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.

Let's talk about snapshots in AU hosts

skratskrat
in Feature Wishlists

For quite a long time, I am thinking about a workflow in AU hosts (e.g. AB3 or AUM) where there will be one, always accessible button to easily save a snapshot of: 1. specific AU, 2. specific channel (and all AUs loaded there) and 3. all channels (and all AUs in the project).

This is a feature several standalone apps already have, now I can only recall SeekBeats, or work-in-progress Drambo (it has parameters locks and scenes, but it's a bit similar), but there are also many hardware machines that has this feature so I believe most of you know what I am talking about (if not, I can elaborate more).

The beauty is that when you like some sound when just tweaking knobs, you hit one button and move on to tweak more and maybe find something better, maybe go back to previous version. Or 5 versions before. Then you either have more versions of the same sound to pick from (how many times you lost some great idea just because you fiddled the knobs more and more after not being able to go back?), or you have multiple variations of similar idea you can use in composition, live performance etc... Or you can also use e.g. the same synth instance to play completely different sound in another part of the song, if these two sounds never play together (which is quite common case with song that have a distinct "B" part)

It's such a great workflow for quickly sketching ideas and not getting out of the flow by saving a preset, thinking about how to name and how to mark each version (which is also not very sustainable as you end up with crazy mess in you presets) and it's less likely you recall it later and experiment with these variations. Not to mention trying out **combinations of various snapshots **, by recalling presets manually for various AUs, you need quite a sophisticated system to name the presets properly to remember which combinations played well together = absolute creativity killer.

From what I know about AU architecture, the state saving is a strong requirement as the hosts save the state of AU within the project (or within its internal preset system). So for the host it's just a different way to save AU presets, only it does not save them under a name (but only under an e.g. automatically incrementing number) and save them only inside the project scope. Also, there should be the ability to save all channel / project AUs at once (or manually selecting which to save within the snapshot, SeekBeats has this implemented nicely and intuitively).

I don't know if I even heard someone requesting this and I wonder if is it only me finding this a potential gamechanger or it's just a feature people never thought about...?

Comments

  • skratskrat

    BTW I know Apematrix has something similar, but it actually uses presets and morphs between them, which is somehow related, but actually something completely different :smiley: But yes, morphing is another interesting possibility with snapshots, but I also think it may open new world of bugs so I understand why this may not be in the interest of developers... And yes, snapshots like this in general could cause buggy behavior - maybe having many snapshots of ALL plugins in a big project will crash the hosts because of memory overload, or recalling the snapshots while playback is on will cause glitches or even crashes (but that's actually the same right now with presets). But anyway, this would open a whole new world of possibilities, also applied on MIDI AUs this allows for easy scene-based approach for composing / live playing.

  • audiorangutanaudiorangutan

    @skrat
    I agree that snapshots would be super fun and productive. I have been wanting this for a while also. I know at least the developer of AUM is considering this. Until snapshots are baked into the DAWs, what I do is control them from MIDI Designer, and use MD’s snapshot systems. But then you are in very deep with building a front end interface for all of your apps in MIDI Designer, and that isn’t for everyone.

  • RajahPRajahP

    We were ‘Almost’ there.. Can you imagine where this app would be today if it was not discontinued?

  • skratskrat

    @audiorangutan said:
    @skrat
    I agree that snapshots would be super fun and productive. I have been wanting this for a while also. I know at least the developer of AUM is considering this. Until snapshots are baked into the DAWs, what I do is control them from MIDI Designer, and use MD’s snapshot systems. But then you are in very deep with building a front end interface for all of your apps in MIDI Designer, and that isn’t for everyone.

    Yes, I would love to use the interface build by the developer that is usually better than anything I'll build and with no effort ;) But it's a good hint definitely, I personally never bought MIDI Designer Pro, although I was looking at it several times. Sounds like yet another tool that would prevent me from actually making music :sweat_smile: Also, I suppose this is not useable for MIDI AUs as you can't easily control stuff like sequencers or piano rolls via MIDI... Imagine being able to easily store and recall snapshots for all those amazing MIDI AUs out there...

    @RajahP said:
    We were ‘Almost’ there.. Can you imagine where this app would be today if it was not discontinued?

    I know this video very well, that actually made me buy KRFT :smiley: I've spent some nice times with it, but I am unfortunately quickly getting bored by "closed" kind of apps, as they usually produces very generic sound... The synths and effects are always the same stuff you've heard million times and it's nearly impossible to get something original out of it. This is why I always prefered plugin hosts where you can come up with crazy combinations and build your own signature sound. Yes, you can load your own samples into KRFT, but once you record samples, it's usually after the creative part of song making process, but that's actually the part when the snapshots would be most helpful...

  • wimwim

    @skrat said:
    I know this video very well, that actually made me buy KRFT :smiley: I've spent some nice times with it, but I am unfortunately quickly getting bored by "closed" kind of apps, as they usually produces very generic sound... The synths and effects are always the same stuff you've heard million times and it's nearly impossible to get something original out of it. This is why I always prefered plugin hosts where you can come up with crazy combinations and build your own signature sound. Yes, you can load your own samples into KRFT, but once you record samples, it's usually after the creative part of song making process, but that's actually the part when the snapshots would be most helpful...

    KRFT has midi out, which removes the limitation of the internal and imported sounds. It doesn't address snapshots though.

  • skratskrat
    edited August 2019

    @wim said:

    @skrat said:
    I know this video very well, that actually made me buy KRFT :smiley: I've spent some nice times with it, but I am unfortunately quickly getting bored by "closed" kind of apps, as they usually produces very generic sound... The synths and effects are always the same stuff you've heard million times and it's nearly impossible to get something original out of it. This is why I always prefered plugin hosts where you can come up with crazy combinations and build your own signature sound. Yes, you can load your own samples into KRFT, but once you record samples, it's usually after the creative part of song making process, but that's actually the part when the snapshots would be most helpful...

    KRFT has midi out, which removes the limitation of the internal and imported sounds. It doesn't address snapshots though.

    Yes, I tried using it for a while, but as usual, it was unstable and unpredictable quite a lot and required a lot of preparation. I am spoiled, I know ;)

Sign In or Register to comment.