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Ipad / ios music making


TheBro

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Hey all. Just wondered how many of you are using Ipads to make music with. For me its all I've got at the moment so don't really have a choice!! I know its not as fun as using hardware which I do have but my studio is mainly in the cupboard. If so what apps do you lot use etc as I'm curious??

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I've got Audiobus 3 but seems very buggy and unstable to me. It sort of half works which is frustrating. I like Garageband but am frustrated by the sequencing side of things. Still using Beatmaker 2 although need to migrate over to using BM3!!

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GarageBand, AUFX bundle. Think audiobus is obsolete now?

 

Audiobus 3 just came out. I still use 2 just fine though.

 

Korg Gadget, Animoog, Filtatron, and Nanoloop are all great too.

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I hear good things about Korg Gadget wish I had started off using it but Beatmaker 2 got there first lol. Animoog is a good app I understand too.

 

Animoog is still my favorite by far. So fun to mess around with because of the expressive keyboard and looper. The sounds are all high quality too.

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novation just put out a suite of apps that are free (with dlc expansions). the only one i've messed around with is groovebox. was pretty easy to knock out something musical but it's all pretty limited unless you buy addons. for $4 you can't beat nanoloop imo

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The Animoog is a great synth. Have used it live before. Samplr is pretty neat, but requires that I add sounds via iTunes (which may require me to format the iPad). I fucking hate that interface.

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I made a couple of sunvox tracks on the iphone but had problems with the touch screen side of things.. I tried korg gadgets on someone elses ipad but was not really impressed; again, the touch screen stuff just doesn't do it for me and they feel like java web applications than robust programs when I'm using them.

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I'm so close to buying an ipad, even though I'll probably not like it. I really want to try out Patchbase, and Sunvox, and the other stuff like Patterning, Korg Gadget etc.

..buuut that whole planned obsolescence thing really gets to me when it goes beyond my phone. The idea of a device I use for music getting to the point where the software doesn't work anymore unless I buy a new device kinda bums me out.

Anyone still rocking an earlier generation ipad? I'm thinking ipad mini 2 if I actually get one.

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  • 8 months later...

AudioShare should be everyone’s home base on iPad. It is the best way to capture audio from any app, also does inter app audio (IAA) for effects, and can easily trim, process, convert and import/export files.

 

Samplr is probably the most satisfying app, and audioshare is the solution for managing audio for it. You can record in the app but can’t trim. It’s by far the best job at turning the iPad into an instrument.

 

Beatmaker 2 is what I’ve done the most stuff on. I’ve had it on my iPhone for years and have cranked out lots of material using mostly the onboard samples, but it’s easy as hell to use it as an mpc. A track I started on beatmaker ended up my ep which is out now thru rubadub.

 

Beatmaker 3 is the most promising DAW. The UI is kind of confusing to navigate, and it has some bugs, but it supports AU, has a full I/O section and an impressive suite of fx. Pretty sure you can send and receive audio or midi from anywhere, and it works with an interface if you have CCK.

 

As far as standalone synths, all the moog stuff is amazing (and supports AU), but my favorite synth is probably Korg mono/poly (which doesn’t support AU yet). The noise osc and regular osc blend really well, and it has a good mod matrix. Zeeon is another great synth that would cost like $50 on a computer.

 

Korg gadget is also great, but has lots of cringey stuff made just for edm, but if you’re a mature musician, you know how to get the sound you want.

 

FM4 is the tx81z but better. It’s the best, simplest synth available. Cuckoo has a vid on it.

 

I have elastic drum. Some people swear by it, but for me, the drum synths are kind of lame, and the parameters aren’t tweaked well, so a lot of the range of sound is unusable.

 

Many apps support Ableton link, and when you realize you can use multiple apps together, it gets pretty exciting.

 

My main complaint about iPad is there isn’t a single good solution for controlling Ableton. This is 2018. I should have apc40 or launchpad functionality on my iPad. So far I haven’t found a usable, auto mapping solution. Pretty pathetic. Maybe Ableton is locking people out so they have to buy push.

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My main complaint about iPad is there isn’t a single good solution for controlling Ableton. This is 2018. I should have apc40 or launchpad functionality on my iPad. So far I haven’t found a usable, auto mapping solution. Pretty pathetic. Maybe Ableton is locking people out so they have to buy push.

 

Having spent a lot of time programming my own script for control surface I got to agree. Usually this kind of stuff has a public API with easy tutorials for getting started, but not Live. The best you have is some unofficial decompiled Python scripts that come bundled with Live so you can sort of see how other control surfaces work with Live and "how things are done" in the framework.

 

I think you may be right that not documenting that stuff is just conscious decision to force people buy Push and M4L. I sort of understand too, because a lot of people run pirated copies of Live which is already a pretty good instrument on its own. The company has to make money somehow, so Push becomes the logical step to financially exploit their knowledge of what's going on.

 

As for some things that do work - have you checked out TouchOSC and Lemur? From what I experimented it was actually really easy to set up a more or less automapped surface - it's not 100% working out of the box (maybe Lemur is though), but then I was not paying any money for it either (aside from 5 for TouchOSC). I think if you take the existing MIDI implementation of some working Akai surface, you can just build the same visual surface in TouchOSC in like couple of hours and then you just have Live MIDI-talk to TouchOSC instead of the physical interface instead. I built something on my Android phone but because the screen was so small I did not really end up using it.

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i 100% support ableton and paid for the upgrade to 10, and have a push. but anyone who uses push understands that while it's amazing, it can really only do one thing at a time. would be amazing to have session view on the ipad with faders, always dedicated, so i can use push for tweaking devices and doing drums.

 

i have touch osc but i've never had much luck with it. i guess i really need to get in there and figure it out. its just disheartening that there isn't a single good publicly available version of what i'm trying to do.

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I have been thinking the same thing, as in why is there no general ipad/tablet app for controlling Live, and the best I can come up with is that things like TouchOSC and Lemur basically are those apps. It's just that the people who have this kind of needs and issues are usually also the kinds of people who either buy a Korg nanokontrol (or some other piece of plastic) for this specific task or hook up a simple TouchOSC interface. Basically it seems to come down this - while everyone seems to have a need for Some Thing for controlling Live from the tablet, everyone also has special quirks and wishes that are impossible to satisfy with a general one-size-fits-all solution, so the workaround is to build your own thing in TouchOSC or something else.

 

By the way, my experience with TouchOSC has been really positive - creating a basic interface takes like less than an hour, and then for a really basic mapping you can directly manually map it to your set (like 10 mins max) and you're good to go. For more advanced stuff (like paging and the red selection rectangle in the Live GUI) I think this page can help a bit - https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/206240184-Creating-your-own-Control-Surface-script

I also found a more advanced script on Reddit a while ago, but I don't have the link with me now.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Downloaded Elastic Drums and it's pretty decent. Supports recording through your mic so that can lead to a lot of interesting sounds. And recording automation.

 

Here's a clip of Terminal 11 messing with it: https://www.instagram.com/p/BlHG-TfDkWX/?taken-by=terminal_11


And Richard Devine: https://www.instagram.com/p/Bk--rJVndpf/?taken-by=richarddevine

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  • 11 months later...

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