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.
Why no love for bias fx2?
I feel like when it first came out everybody shit on it. Honestly though I feel like it improved on the best guitar amp sim on iOS, and maybe on any os, in almost every way (I wish presets carried over). The sound is sooo good and realistic imo. I feel like I owe positive grid the thousands I’ve saved by completely switching to digital from analog over the last few years to practice, record, and gig with.
I also don’t think non auv3 is a big deal for this type of app. At least with Bm3, IAA works just as well as auv3 would for all intended purposes. Anyways, ramble over, just hoping to spark some discussion and hopefully some love for this app.
Comments
Positive Grid is a shitty company who have burned a lot of people from way back when? No love for them here. Personally I will not purchase another of their products after getting burned a few times with a lack of an upgrade/update path for existing users, from FX to FX2, for example. At one point there was no news at all on the horizon that a new replacement product was coming out, so I bought and it was replaced a few weeks later. Eventually they might have made it right but only after existing users squawked.
I do get tempted every once in a while but then realize
Sorry but I just don't think it sounds as good as Overloud. Also IAA, seriously? IAA will be dropped by Apple at some point, which means that any money invested in BIAS will be wasted.
I’ve got it and upgraded, and can see it being used for live use (standalone) going forward with no issues. Plus since this has recording, it brings it up to speed with Amplitube and even JamUp Pro where you can export the recording to be used further. I’m mostly modular with Nembrini and others now, though. I’ve dialed in a good sound that I’m happy with.
I switched from bias fx(amp 2) to tonebridge year ago,then week ago I changed again to bias fx 2 with only amp(no cab) from Bias Amp 2 cloud and finally I’ve started to use Thafknar with ir’s for my taste,because cabs make most difference
@Polar : I think there isn’t a lot of love for Bias FX because there are better sounding amp sims now.
I like Bias FX2. I have a lot guitar software on iOS and Mac (also I have a tube amp and a bunch of pedals), and I can assure you that this is one of the best ampsim today! This is my usual, when I need a good sound for blues, and I have couple of amps which I crafted for my purporses. I have all expansions on iOS and desktop and I very hapy with sound I can reach out with Bias FX.
No Auv3 and tone capture only available on desktop.
Theres lots of AUV3 alternative that sound sound better to my ears : THU or Nembrini, Tonebridge, or even TC-helicon Guitar Rack.
So yes for me no love for Bias FX
I have been gigging with BiasFX into my Bose L1 model 2 for a couple years now. I have better tone than most local players. The Bias FX EQ modules are your friend. I use them to tame any fizziness or annoying frequencies. Also put a tube screamer in front of the amp in Biasfx with the drive turned down works wonders to fatten up a Marshall model. I had a stroke a couple years ago so I can't lug my tube amps to gigs. No modeling app comes close to the feel of a great tube amp yet. They keep getting closer though.
Out of curiosity have you tried any of the latest batches of amp sims: THU Overloud, Nembrini or Mooer GE Labs?
@Polar I’m pretty new to iOS sims and only started shopping this year, it seemed like many were angry with PG because there was no path to upgrade from FX1, and FX2 started out buggy at first and with no midi. It’s how people felt about Cubasis, there was no path to upgrade from CB2 to CB3 and CB3 was crash city.
All that aside, I played around with the FX2 free demo and was not compelled to go in on it. I think the overall feeling I got was “fizzy”, which in turn seemed digital. That’s my limited opinion. I recently watched two lengthy YouTube demos on FX2, one sounded horrible and the other sounded amazing, so I’m sure there’s a path to good tone there. I was much much more impressed with Ge Labs on first impression.
Now, I have completely gone crazy with Nembrini and Overloud. I have all the Nembrini amps and the Overloud full pack plus 11 rigs. Why?? Because they sound so much better to me and so much more real than the other apps. I don’t think it’s a fair contest to compare Overloud and Nembrini to Bias, Amplitube, Tonestack, Depthlike, etc... it’s not even close if we’re talking real analog amp sound fidelity. I think Ge Labs is the wild card, as it has tonal elements of Bias and Overloud, and the most interesting pricing model.
The short answer, PG has been surpassed but experienced simmers have invested and can get great sounds out of it...
The nembrini stuff sounds great. I own just about all of their stuff. One of the things I like about Bias FX is that everything(amps,fx,cabs, IR's) is in one wrapper. I intend to do a deep dig into the Nembrini apps while I am on vacation next week. I will definitely check out the other two as well. Still, for me, nothing sounds or feels like a tube amp on the verge of breaking up. They keep getting closer though.
Why no love for Amplitube either? Because we have AUv3 choices at some great prices.
