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.

New keyboard app that has movable notes under your fingers in development!

The Dev Andrew Stern want feedback from users during the design stage to see what might be useful.

Comments

  • How are you ascending and descending on the scale hitting the same keys? Whatever you’re visually doing on the video makes no musical sense. Can you provide more information?

  • Surprisingly cool for people who can't lay down phrases like that on a keyboard.

  • I I think the top row runs up the scale and the bottom row of buttons runs down the scale. Then you choose one of the buttons along the row to jump to a different note and/or scale. The big button up top repeats. Interesting.

  • Looks like a pretty 'Jam Friendly' app!
    Just keep the groove without any fear of hitting the wrong notes :)

  • Very cool. Reminds me of the auto button on Geoshred.

  • Would be good to be able to program in a chord progression, and/or send midi in for that purpose.

  • Having fixed buttons to ascend, descend the scale and stay on the same pitch reminds me of some chant notations that doesn't notate pitch but instead the shape of melodies.

    Some potentials that immediately brings to mind...

    • the ability to do similar things to 2 linked voices (thus doing polyphonic harmony with the voices going parallel, opposite motions as well as one voice droning etc)
    • being able to quickly pair notes in a scale that goes together often in the song and thus having a button that 'suggest' the linked note when one of note is played, much like the word suggestion on keyboard input, but instead making it easy for some characteristic intervals in a song
    • buttons that works like 'undo' (and probably also 'redo') that can retrace the past few notes played, making it easy to run the way you came on the melody. This could get very interested if combined with some sort of transpose button, but this is getting complex and I haven't really got this thought out yet

    Very exciting app idea!

  • Now that's innovation!

  • My 1st reaction was "Very nice. Great idea, and a great demo"

    My 2nd was "I wonder how hard it would be to implement a lot of this functionality in Mozaic"

    My 3rd was "Damn I wish I had more control over the UI in Mozaic"...

  • _ki_ki
    edited July 2021

    @monch1962 Since the dev‘s idea is soo cool and different, I just wanted to play around with it.

    I already implemented a prototype using the 16pads layout in Mozaic just to be able to try how this would feel like. There are a lot of things to consider, like on which time-point the pad mapping will change as several pads are likely to be pressed together (Finger of the old pad isn‘t lifted yet), or how to return to a specific note etc.
    I now have something where i can play deterministic melody lines, but as one needs to press a specific pad for note repetition it needs totally different finger movement and muscle memory than a regular keyboard.

    And no - i‘m not going to publish the script as there will be an app with a better UI and probably better fundamental concept on how to play. The dev’s prototype also has mod-wheel support through finger movement on the pad, so there are lots of additional features not possible to mockup/implement with Mozaic.

    And f we are lucky, the app will support AUv3 after some updates if it sells well and enough requests were made for this feature.

  • Is there any ways of getting in touch with the dev other than Twitter?

  • @_ki before reading your response, I did exactly the same thing (built it on the 16pad Mozaic layout) and found the same challenges. I chose to implement it so that you could pre-configure Mozaic with a root and a scale (only implemented "major" and "minor") beforehand using the knobs, then have Mozaic listen to an incoming MIDI stream and remember the last "note on"+velocity+channel. That way you could play something on keyboard, then switch straight over to playing the Mozaic pads without any sudden jumps in range/volume/channel as you switched from keyboard to Mozaic. Those sorts of details only become obvious once you start thinking about how to implement it.

    I also did it just to try out the idea, not with the aim of trying to build something robust or release-worthy. It works well enough as an experiment though.

    My conclusion is that Andrew Stern has come up with a very clever concept, particularly if you're not particularly musically adept but like the idea of playing those sorts of "rippling" runs. If his app lands with AUv3 support, I'll be buying it

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