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.

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Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

How to annotate within mp3 files

I have a big project where I need to sort through and annotate a couple hundred audio files--all recordings of my solo ambient jams. The goal is to select excerpts that are good enough to release on SoundCloud. I want to be able to tag and comment on areas within the longer jam files. The jams are quite long, 10 to 25 minutes each.

**I'm looking for a note-taking app for the iPhone where I can make notes as I listen to a track and have the notes somehow linked to timestamps within the audio file. **

I plan on annotating mp3 files and using my notes to do the actual editing of the original .wav files in Logic Pro. If there's a way to annotate directly into .wav files, even better.

Does anybody know of an app that will do this? I've read reviews of some of the notes apps, like Notability and Noted and MarginNotes. They all appear to work with audio files, but I don't think they can import audio files. Or is there a function in an iOS DAW that does this?

Thanks,

Steve
ThinAirX.com

Comments

  • edited March 2020

    Notability can import and playback audio, but there's no timeline to add your markers or comments.
    As a plain guide Anytune is probably your best option.
    Markers appear with a numeric label on the timeline, but if the playhead passes the mark it displays whatever you named this position. Each mark may hold an additional multi-line comment.
    Positioning in the waveform is excellent and you can jump to marked positions.
    (dunno if that's included in the free version, though)

  • Maybe, don’t hold me to this. Maybe someone else can chime in, Twisted Wave Audio Editor?

    https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twistedwave-audio-editor/id401438496

  • @Telefunky thanks for the suggestion. I'll check out Anytune. It's a $40 app but provides 30 free trial.

    Twisted Wave Audio? I'll check that out too.

    How about one of the DAWs for iPhone. I don't have an iOS DAW because I use AUM as my host and Logic Pro for editing. But maybe I should get one if I can do this sorting/selection project on my iPhone.

    Steve

  • edited March 2020

    I looked up Twisted Wave Audio. Looks like the ticket so far. I just realized that "audio editor" is a whole class of apps I didn't really know about. Am I right that an audio editor is a DAW-lite and is for recording and rough edits where a DAW (like Logic) is for compiling and post-production and mastering.

    Markers is what I'm looking for. In my original post I said timestamp and tagging. That's markers.

    Steve

  • wimwim
    edited March 2020

    I don't think you can add text to markers in Twisted Wave. You can add comments at the song level and you can add markers and name them, so I guess you could reference the marker names in the text though. I'm not clear whether there is a limit to the amount of text you can put in comments in twisted wave.

  • Twisted Wave has markers and regions in the OSX version, but that part is left out completely in IOS.

    Ferrite (focussed on podcasting) has some useful features in your context:
    it can tie a marker to an audio section (or to the timeline position) and this marker can be connected to a picture from your image collection on the device.
    Choice is fairly convenient, so you might write by hand on sheet and make a photo.
    The connected photo will appear in the info section that pops up when you tap the marker.

    Ferrite is my favourite app for a similiar purpose like yours (arrange audio snippets from longer sessions).
    It's probably not an instant success because it takes a small amount of time to get familiar with it's touch reaction, but it's very well designed in this specific area, handles extremely long files, unlimited undo/redo, automation tracks for AU parameters and even remembers what files you used in your current project.
    I don't have the latest version (stuck in IOS-9), so this may have improved with the files app, but the only disadvantage is it's flat file hierarchy without project folders.
    Probably kind of overkill to just tag an mp3 file.

  • @Telefunky said:
    Twisted Wave has markers and regions in the OSX version, but that part is left out completely in IOS.

    TW iOS has namable markers.

  • sorry, my bad... messed it with the missing region handling, oops.

  • Heh, I didn’t even know it was there before now. ;)

  • Does anybody know if markers in Twisted Wave iOS (iPhone) will carry over when I export the audio file to Logic Pro? If so, I'm sold.

    Steve

  • Thanks @wim for finding that out. i have TW Audio Editor but I got it like 2 years ago, when there was a massive price drop and haven’t used it much. I knew it had some note taking capabilities but wasn’t sure how much or if it was what @ThinAirX was looking for. Thanks for finding that answer.

  • Check out MP3 Chapters in Ferrite

    http://service.wooji-juice.com/ferrite/user-guide/ferrite-user-guide-2.4.2.html#chap_mp3chapters

    Chapters are markers that you can place into projects at particular moments in time. While you can use them to quickly jump around a project while editing it, they are designed to be included in the final .MP3 file when you export it, typically for use in podcasts. Many podcast players allow listeners to skip straight to the start of a chapter, and some can display custom artwork for each chapter, or allow a chapter to contain a link to a website.

  • @ThinAirX said:
    Does anybody know if markers in Twisted Wave iOS (iPhone) will carry over when I export the audio file to Logic Pro? If so, I'm sold.

    Steve

    I doubt it. I can't test with Logic Pro, but I exported a file with markers, then opened with Audacity, and the markers weren't there. Ableton Live too.

  • I'll check out Ferrite. Thanks @wim and @mojozart (I love your handle, Mojozart!).

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