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.
More variety of tools
I want to preface this by saying I am in no way trying to be a complainer or sound down on the amazing developers and apps we have available to us on ios now. It's amazing and I never thought I could make a whole album on my iPhone.
However, does it ever bug you a little that all these new apps keep coming out that all basically do the same thing? I don't need another compressor, chorus or synth. I have more options than I could ever ask for. Every week a new effect or synth comes out but to be honest most of it is interchangeable imo.
What I'd like to see is new tools that aren't available on ios yet such as
-Spectral editing tools (ans spectral synth is the closest thing but not practical)
-Ai driven source seperation tools (such as rx musical rebalance feature)
-Eq that shows frequency overlapping points
-declip tools
I'm just saying we have a plethora of amazing apps (thank you amazing developers) but also a lot of them are kind of redundant (how many choruses do you really need) and I'm just a little surprised nobody has tried to make something a little different. Klevgrand? Ddmf? 4pockets? Anybody wanna make some more tools geared toward this kind of thing?
Comments
The ddmf comp was a godsend.
It mostly bugs me that a lot of new apps come out doing something great but stability of iOS is still quite atrocious.
Hopefully iOS13 will bring tools like you mention in a new DAW app. The phase out of IAA looks to me like they're preparing to roll out some kind of iOS Logic or a more featured Garageband.
You all wanted more desktop like “professional” apps and workflows. You all spoke with your wallets. You got what you wanted. Bed made. When those tools finally make it to iOS, guess what, there will be too many of them as well and you’ll be dissatisfied again. We could’ve had an environment with unique stuff that existed no where else. And many tried to create that. But people refused to RTFM and blamed the apps. So I don’t wanna hear it. Enjoy your upteenth AU chorus and flanger. This iPad here is staying put on 11.4 with the best all rounder for what I do (ns2) and a handful of other FUN things that will be sadly forgotten
That doesn't really make any sense.
I'm looking forward to a much more stable "pro" platform. I'll keep another iPad for the "unique" chaotic state iOS is in at the moment.
It’s a tough dilemma. The cross section of skilled developers, who are also active musicians (or involved with them), who are musicians of the type that know about or care about something like “spectral editing,” and who also have the time to invest in something like that without expectation of any justifiable profit for their time ... has got to be very, very small.
Guys like Bram Bos. Pretty rare.
To me it makes a lot of sense - and tells the story of IOS music apps in a nutshell
I've come to a similiar decision, keeping an Air-2 on IOS 9.3.
Here's one of those lost gems not available anymore - it even runs on my iPhone 3gs.
I'm sure it's a fun app but I can't listen to that video...
The unique environment thing doesn't make sense to me. There are plenty of unique apps but the environment is not unique or special, it's a total mess.
I like having a wide variety of synths to play around with. Each one has its own kind of sound character or interface difference, and I think they're fun. I'd buy most all of them, if I could afford them all.
A big part of the attraction I have for synths is because I was a in my twenties in the 80's when synths first became a big part of rock and pop music. Back then I saved up to purchase a Juno 106 as my fist synth. My second synth was a D50. Then I got an M1. Before I bought the Juno I was dreaming of owning an OB-Xa or a Jupiter 8 , but they were out of my affordability range at the time.
Flash forward to a couple of years ago, when one day I stumbled upon a Sound Test Room video on Youtube. That's the first time learned about affordable synths for iOS. I bought my 1st iPad for the sole reason of playing synths on it.
For me a big part of these awesome synth apps are nostalgia. I could finally play those sounds I dreamed of playing back in the 80's. And not for thousands of dollars.... I could get an iSO synth for around $10.00!
It must be a psychological thing with me, because I want them all. Yet I'm only just beginning to learn how to program them. It must be a form of addiction.
I have Sugar Bytes Factory on my list of synths I want. But money is tight these days and I need to be frugal.
I think it would be great to have all kinds of new iOS music tools to work with.
I really liked the idea of that text-to-speech synth app from a recent thread.
I'd love to see that type of idea progressed further and made into an affordable app that could be part synth, part text to speech vocoder, and have the ability to enter text and play the words as vocals on a keyboard. I think it would be cool to be able to assign different forms of expression to each word. Like having a bunch of word-expression presets that could be factory presets, but also have the ability to program your own word-expression presets.
I think of that as being like running computer generated speech through various types of expression envelopes to change the expressive quality of each word in a variety of ways. I wonder how many varieties of "typical" vocal inflections there are anyway? You could probably make some very cool vocal sentences using just something like 10 types of time-stretching type presets.
I can't sing worth a dam. So I would love to have a way to add expressive costomizable synthetic vocals that could be easily created and modified, without having to have a degree from MIT.
@db909
Lots of hobby developers starting off with the same cookbook code, there is little viable business in IOS music software, there will be little innovation.
I think you’ve given an accurate description of why we haven’t seen these sorts of music creation apps. The current economics of iOS aren’t conducive to niche apps. Perhaps with better file support, more stability, and more capable iOS hardware more people will see iOS as a viable platform for music creation and we’ll see more complex and niche apps being developed for iOS.
I still doubt it. No matter how you slice it, even disregarding the monetary aspect, the population of developers that fit the profile is really small.
BeatSpiral is an app that basically does what the small Boss Roland SP xox sampler/groove boxes are known for.
It leaves out the sampling part, but playing, arranging and recording is lightyears ahead of the Roland stuff. The mode of operation exploits touch to the max in a quality comparable to SamplR.
But it doesn't fully reveal itself at 1st glance, so you got to RTFM which seems a highly unpopular thing, as @db909 mentioned. Given the complexity of actions BeatSpiral can perform the app is stunningly simple to handle. You can jam live all kind of stuff and make it record with a clever swipe without the slightest interuption.
The 'unique' aspect is in the approach of interaction design: the developer found a different shape for the Roland paradigm, but with less screen estate and more/faster control.
Yeah I ended up watching a different video, very cool app.