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.
Spacecraft or Quanta
I haven't explored granular synthesis
yet so I don't want to go in blind.
I'm favouring Spacecraft namely because
I can use ,'samples', up to 20mins long.
What's the general consensus?
Thank you in advance.
Comments
I'm not huge on granular synths - but I have both Quanta, Spacecraft, and Tardigrain - Spacecraft is by far my favourite out of those 3. (Tardigrain would be my 2nd choice)
I've just found out how to wire the aftertouch app from my iPhone into tardigrain, jeez it's good, a whole new instrument - mapped x/y to start/end of grain and z to length - granular samplr bow-a-like 😁
With Spacecraft it’s easy to get something good sounding out of it without really trying.
Excellent reverb, excellent midi etc.
With Tardigrain it’s still relatively simple to get something good out of it but if your not familiar with its inner workings it can be a bit stiff.
Quanta has a lot of depth and a solid synth in it to boot. A LOT of options on what the grains do. Solid file importing for using your own samples and is capable of percussive noise, altered Instruments and lush soundscapes.
spacecraft! def spacecraft
Borderlands? I’ve got both Quanta and Tardigrain. Quanta easily sounds more musical because you can layer in the oscillator, Tardigrain needs a manual. So far I prefer Quanta as it’s way easier to explore. But having seen videos of the latest version of Borderlands, it looks pretty accessible and sounds great. Dropped it on my wish list immediately.
Spacecraft...can be sci-fi to dark sounding...and definitely makes sound beds
tardigrain...would absolutely rule at making cringe dark ghostly stuff
Quanta...in my opinion is more instrument like, and makes grainy synth sounds
Borderlands...is an atmosphere drone monster
These apps can do more, but these are my main uses for them. Hope it helps.
Also...borderlands is NOT auv3 if this is a factor
That certainly helps me. The Spacecraft UI scared me away. I need to spend more time with granular in general but time has been in short supply.
If it’s important to you, with Spacecraft you can process audio live, while Quanta can’t. Tardigrain can sample if used in an effect slot, but you need to stop recording in order to use it.
I’ve thought about using Granular in Spectrum for live processing, it seems like it does that. Anyone have any experience with Granular on live audio?
Not to derail this thread..
if you’re new to granular and want a great instrument that’s massively inspiring and easy to use...spacecraft
Spacecraft for arpeggiating pads with a relatively simple granular engine, and playable, well matched effects.
Borderlands for a deeper, more flexible granular synthesis engine that also has a truly outstanding touchscreen UX.
Quanta for a similarly deeper/customizable granular synthesis engine but with a wavetable synth style workflow. In particular, quanta makes it easy to get predictable, playable pitches at small (below 50ms) grain sizes.
Spacecraft is a trip.. you'll love where it takes you..
Borderlands for a different kind of journey..
Synth / Sound / Field scalpers easily outperform Borderland / Quanta / Spacecraft. I have all the above. The only downside of scalpers is its cryptic learning curve.
The various granular synthesis apps have different approaches. So, comparisons are really of the apple vs. mango variety. Granular synthesis is a broad category. I'd check out Jakob Haq's video that surveys them and might give you a sense of whether one speaks to you more than another.
They are all good fun (including Borderlands) and will inspire different varieties of sound.
Jakob Haq video with granular synths
They're really so different that they can't be compared. Quanta offers a ton of fine control over everything. On the other hand: in Soviet Russia, Spacecraft controls you.
+1 for the Scapers. Esteemed forum member @MarkH has a number of outstanding YouTube videos on them (and on Tardigrain as well).
I find Spacecraft best for smooth granular pads, Borderlands is great too because it offers the easiest way of intuitively mixing different granulized samples.
The Scapers offer a very deep and scientific approach but that takes away lot of the fun I have with the others.
Quanta is the best iOS granular-oscillator synth I know. Extremely deep, powerful modulations and great for rhythmical and rough, grainy stuff. It can do pads too but not as smoothly as Spacecraft.
But if all you want is smooth pads from almost any sample, Spacecraft does it.
There’s nothing comparable to Spacecraft, or Borderlands, or the various Scapers.
Don’t have Quanta (yet) but that looks great too.
Hope that helps!
Surprised nobody mentioned iDensity, having played around with other options this is the one I’m coming back to most often.
Borderlands would be my favorite, but no AUv3 support yet (I think the promise is it will come in one of the next updates)
Borderlands as AU was something the developer mentioned he might consider at some stage in the future.
@Gravitas just a word of warning, it's actaully the more expensive desktop version that has the option to go to use longer dutation input samples (up to 16mins). The iOS version is unfortunately limited to only 2 minutes for the input audio sample duration.
The 20 minutes you mentioned is actually the duration of the output recording you can make in the iOS standalone version (this feature is for recording your performance and is redundant when using as AUv3).
Also, somebody else mentioned the live granularisation. This feature will be significantly improved soon with an endless buffer mode (named 'infinite' mode) and is currently in beta, close to release.
Quanta is a cool synth, and I haven't used any of the others you mention. With that said, Quanta can be a real bitch to get things in tune and sounding useful. I can make some fantastic sound fx and soundbed type stuff, but it's rare that I'm able to properly dial in a sound that I would use in a full song.
Thank you for the warning.
2 minutes will be more than sufficient for my needs right now.
Infinite mode??
Sounds interesting.
Great news, thank you! 🤗
I've had a lot of mileage just out of spectrum's granular one - just made a soundtrack for a little arty film poem thing in working on by freezing and tweaking me playing the guitar. Did a twelve minute take that edited nicely down to ten minutes (basically took out some gash bits where I manually tweaked the pitch and it sounded lame as it transitioned)
Worth a good play with if you have time - read the manual for the euro rack mutable instruments Clouds module, it's basically an emulation of that as far as I can tell...
Nice, thanks for bringing new features to an already awesome product!
Can you not do the same in Spacecraft?
Understatement of the universe.