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.
How difficult is it to support splitscreen?
Owning a 12.9" iPad that I chose over smaller form factor in 2017 expecting split screen support would gain traction among app developers, I started lately looking for a more portable option since most apps are not designed for the big screen anyways, and it is kind of a bummer / missed opportunity.
Auv3 hosts windows managing seems to follow the same path...
How difficult is it for developers to bring split screen support to existing apps or even to new ones?
Will having a bigger screen ever be a plus for music making on ios?
Comments
Split screen support can be surprisingly easy from a development standpoint. You're already trying to deal with different screen sizes, AU host windows, and orientations so the same adaptive layout strategies tend to carry over without much hassle.
That being said, some apps are easier to support than others. If you've got a layout full of knobs that are designed to display across a horizontal axis and suddenly the window size becomes extremely narrow and tall (as in split screen in portrait mode) you might have more trouble.
I think multitasking might even become mandatory for new apps in the near future.
@TonalityApp That's why I'm still slightly baffled why there's no "portrait split screen" option so that two apps would display one below the other, each in landscape. That would be much easier to deal with layout-wise for app developers. But maybe I didn't think it through and there's obvious problems with that approach.
@SevenSystems Yeah that kind of layout seems far better for both developers and users. I can’t think of too many downsides other than trying to figure out a consistent process to enter such a layout as opposed to a vertical split (but that’s an Apple decision). I think Android has something like that already. Maybe we’ll see it in iOS 14...
I guess for maxiPad it isn’t big of a challenge. But what about smaller devices that support split? That would require a completely different/new layout.
@0tolerance4silence Definitely in some cases. However I've found that once you've already dealt with the problem of an extremely tiny AU window or an iPhone, a split screen on something like an iPad mini isn't too bad.