@dafrimpster agreed there’s nothing quite like a real tube amp, specifically how the tubes react to playing and picking dynamics. The living and breathing dynamic range of a tube amp is the hardest thing to recreate, whereas sounds and tones are subjective to one’s taste.
I don’t know your preferred style but if you are looking for one wrapper with everything and midi I’d consider Overloud. If we’re talking real amps on the verge of breaking up, their Rigs for Fender Bassman and Super Reverb and the Orange and Vox rigs are REAL. They’re not the sims which are also great, they’re the captured Rigs. They also have a few more vintage rigs and plenty of metal ones. Yes $18-$26 is a lot to pay for one rig but each comes with 50-100 captures of different setting iterations, they can be adjusted like regular amps but work better as presented, and you can add all the stompboxes around them. If you hone in on an amp you want, you won’t be disappointed in its Rig version. The one amp rigs are captured ad nauseam, and the rigs with several amps have fewer iterations of each. Some rigs have 300 captures and only 10 presets, others have 50 captures and 70 presets. You will find your tube tone!
Btw, captured rigs are still simulations. They just happen to be sims whose parameters are derived from analysis of an actual amp by sampling the amp with input signals at different levels in order to capture the non-linearities more accurately than if a programmer tried to algorithmically generated the non-linearities.
It is a process that still involves amp simulation and is not like capturing IRs.
But the Rig cabinets are IRs aren’t they? Isn’t that what makes them different form their cabinet sims? Otherwise it’s just semantics for using a different technology.
I can’t tell you if the rigs sound exactly like the real amps since I don’t own them, but as good as the Overloud sims are I found that the rigs sound even better, more tightly responsive and more real. Granted they’re not as tweakable as the amp sims, many of which are phenomenal like the Brunettis and the three Randalls. The Rigs on the other hand are essentially excellent natural sounding presets that are instantly usable. You can still make presets with them by adding pedal sims but don’t really need to. I’m using 50/50 sims and rigs right now. My head explodes with the possibilities...
Cabinet IRs are a totally different thing from the "sampling" they do of amps to capture the amp characteristics. The IRs only capture the cabinet characteristics (no differently from other good cabinet IRs).
Cabinet IRs just use simple convolution.
The sampling of amps to derive their (distortion) characteristics is a VERY different thing. Basically, you sample the amps to determine how to adjust the parameter curves used by your amp simulation. There is really nothing similar about the process.
It isn't semantics.
Ok so it’s a different or newer simulation technology which sounds great, whereas IR is basically the reverb of a room captured with a tiny sample. Which do you prefer IRs or new non-linear tech? Specifically for guitar cab...
I think you don't understand. The IR and amp simulation we are talking about are for different parts of the signal path.
In the amp rigs, the IR is ONLY for the speaker cabinet. It has nothing to do with the amp.
The amp simulation is for the pre-amp and power amp. The 'sampling' of real amps is for deriving the internal settings of the amp simulation.
So, it isn't a matter of which you like better IR or non-linear. The IR is just for the speaker cabinet. Essentially it provides EQ and some small amount of early reflections.
The IRs have nothing to do with the amp/poweramp/distortion.
Yes that’s obvious, but I’m asking about the Rig cabinets not the rig amps. In the rig player you can choose all the different cabinets not just the matched one for that rig. You can also turn off the rig amp and just use the cabinet. So I’m assuming those are Overloud’s or Choptones IRs, and not cab simulations from their cab collection. And the point is that the amps are being sampled and then re-created, which is more accurate than just a sim approximation. Sorry for my misunderstanding, but we are still talking about captured rigs here. Obviously you can’t capture an amp only its behavior. Are their sim cabs and rig cabs different? I’m assuming they are...
I sunk a decent amount of money in Positive Grid stuff. JamUp I actually feel okay about because it mostly worked and allowed me to record in iOS and learn to use DAW's. So even though it's been eclipsed now, it was a decent product 7-8 years ago.
All the BIAS variants really irritated me after awhile. Too resource-hungry for the available hardware, too crash-prone, and too much money-grabbing by reissuing full apps instead of improving the base product.
This may sound ridiculous, but while the original BIAS modeling was lauded for being "next gen", I thought it was kind of sterile and that a lot of people may have just been responding to the built-in room reverb that was included with the app.
@espiegel123 so then the high price tag of the rigs is because they’re simulating based on the actual real amp and offering preset rigs, and no other reason? It’s clever marketing. How is it different from the sim collection then? Capture modeling vs approximation?
Totally agree. Death by a thousand tiny cuts!
Talk about consistently finding new ways to alienate your core audience. 😡
I noticed something in the "Guitar Plug-in" market recently.
Hardware platforms emerged that support 3rd party plug-ins:
Kemper
Fractal
Mooer
United Audio
and many more.
