Throwing hardware at it!

I tend to keep with a policy of skipping each generation of hardware and since I dutifully skipped the 4th generation iPad, I broke down and bought an iPad Air. There was a $200 buyback that I took advantage of for my ancient and unused iPad first generation as well so it wasn't quite as much of a wallet shock. I went with the 64GB model because I do store tons of music samples on my iPad and the size does matter! I opted for the full size model instead of the Mini because again, with synth apps, the size matters.

Early reports have been very good related to music making on the Air and I can confirm that most of my performance concerns on CPU have been addressed. If you follow my tutorials or postings on Noatikl,  you might remember that I used mainly Sampletank due to its ability to give 4 MIDI channels without too much CPU overhead provided you use a light DAW along with Audiobus.

So, with the Air, I decided to try a piece with a heavy DAW and with 3 concurrent synths recording. The heavy DAW is my favorite, Auria and the synths are the Dxi synth, Thor and Alchemy Mobile. I drove all 3 synths with Noatikl which would usually bring my 3rd gen iPad to its knees. Without a hitch I was able to record all three concurrently into Auria, which is a very heavy DAW by itself.

Another recent addition to music making on the iPad is inter app audio as I blogged before and I added some additional tracks using the Arturia Oberheim SEM synth and my old standby Sampletank for the violin.



Throughout the piece, Auria was responsive and the tracks all recorded without issue. I think I can now add many more concurrent tracks with Noatikl and Auria is now a go-to DAW for me. I'll be posting more as I experiment further. Thanks for reading!

More DAW-like than ever - iOS7, Auria and Garageband

Arturia Mini with IAA transport shown

With iPad's iOS7, one of the more significant additions is inter-app audio. We've had Audiobus for quite awhile now but inter-app audio makes audio sharing more integral to the operating system (Apple is allowed to make use of all the internal routines - unlike 3rd parties - gives them a bit of an unfair advantage, but I digress).

At this time, only a handful of apps support IAA but more are adding it everyday and it will become increasingly common in the coming months. IAA makes synths on the iPad act much more like VST or AU plugins do on the desktop. You can easily plug-in compatible synths to any DAW that supports it and record right from the synth into the DAW without Audiobus routing or the need for other apps running (this means a lot on the limited memory/cpu of the iPad!).

Two DAWs that already support IAA are Auria and Apple's Garageband. In the case of Auria, you simply plug-in the synth like you would any of its insert effects. For garageband, you select an IAA track type directly. Both work reasonably well at this point and not too surprising, there are occasional bugs in both too. It will probably take a few patches/releases to get things completely stable, but IAA is already very usable.

Auria is becoming my favorite DAW lately due to its fantastic automation and effects bus but it is a bit pricey. One nice development is that if you have any of the Sugarbyte effects (Turnado, Wow) for the iPad, you don't have to pay twice to use them in Auria. It recognizes them and lets you use them as native plugins - Auria native plugins do work better than IAA provided you are using Auria.

Garageband has many great additions in the iOS7 release - the track limit is up to 16 on older iPads and 32 on the brand new ones - I think there is a purchase in my not too distant future. Another more hidden but significant feature in Garageband for iPad is that for the first time, you can easily transfer lossless mix downs out of Garageband. Garageband used to be the "roach motel" of DAWs - you could get sounds in but couldn't get them out. Now you can mix down and select "Open with" to open the mixed down AIFF in another app. Not all apps support "open in", but one significant one that is is AudioShare which in turn lets you copy/paste anywhere you wish - so for the first time, Garageband plays well with others.

The piece below was created in Auria with only Inter-app audio synths. I used the Arturia Oberheim SEM synth for the arpeggios, Waldorf's Nave for some of the leads and the Arturia Mini for the bass. There were a few crashes but the entire thing was driven from within Auria and mixed/mastered and posted. I think this will be a huge development for iPad music moving forward!

Just an aside, the Arturia synths are available on desktop for roughly $100 each - on the iPad, they are $9.99 and sound extremely close to the desktop versions!

Bussing with Xewton music studio

I've had yet another few weeks with Audiobus and have been working a bit with Xewton Music Studio and Beatmaker 2.

In my last posts, I discussed the pros and cons of some of the other DAWs as Audiobus targets so here are 2 more. Auria and Multitrack DAW are both good targets but work only with audio files. The appeal of Beatmaker 2 and Music Studio are that in addition to acting as targets for Audiobus, they also provide MIDI tracks natively. This lets me combine their native sounds with other Audiobus inputs.

Both tools provide this but both also are imperfect and have their quirks. The quirks are more shortcomings in what they provide natively and not so much Audiobus. Beatmaker 2 is the more feature-rich of the two but suffers from its often counter-intuitive interface. It started its life as a low power iPhone app and that history shows. Many folks have used Beatmaker for years and for them, the issue is moot. For me, learning it is frustrating in many places. Most functionality is there and if you mine their forums you can figure things out.

Music Studio on the other hand has a beautiful interface and is fairly simple to use but has some glaring functional omissions. Fading out a song is almost impossible if you mix audio and MIDI tracks. The effects chain is also somewhat bizarre but if you are patient enough, you can get good results. For fading, you might do better to mix down and then copy into another app for posting.

My verdict for these two tools is to give Beatmaker 2 the nod. I need to get used to its weird interface, but functionality wise, it provides good audiobus support with decent MIDI capabilities. It's native samples are meh, but you can add your own.

Overall, MultiTrack DAW remains my favorite when I don't need MIDI. Auria is just too crash prone with audiobus (I'm on an iPad 3 with nothing else running but it is flakey with Auria).

Here is a track I put together primarily with Audiobus on Xewton Music Studio:


The beats and bass were created in the Korg iPolySix and it was easier to just mixdown and audiocopy/paste those into Music Studio - so no Audiobus there, though Korg does support it. The next few tracks were Audiobus from the Moog Animoog synth. I added a couple of native Music studio tracks for muted guitar, muted trumpet and flute. Then I added some ambient bells/drones via Audiobus from Mixtikl.

So, Xewton does work with Audiobus fairly well if you really want to use it. I think I may stick mainly to MultiTrack DAW with perhaps a little BeatMaker if I can ever wrap my head around its interface.