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.

How is gestrument working for everyone else?

So far Gestrument is my worst performing Audiobus compatible app on my ipaf mini. Even just running it with loopy, a restart, and all background killed its crackling like mad. Lowering the quality and CPU usage button to low still leaves me with a bunch of crackling. How is it working for everyone else?

Comments

  • I can't even get it to work. Audiobus keeps displaying the sleeping icon for it, even after it is launched.

  • I've just tried it (I wasn't a Gestrument user before so I have little experience with it).
    It seems like there are some clicks happening, even when little else is going on. The good side of Audiobus is that it seems to correct them in the recording (which is pretty cool) but they're audible when playing live.

  • Yeah I owned it pre audiobus. Never had any clicks whatsoever even running it as a controller for other synths. Hopefully it's something the dev can look into and optimize for audiobus use. I own so many freaking music apps its crazy lol. Always glad to see them pop up with audiobus support. I've only had to purchase a couple compatible apps since audiobus released as I already owned most of them. Already own most of the ones that are coming out shortly too. Ill continue to leave impressions.

  • Same problem as Eastwood here. Gestrument stay in sleeping state, whatever I do. I tried to use it with ThumJam without success and ended with a crash of he whole system. I tried to delete the app and reinstall it but nothing changed. A shame cause I love Gestrument....

  • I've forwarded the url to this thread to the Gestrument developers.

  • Hi all, sorry to hear about the problems. We are looking into it now, but have so far not been able to duplicate the sleeping state in Audiobus.
    Some of the issues can be traced to the soundfont we are using, which apparently had some extra features for some sounds that is not supported in the Apple player of soundfonts. That's why we added the possibility to change to whichever soundfont you wanted - try loading another soundfont and see if things change. The problems we have experienced is mostly with the piano sound on slot 1 and some of the lead synths. We might just have to try and change those sounds in the soundfont, but it's a soundfont we have gotten permission from the creator of it to use so we have to double check with him that it's ok to change in his soundfont.
    I'll get back to you here when we have found out more about the other issues. Please keep us updated on your issues! /Jesper from Gestrument

  • One more thing. After installing Audiobus I also had Gestrument's synth crackling and going to 300% cpu or so with just playing a few notes. Then I closed all soundapps in the dock and restarted my iPad and then it was gone. Don't know the why of this but it was easily solved.

  • Okay, I managed to isolate the sleeping state bug. The idea here is to use the great Gestrument UI to play sounds from other synth App like say, Sunrizer and record the performance in MTDaw or other apps through Audiobus. I'm aware that I don't need to have Gestrument loaded in Audiobus to do that, but the audiobus panel is really useful to control the output app, that's why I want Gestrument to be loaded in Audiobus too.
    But as soon as you disable the Internal Synth in Gestrument, the iPad goes back to the Audiobus App and you can see Gestrument in a sleeping state. Tapping on the Gestrument icon switch to the app but it goes back to Audiobus after a few seconds, sleeping state again. Enabling the internal synth solve the problem.

    Hope it helps.

  • Thanks Chapalo

  • Sorry to hear about the problems. When adding audiobus support to Gestrument, I forgot to check if it's connected to Audiobus when the user tries to turn off the synth engine. It should not allow the user to turn the synth engine off while connected! We will fix this in the next update.

    In the meanwhile, make sure the internal synth is on and do not turn it off while you're using Gestrument inside Audiobus. If you did so by accident, terminate both Audiobus and Gestrument (by holding them and tapping the minus-sign in the ios multitasking bar).

    Please note that Audiobus has nothing to do with MIDI or using Gestrument as a MIDI controller. You don't need to put Gestrument in the audiobus connection graph when just using it for MIDI, that will just be a waste of CPU. I understand the convenience of the audiobus panel, but perhaps this can be solved in the future by allowing all audiobus compatible apps to show the panel even while they are not connected (just for controlling the apps that are connected).

    Regarding the glitches, I have also found that it's easier to get drop-outs while Audiobus is running, even without any apps in the connection graph. I think this is because of two reasons:
    1. Mainly, Audiobus forces all apps to use a buffer size of 256 frames. This is good for low latency, but bad in some apps where this buffer size is simply too small to get glitch-free audio. I really hope there will be a way to use larger buffers in the future.
    2. Also, Audiobus itself take some CPU cycles, so there is less left for Gestrument.

    Best regards,

    Jonatan - http://kymatica.com
    Developer of Gestrument, AudioShare, BitWiz Audio Synth, Nord Beat, ProLoop

  • Didn´t know Gestrument till now but it seems to me one of the reasons to have an iPad. I´m so keen to get it as soon as my iPad ist back from Apple.

  • edited December 2012

    Thanks Jonatan for the explanation. I really hope that we'll soon be able to have the Audiobus panel in all Audiobus supported apps, even when they aren't loaded in Audiobus.

    @Michael: is it something that each dev could incorporate in their code or is it up to you to put it in the SDK?

    Thanks to everybody for the amazing teamwork!

  • Chapalo, while Michael is busy right now I'll try to answer that: It's not so easy to do that because the connection panel would be filling the whole screen eventually when you have many apps open. But it's still an interesting suggestion.

  • A bugfix release for Gestrument has now been submitted that fixes the audiobus connectivity problems and Zzz-sleeping-state. We've asked Apple for an expedited review process, so maybe it will go live before their winter holidays. If not, it should be out in january.

    @Sebastian: I started a discussion in the dev forums about the panel. Perhaps it would make sense to only show the connected apps in the panel, but show the panel in all apps?
    The most important thing with the panel is not the fast app switching, but the various triggers available (record in loopy, etc..)

  • Ok, let's talk there. Good luck with the review, expediting it was a good idea, although Apple probably have a couple of apps requesting expediting reviews on their hands right now ;D

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