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.

MIDI 2.0 / 32 bit, Bi-directionality, latency, acoustics and the fall of the almighty keyboard?

Comments

  • edited June 2021

    This could TRULY be game changing. Hope current controllers can be updated to the new protocol via firmware updates.

  • heshes
    edited June 2021

    @Lil_Stu07 said:
    This could TRULY be game changing. Hope current controllers can be updated to the new protocol via firmware updates.

    I don't really see the game-changing-ness. I guess it's great to have greater resolution, but as the article says right now, with the 128 value quantization, only "for some really sophisticated listeners, they can clearly hear the steps between points. " I don't think this includes me. In fact, I expect it's going to be similar the debate over whether people can hear the difference between, say, a 256kbit/s MP3 compression and an uncompressed audio file. Many people will think they hear a difference. But the difference will actually be quite small, and many people who claim to hear it will be fooling themselves.

    Regarding latency, I don't know what there is in midi 2.0 to improve it, couldn't glean what the issue is from the article or how it's supposed to be improved by the new midi spec. I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem like latency issues right now are caused by a deficient midi spec. Aren't current latency issues mostly caused by the DA/AD audio conversion step, and independent of or unrelated to midi?

    Mostly, I think Adam Neely, an expert consulted for the article, has it right in the final paragraph of the article:

    Adam Neely points out that most of the effects won’t be heard for years, or perhaps decades.
    The amount of choice MIDI 2.0 allows may now seem superfluous, but he thinks it’s hard 
    to know what music will sound like 50 years from now. The recent MIDI update could 
    allow people to build musical worlds we can’t yet imagine. 
    

    I like the musical world we've got right now.

  • Looks like Apple is embracing MIDI 2.0.
    https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremidi
    https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremidi/midi_capability_inquiry/publishing_and_discovering_midi_capabilities

    Bidirectional discovery and configuration of devices without all the current desktop hacks would be awesome.

    WWDC 21 starts tomorrow!
    Will Apple eventually make a MIDI keyboard controller?
    Or how about just a damn USB-C hub? :smiley:

  • Well, this would be nice.

  • @hes said:
    I like the musical world we've got right now.

    You’re in luck. MIDI 2.0 is backwards compatible, so you can continue to use MIDI as it is now, zipper noise and all.

  • I really don’t think it will have that big of an impact on the popularity of the keyboard though, or at least not in the near term. It’s so deeply entrenched in Western music that it would probably take time for it to drop off the musical map.

  • heshes
    edited June 2021

    @ksound said:

    @hes said:
    I like the musical world we've got right now.

    You’re in luck. MIDI 2.0 is backwards compatible, so you can continue to use MIDI as it is now, zipper noise and all.

    Exactly. Yeah, I never said that I wasn't looking forward to Midi 2.0, or that it wasn't a good thing. I just said I didn't expect it to be game changing. I think ease of use improvements, especially, could be quite nice. Improvements in sound also welcome. But will they be "game changing"? Somehow I think not.

    Is MIDI related at all to zipper noise? Not sure, isn't zipper noise simply the phenomenon when a cpu lacks the speed/power to ramp up an envelope instantaneously? Then you get a click or a crackle. I guess the zipper noise is what happens when you try to avoid this by smoothing the change, and then the steps in the ramp up are evident. If so, then either (1) faster-cpu, (2) more-efficient-synth or (3) midi 2.0, for when you need to smooth, could help. Regardless, I expect there's enough confusion about MIDI 2.0 that people are going to be thinking it's relevant to things it has no effect at all on.

  • Yeah, there's only 128 possible values in regular 7-bit MIDI, so developers had to resort to interpolation/smoothing or use two CCs to make things like controlling filter cutoff to sound smooth, without stepping. Pitchbend is 14-bit (16,384 possible values), try it.

  • wimwim
    edited June 2021

    Well, I expect the first game that will be changed is MPE. It's just a hack after-all to adapt the existing MIDI spec to polyphonic expression. MIDI 2.0 has the capability to replace MPE with something less cobbled together.

    I don't get the impact on latency other than that the baud-rate for serial midi communication over DIN is quite low and I assume MIDI 2.0 addresses that. It had better, considering that many times more data will be required for MIDI 2.0.

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