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.

AudioStretch Lite cool trick

edited November 2019 in App Tips and Tricks

This app, https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/audiostretch/id571863178 is an IAA generator which loads up fine in AUM, and is designed chiefly for people wanting to slow down tracks to learn them, but I just realised the free version also allows you to scrub manually back and forth through the sample, for some cool granular/delay type effects which you can then, obviously, record live into the file player. The paid for version allows a much greater range of time and pitch stretch. I’ll hang on a while to see if it hits the sales, but even the free version is a lot of fun for sample manipulation. - a poor person’s Samplr?

Comments

  • It's also great to analyze chords using the built-in keyboard+spectrum.
    I hope the pro version gets customizable audio-to-MIDI conversion one day.

  • @Svetlovska i’d like this kind of tool... already went through the lite version ( thanks for the tip btw 🙃 )… is the full version working well or is there a better app on the market right now ?

  • edited May 2020

    @mlau - I held off paying for the full version for ages, but now I’m really glad I did. I know of nothing else like it for IOS, and whilst not as flexible or extreme as Paulstretch on Mac or PC, it really does handle massive slowdowns and even reverse through zero of pitch and tempo independently without huge amounts of artifacting, staying musical throughout. It also makes grabbing audio from video dead easy (though Koala https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/koala-sampler/id1449584007 now also includes this) which makes screen recording of musically interesting but unconnected older apps very usable as sample fodder. (You can also get some interesting effects by screen recording yourself manually scrubbing through a waveform - it’s how I made this one):

    It’s dead easy to loop sections, you can save out anything between the cursors very quickly as wavs, and the keyboard shows you the dominant pitches in your clip which can help with tuning the loops.

    One other thing I like to do is create a looping section from source material at whatever speed and direction I want, then save out pitch shifted tempo identical versions of these wavs at say an octave above and below, a third, fifth, and seventh, and then sync loop these on separate File Player channels in AUM to create chordal effects which I know will be in tune with each other. Throw in Perforator https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/perforator/id1382134258, MM-1 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/mm-1-mutemaster/id1503359958 and MIDILFOs https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/midilfos-midi-modulator/id998273841 on channel control and you can build a piece just from ‘tape loops’.

    I used the repitched loops trick on this one, working from a really minimal Mood https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/mood/id1218198148 / Cykle https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/cykle/id1187680637 clip I audio recorded in AUM then took into AudioStretch to create more loops for the whole piece, no other instruments used:

    I’m also told that AudioStretch might be useful to those guitarist chappies, for some reason or other. :)

    tl:dr - buy it, if sample mangling is your thing, you won’t regret it.

  • @Svetlovska amazing tracks and amazing trick.

    Just try to buy Audiostretch to see if I can make something sounding similar because these two tracks are epic.

    Thanks also for explaining all the procedure you ran through.

  • edited May 2020

    @Svetlovska most amazing answer i ever received ! Your music is really good , thanks for sharing ... ok, am sold 😎

    Ps do you have a bandcamp ?

  • @Charlesalbert @mlau: thanks both for the listens, and kind words. Have fun with AudioStretch, and let me know how it works out. :)

  • @Svetlovska i added a post scriptum.... do you have a bandcamp ?

  • just got it, will let you know when bread comes out of the oven 😎

  • @mlau: great, I look forward to it. Yes, I have just got Bandcamp, still figuring it out, I’m intending to edit some of my tracks into an album to go on there in the next few days. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, here’s the link (but nothing on there yet):

    https://cthonicist.bandcamp.com/

  • That's an awesome technique!! Thanks for sharing! And good call on the supplemental apps like MM-1. I think I'm gonna need to give perforator a try now.

  • Great tips Svetlovska. I just compared the stretching quality of audiostretch and cs spectral. I think cs spectral is more flexible. It can also do pretty much any size of stretch, and can reverse etc too. But the advantage is that it gives control over ft factor and overlap size. This can give audibly much more dynamic and interesting results. From the manual:

  • Only problem is that there seems to be a bug that means you can’t actually choose the name that your files get when you save them, also seems to be no way to rename them. Small inconvenience though...

  • Wow Gavisnki, I've had this app for years and never realized it had that feature. I think you were saying it's a bit tricky importing audio into the app though, right?

  • It is a bit, it’s possible though. Have a go and see if you can figure out a more direct way to do it, let me know if you succeed! This ability, along with reverse etc, is in the ‘files’ tab, 2nd from left on bottom.

  • edited May 2020

    Can we use cs spectral in AUM with IPad Pro 2018/2020? Or there is a bug with sample rates like some other old apps?

  • I’m using 2018 iPad Pro, both directly in AUM and through audiobus work, if a little temperamental to load. Once you figure it out it is generally smooth enough. Actually more stable in AUM / AB3 than standalone!

  • @Gavinski said:
    I’m using 2018 iPad Pro, both directly in AUM and through audiobus work, if a little temperamental to load. Once you figure it out it is generally smooth enough. Actually more stable in AUM / AB3 than standalone!

    @Gavinski thanks for the answer.

    I don’t have the app. It’s a little bit pricey (21.99 euros) so I just need to focus what it can do.

    Maybe I watch some YouTube videos now.

    For soundscapes would you prefer CS SPectral or Audiostretch?

    So no audio artifact with the app even if using it without external audio card? (At 48000Hz)?

    Thanks again.

  • I’ll share a couple of stretched samples later if I can. I am no expert on either of these apps, by the way, they are both pretty new to me. Audiostretch has only really that one feature, stretching and reversing audio, and showing pitch of notes, as far as I gather. Cs Spectral has that and tons more. No idea of the sample rate of either. Maybe u can find that info in the manual. Doug did a pretty good video on the basics of it. It’s one of those things that if you like these kind of leftfield things it can do, it is worth every penny, but as we saw in the Samplr discussion earlier today/yesterday depending on your time zone, ppl have wildly differing opinions about apps, lol.

  • @Svetlovska many thanks ! Your bandcamp is in my fav.... will check it 👍

  • @Charlesalbert i think it is 44100hz. Does this matter when slowing down and doing soundscape stuff do u think? I like lofi anyway, no biggie for me

  • edited May 2020

    I know little about sampling though, so there may be other reasons why it matters, if so feel free to enlighten me

  • Thanks for the brilliant tip. I’m a longtime user of AudioStretch, but never knew that it was IAA compliant.
    I’m not going to get anything done today.

  • Don’t think I have time to do the audio examples for that, uploading etc that it would require today. Let’s just see if somoeome who knows both apps well can chime in maybe

  • edited May 2020

    @Svetlovska - Did you see the iOS shortcut I made? It should help you get the audio from a video directly into Audiostretch without needing Koala.

    (Used Audiostretch lite for my tests, but can be changed to Audiostretch)

    https://routinehub.co/shortcut/5189

  • edited May 2020

    Hi, @Samflash3 : thanks, yes, I saw it, clever stuff :), but AudioStretch Full Version (and now Koala) can import videos direct, and both can export the audio from these as wavs back to AudioShare, which is how I work anyway, so for my own use case, I don’t need the shortcut. (If I take a video into AudioStretch, it’s because I intend to muck about with it in there.)

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