So, companies like OverLoud thought "we can build a software" 3rd party plug-in engine.
So, we get the OverLoud iRig Player that can accept and run software that can be sold by Choptones for all the hardware platforms and OverLoud's iRig Player (but marketed directly by OverLoud in this case to simplify support and the distribution/installation details. So, the $18 cost of an iRig Collection might involve a revenue split between OverLoud and ChopTones.
It also help understand why they appear to be competing with themselves
and confusing their customers a bit but as you say... the results can be really, really good.
So, an "Amp Sim" can narrow it's focus to a precise hardware emulation and include cabinet details or split that into another piece of software.
But the technical details of all these approaches to Software-based Guitar Plug-ins are specific to the vendor and they compete on implementation details but this "plug-in" running in a simulated hardware "plug-in" that runs in a DAW is just following trends in the guitar hardware marketplace.
I'm not sure but I think some hardware can install multiple plug-ins not unlike what we do with AUv3's in series... so pre-amp, power amp, cabinet, room models could be assembled in the hardware. Maybe someone with a UAD audio interface can comment.
The process of sampling the amps and fine-tuning your simulation code to match the actual performance is time-consuming and something users can't do if THU (for example) is sampling particularly good-sounding actual amps. So, there is some special value there if the modeling and sampling is really good. They will do a better job of capturing real systems -- I haven't used them so I can't speak as to whether the technology they are using works well enough to merit the difference in price.
How is it different from the sim collection? Think of it this way. Someone develops some algorithms that generally model how a pre-amp and amp work. These things have non-linear responses (particularly when you push them) and have a lot of parameters that contribute to the result. One method of 'modeling' is to basically simulate the many different systems (sometimes actually the actual electronics but usually not) that contribute to the sound. When you do that, you will come up with some approximations of of how those things respond as you change their settings. You then spend some time refining your math/algorithms till they sound good to you and are pretty much in the ballpark.
The reality is that if you do a detailed comparison of your simulation to an actual amp -- you will find that at different setting the real amp doesn't respond in the way you model predicted. The maths are so complicated that trying to fine-tune your algorithms to predict the actual behavior may be an exercise in frustration. But you can get close by mapping out the non-linearities and applying those to your predicted model to get much closer to what was observed.
That is is gross oversimplification, but hopefully it made sense.
Thanks! This makes a lot of sense with the marketing and selling approach Overloud uses for the Rigs, because they talk about getting their hands on a specific amp from a certain year or from a friend’s collection, or equipping a certain amp with specific tubes or more vintage specs. So a specific great amp could lead to a really great capture. It’s funny though that some of their Rigs are popular combo amps that have specific stock speakers for their signature sound, yet they still provide rigs using all kind of 4X12s and other variations. Makes more sense to mix and match cabinets on an amp head. A few of their rigs do sound better and wetter than the sims to justify the price point. But there’s also nothing like finding an amp sim that you can sculpt from scratch. Thank you for your clarifications.
U guys have (unfortunately) made some very compelling points...and now I have to go reconsider everything
I still personally feel the sound is great, but I guess I haven’t delved into the nembrini apps enough.
I do have to say though that the presets they come with are not a good indicator of its quality, it’s really when the tone cloud community (one of the best features) gets going that the potential shines through.
That’s biggest problem with 2 though...the presets available didn’t carry over and now it has to take time again for people to create new ones
Yeah, the Nembrini present aren’t that great. They should hire @flo26 for some incendiary tone presets!
They have offered some excellent tips, (like lowering your input levels while in the rack mode) to create more pristine clean tones in the non-overdriven channels...
IR cabs vastly improve the tone as well!
I beg to differ. Presets for an amp sim are kind of silly. Every guitar, player, interface, type of strings, etc are too different for presets to have any hope of consistent meaning. Demos can be a good indicator of the overall character and capabilities of a sim. Presets? Nah.
There are a few presets I’ve found or built in all the amp sims I have, which has made it hard to get rid of any of them. However, I will say that the big difference I’ve found with the Nembrini amps is the dynamics and responsiveness to playing style. At first that was hard to get used to after playing with good, but stodgy amp sims. I could play as sloppy as anything and it would all sound pretty much the same. Not anymore, and now that I’m used to it, I’m hooked.
Sorry I meant bias’ stock presets not nembrini, although I agree with you
Idk, I was able to find any tone I wanted along with multiple versions from the community user presets of the first bias. I’m talking down to guitar player, song, and even section of a song (I.e. there’s an amazing run like hell intro preset that sounds near identical.) And I enjoy being able to switch from slash, to Gilmour to Stevie ray vaughn emulations in an instant.