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.

Which device to pick for Gadget? Suggestions for performance and usability benchmarking

I am looking to buy an iOS device with Korg Gadget in mind as primary app. Which one to pick? How to pick?

  1. Performance: Presumably Korg Gadget runs on any iOS device with 9.3 or newer. This means that it could run on an A5 (as in a 2012 iPad 2) to todays A12X. But how much is "enough" power? How to measure this?

  2. Usability: with different resolutions, screen sizes and aspect ratios come different levels of usability. A 4" display is almost unusably small, but is 12.9" so much better than 10.5", 9.7", 7.9" or even 6.5" what is de cutoff point?

  3. Others: does RAM size matter? Having a headphones port matters, but how much?

Ideally, I would never run into stuttering performance, be able to tweak buttons, edit the sequencer and play notes without feeling encumbered and be secure in the idea that I have the most optimal pick for my needs. Perhaps in this community we could build a song template that will let one test the real life performance of Gadget. I think it would be best to do this with the gadgets that are available in the "LE" version, so it can be tested on any device, even if the user does not have the full version of Gadget (also curious about the Mac and Switch versions). This song would use several different gadgets and one could keep duplicating the tracks until artefacts appear. This would need to be done with a predefined latency setting, but perhaps multiple settings could yield useful insights.

As for screen usability: 4" is too small, as is 4.7". But when is it big enough? How many strips can fit in the song view? Do the sequencer view and gadget view benefit from this aspect ratio?

I would appreciate any ideas. Meanwhile, I will build a pretty basic song to stresstest Gadget with.

Comments

  • I'm personally looking at the 256GB iPad Air 3(10.5" & 3GB Ram and a 3.5mm headphone jack!).

    For now I'm still happy with my iPad Air 2 and depending on the outcome of WWDC'19 (ie. if the iPad Air 2 gets iOS13 or not) I'll decide on how to proceed...

    Using the heavier Gadgets it's easy to push the Air 2 to crackle-town but that is to be expected of an older device...

  • Audio wise Gadget is running fine on my A9X Pro 9.7 (expect for the heat/battery drain). No crackles, etc.
    But if I was in the market for a new one I’d choose the same as Samu, or perhaps even the standard iPad 2018.

  • It’s runs great on my Air2 but I don’t go too crazy with the track count, on average I’ll use 10 or 12 then send it to Ableton and add more if I feel I need more.
    I’m guessing it’ll be a beast on the newer ones. I just can’t get behind an iPad without a headphone jack. I like to be able to just plugin a small midi keyboard and some headphones and create and not need a dongle to use both, sometimes I get ideas in the middle of the night and want to jam in bed, lol

  • edited March 2019

    It’s kicking ass on my iPad 2018 128gb. I mean I haven’t tried to run 20 instances of Odyssei or anything crazy but in the course of typical session, I’ve noticed absolutely zero hiccups.

  • The new Air is the "sweet spot".

  • The iPad 2018's pack a lot of punch for the price -- and I imagine they will be pretty inexpensive with the release of the new iPads.

  • I've run 10-12 tracks on the 2017 iPad no issues (with heavy automation of FX). This included sample heavy ones like Glasgow with the KAPro string module, a ton of sample cutting in Abu Dhabi etc. Also, don't forget you can freeze tracks in Gadget if needed and that would help things out too.

  • Well I got it up to 12 tracks on 2018 iPad last night with an Odyssei instance and a Lisbon instance among others, automation going on, etc. not a single hiccup. In fact I haven’t had any battery drain issues either.

  • @db909 said:
    Well I got it up to 12 tracks on 2018 iPad last night with an Odyssei instance and a Lisbon instance among others, automation going on, etc. not a single hiccup. In fact I haven’t had any battery drain issues either.

    That is pretty impressive. Could you share the song, so other ppl can check how their device runs it? What is your latency?

  • I am using iPad Pro 9,7 and I was able to add about 110 track (different gadgets) until Gadgets crashed ;) all the time music was playing from about 4 track and all another new track was empty. In the moment of adding new track I heard a hiccups, but besides of that moment music sounds correctly. I hope to add 128 tracks, but unfortunatelly I could not :)

    I am interested to change currect iPad to last ipad with headphones port (Pro 10,5") in near future in sense of using music tools.

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