The Amazing Audio Engine is here, and it’s open source and Audiobus-ready

Taae

I’m very pleased to announce that The Amazing Audio Engine has pulled into the station. It’s been a long time in the making, and there have been one or two minor distractions along the way, but I’m proud of the result:

A sophisticated and feature-packed but very developer-friendly audio engine, bringing you the very best iOS audio has to offer. We’re talking audio units, block or object-based creation and processing, filter chains, recording and monitoring anything, multichannel input support, brilliant lock-free synchronization and rich Audiobus support.

You’ll find The Engine, a bunch of documentation and the brand-new community forum at theamazingaudioengine.com

It’s also open source. And it’s ready for Audiobus.

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Thirteen Months of Audiobus

Tomorrow, Monday December 10, my friend and partner-in-crime Sebastian Dittmann and I are launching a project over twelve months in the making: Audiobus. We’re very proud of what we’ve managed to do, and we both firmly believe that Audiobus is going to fundamentally alter the way people create music on the iPad and iPhone.

You can find out more about Audiobus itself at audiob.us, but I wanted to take a moment to breathe, look back, and explain why the hell I’ve been so quiet over the last year.

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Loopy and Loopy HD, now with Bluetooth pedal/keyboard support, iPhone 5

Loopy HD 1.3 and Loopy 2.4 just hit the App Store.

Loopy hd 1.3 loopy 2.4

The main new stuff is support for Bluetooth pedals like the AirTurn and Cicada (as well as any Bluetooth keyboard). This uses the same system as the MIDI control, so you can do all the same stuff. It’s pretty neat.

Also, iPhone 5 support, which introduces — you guessed it — another row of loops. How could I resist?

There’s also some dramatically improved clock code in there, which offers new behaviour when using the x/÷/+/- clock length controls to give you new options for putting interesting rhythms against each other, and better support for non-4/4 time signatures.

There’s a bunch of other relatively minor improvements in there. Here’s a summary of all that’s new:

  • Added support for Bluetooth pedals like the AirTurn and Cicada, and Bluetooth keyboards
  • Added iPhone 5 support
  • Enhanced support for alternative time signatures
  • Improved clock length manipulation, with more flexible behaviour for “+” and “-” buttons
  • Rearranged Settings screen for easier understanding
  • Added “Cancel pending actions” MIDI action
  • Keep MIDI device connections over multiple sessions
  • Ask for a session name when saving for the first time
  • Assorted bug fixes and optimisations
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Updates, updates for everybody: Loopy HD 1.2 and Loopy 2.3

Loopy hd 1 2

The update has landed!

Loopy’s now slicker and meatier than ever, with a brand-spanking new audio engine — with some nifty new audio processing smarts and just ~6-7ms latency, which sounds absolutely fantastic — greatly improved punch in/out controls, multi-channel audio interface support, and a colossal amount of other improvements.

You can read more about the update here, grab Loopy HD (for the iPad and iPhone) or Loopy (for the iPhone) right now on the App Store, and talk about it on the forum.

You can also check out the new introductory tutorial — there’ll be more soon.

Many thanks to the testing team for their hard work making sure the new update is house-trained.

Happy looping!

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Brand New Loopy, Coming Real Soon

I’m very happy to say shiny new versions of Loopy and Loopy HD are on their way!

I’ve had my nose to the grindstone over the past months; I’ve taken Loopy’s insides out, given them a good, solid spit-and-polish, and put them back in. The result is a huge number of performance enhancements, much better quality audio processing, and a more robust engine (which, incidentally, is soon to start leading a life of its own). What it means for you: More stability, better audio quality, improved workflows, hugs, puppies.

It’s true that this is most significantly an internal-evolution release, but there’s also some new stuff in here.

Multi-Channel Audio Interface Support, Baby

The most exciting for the more serious musicians and tinkerers among us is new support for multi-channel audio inputs. When you have a stereo source plugged in, you’ll have a choice of whether to record stereo, mono left channel or mono right channel. If you have a device with more than 2 channels, then you’ll be able to select any stereo pair, or one particular channel.

Loopy HD multi-channel input support

Count-In Quantize Length

By popular demand, I’ve also added a “Count-In Quantize Length” setting, which lets you set how long you want Loopy to count in when recording, independently of the clock length. The default options syncs with the clock length, or you can set a specific duration from a quarter of a bar, up to 16 bars.

Huge Punch In/Out Improvement

I’ve also made a fairly significant change to the punch in and punch out mechanism.

In prior versions of Loopy, the actual punch in/out command is fired when you release — when the touch ends. That means that if you’re a slow toucher (it’s okay, no one’s judging you), you could miss the punch in/out point by tenths of a second. I went back to the drawing board, and came up with a new system: Loopy begins recording, in the background, as soon as you touch a track. If that touch ends up being a punch in/out gesture (instead of, say, opening the menu), then recording continues, beautifully in time. It’s much more intuitive, and I think will end up making it far easier to get perfect loop timing.

Toggle Track Sync Via MIDI

I’ve added a MIDI-triggerable action to toggle track synchronisation with a foot switch, which makes it easy to record irregular-length tracks, hands-free.

SoundCloud Update

I’ve integrated the snazzy new(ish) SoundCloud interface, which looks fantastic and also takes care of all the social network sharing stuff.

SoundCloud interface in Loopy HD

And finally, I’ve added a Japanese localization (こんにちは!), and updated the Italian one.

The update’s in beta testing right now, and I’m expecting to submit it to Apple next week.

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The Amazing Audio Engine: Funky Remote IO-based Core Audio Engine Coming Soon

The Amazing Audio EngineHuzzah! I’m announcing a new project which will be launching over the next couple of months.

It’s called The Amazing Audio Engine, and it represents the product of years of experience with iOS audio. It’s a sophisticated iOS audio engine that lets developers skip the Core Audio learning curve, and get on with writing great software.

The tech behind this is what drives Loopy and Loopy HD, as well as the in-development Audiobus app.

Subscribe at theamazingaudioengine.com to be kept in the loop as it approaches launch time.

Some of the features:

  • Automatic mixing of multiple audio signals with per-channel volume and pan controls.
  • Built-in support for audio filtering and effects, including the ability to form complex filter chains, constructing channel groups, or even whole trees of groups, and filtering them as one composite signal.
  • Built-in support for audio input, including optional use of the Voice Processing IO unit, for automatic echo removal – great for VoIP.
  • Record or monitor the output of the whole audio system, for in-app session recording, or get the output of one channel, or any group of channels in the processing tree.
  • Support for any audio format (AudioStreamBasicDescription) that the hardware supports: Interleaved, non-interleaved, mono, stereo, 44.1kHz or any other supported sample rate, 16-bit, 8.24 fixed floating-point – whatever you need for your project.
  • Very light, efficient engine, designed from the ground up for speed. All Core Audio code is pure C; no Objective- C or BSD calls, no locks, no memory allocation.
  • Efficient mixing of input signals, using Apple’s MultiChannelMixer.
  • Fast, lock-free synchronisation mechanism, enabling developers to send messages to the main thread from the Core Audio context, and vice versa, without
    locking or memory allocation from the Core Audio thread. Message sending from the main thread is two-way, and can be asynchronous, with a response
    block, or synchronous.
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