though the app without any difference. But, when you compare switching this button on and off with all effects deactivated, you are right: I hear a subtile loss of power in deep frequencies, when you use sounds that have a lot of low energy. You can boost low frequencies again with the master equalizer, but of course that's not what we want. We'll have a look at this

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