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Best AUv3 for creating "guide cues"?
Hi, forum!
I'm currently using the wonderful trio of Audiobus, AUM, and Xequence 2 to play live keyboards with my band. It's working well. The reason I've incorporated Xequence is for custom background tracks to fill out our sound. Along the way, I realized I could make a custom click track with pattern changes, etc., to follow the song. I use Ruismaker Noir for that, and it's great.
Now I'd like to incorporate spoken guide cues for the band ("Chorus, 2, 3, 4", etc.), triggered by Xequence. I have a pack of about 100 such cues as WAV files. I think what I need is an AUv3 where I can assign each file a MIDI note. I could then save the mapping as a "kit" or "instrument" to be hosted in AUM for each song.
What app can I use for this purpose?
- I have DigiStix, but that seems to only support 16 notes.
- It seems AudioLayer could do the job, but isn't that overkill? I don't need more than one layer per note.
- Would Chameleon fit the bill? I've heard that it may not be able to map all 127 MIDI notes.
- Obsidian in NanoStudio 2 might work, but I have excluded NS2 since there is no Audiobus state-saving.
- I do have BeatHawk, which can slice a sample into multiple notes (provided I combine them as an Apple Loop in BeatMaker 3). Is that my best choice?
Is there something better for this job?
Thanks!
Andrew
Comments
Do you own AudioLayer already?
I don't think it's overkill.
It's quite efficient for the purpose actually and you can quite easily change the mapping and other parameters (Volumes etc) fairly quickly. Anything else will likely eat more resources.
Theoretically, a slicer would work but that gets very bulky with 100 samples.
Obsidian: No, max. 24 samples per layer and Slate has max. 32 samples, you can only get more by using different velocity levels but that would make triggering them from Xeq2 unnecessarily cumbersome.
AudioLayer would be my recommendation for your purpose.
It could also be the click track sound source so you don't even need Noir anymore.
@rs2000, thanks for the feedback. No, I don't own AudioLayer. After my wallet recovers from "App Friday" purchases, I'll have to pick up AL. 😉 Maybe I'll wait for a Christmas sale…
Chameleon has 7 octaves, 84 notes.
Aah, bummer, you've just missed the recent 50% off sale.
BeatHawk could be the second best option. You'd only have to create the sliced Apple Loops once, right?
I thought I read somewhere around here that there's a limit on the number of samples Chameleon allows per instrument (15? 16?). If I can assign 84 samples each to its own note, that's almost enough. Perhaps I could break the pack into 2 instruments and load them side-by-side in AUM.
Is there an appreciable difference in CPU/RAM usage between AudioLayer and Chameleon?
One big advantage with AudioLayer is it uses disk streaming. So, not all samples need to be loaded into ram at once, only what's being used. I doubt (though I'm not sure) that Chameleon does that.
I don't know how long your samples are, but that could be a significant factor if they are large. If RAM becomes a problem, then multiple instances of Chameleon may not help as the limitations are global across instances. I doubt this is a factor, but it's something to consider.
You need to be sure to use local storage and not cloud storage with AudioLayer, or you may get stuck having to re-download samples from the cloud at the worst moment.
BM3 would give you enough slots, and with its 64 pad view, you could have all your samples on just 2 pages. Personally the idea of incorporating BM3 into a live rig makes the hair on my neck stand up, but we do have one professional musician on the forum who uses it in every single gig and swears by it. I would imagine if you had already made the bank and weren't recording or editing anything that BM3 could be perfectly stable. No state save though. You'd have to load the project every time.
Ah. I didn't know that.
Each sample is 1-3 seconds.
Yeah, I've actually tried playing live with BeatMaker 3. It has so many great features, and I love that it has scenes! Unfortunately, it crashed frequently during performance, and I had to switch back to it each time to open the next song's session. I use forScore for sheet music, and it broadcasts a Program Change to switch songs. With a small MIDI controller sitting beside my iPad, I never have to leave forScore (as long as everything behaves).
I'm guessing RAM isn't an issue then, but I guess it could be since you probably have other apps loaded up. Unfortunately there's no way of telling such things on iOS other than by trial and error. Still, I'm guessing AudioLayer would take less RAM resources than other apps, and this equally important to manage, if not moreso, than CPU usage.
I run about 5 layers of keys in AUM (Ravenscroft 275, BeatHawk, AudioKit D1, Volt, Mersenne, etc.), on top of the tracks that Xequence is playing. It's quite heavy on resources, although I don't know whether CPU or RAM is more constrained. I don't want to raise the buffer (we keyboard players are picky about response time 😉). I'm somehow getting by at 256 samples. 😬
Yeh, unfortunately it comes down to trial and error. There are no diagnostic tools that can help. If RAM is the constraint then "disk" streaming is helpful. If CPU is the constraint then disk streaming does more harm than good because it needs more resources.
Yeah, that's true. Maybe I'll just start the process in BeatMaker 3 to see how long it could take. I think I can do all the slicing there and then do the import and mapping in BeatHawk. I'll have to first combine all my separate WAVs… 😔
On second thought, @wim brought up something that makes me hesitate to use BeatHawk here: all instances of an Audio Unit share the same memory limit. I often use several concurrent instances of BH as instruments in AUM. The guide cues would have to share that memory pool, however large it is.
I think it's down to Chameleon or AudioLayer. For Chameleon, it sounds like I'd have to pare down the number of samples to 84, or use 2 instances.
If you have a Windows or MacOS machine, appending all wave files into one long snake is easy:
)
Download the commandline utility "sox" in its binary form from https://sourceforge.net/projects/sox/files/sox/
Then drop all the wave files you want to merge into one folder and run this command:
Windows: sox *.wav ..\all1.wav
MacOS: sox *.wav ../all1.wav
You will find the resulting file in the folder above (destination file should be in a different folder, otherwise the newly created file might be included in the destination and lead to unforseeable issues
That's how I prepare my audio material before dropping into ReCycle, for example, to finally use them in Gadget > Stockholm.
BTW, @wim mentioned disk streaming in AudioLayer and indeed that will save your memory.
Another tipp for reducing memory is to convert your cue files to 22kHz mono. Still perfectly understandable but only using a fraction of RAM.
You could go even more extreme and convert the files to 8bit audio after giving them a good downward expansion and dynamics limiter treatment to minimize quantization noise.
This can also be done with sox but I'll spare you the details...
Thanks for the tips! In thinking the process through, I wonder how easy it would be to swap, add, or remove a sample from the virtual instrument after the fact. For instance, what if one of the cues turns out to be unintelligible in the monitor mix and needs editing. With slicing, that seems problematic. With AudioLayer, would this be as simple as overwriting an individual wave file in a certain folder?
Sort of, though the process isn't exactly like that. You would import a sample from the file system to replace the sample in that zone. Basically the same thing, just different terminology.
OK. That sounds easy enough. I think I'll settle in and wait for a sale… In any case, I can start building a couple kit maps (perhaps 64+40) in Xequence.
I just wanted to follow up on this. I bought AudioLayer; and after some fiddling, I learned how to set it up for this use. It's working flawlessly! Even loaded alongside my most demanding AUM sessions, it's not showing any practical impact on system resources.
Thanks to everyone who helped me figure this out! 😄🎉