Speaking of tools to glue together your gear and serve as the heartbeat of your studio – AUM. This iOS super-tool can serve as an essential hub for combining apps and hardware in any combination – and now it’s even more savvy with Ableton Link and MIDI.
You’d be forgiven for thinking AUM was just some sort of fancy mixer for the iPad. But it’s more like a studio for combining software with software, software with hardware, and hardware with hardware. So it might be a way to combine stuff that’s on your iOS device, or a convenient tool for mobile recording, or a way to let your iPad sit in a studio of other gear and make them play together, or a combination of all those things.
It does this by letting you do whatever you like with inputs and outputs, iOS plug-ins (Audio Unit extensions), audio between apps (Audiobus and Inter-App Audio), and multichannel audio and MIDI interfaces. It’s a host, a virtual patch bay (for both MIDI and audio), and a recording/playback device. And it’s a tool to center other tools. There’s also Ableton Link and MIDI clock support.
It’s worth bringing up AUM right now, because a minor point update – 1.3 – brings some major new features that really make this invaluable.
- Ableton Link 3 support means you can start/stop transport.
- You get “MIDI strips” for hosting useful MIDI-only Audio unit extensions.
- You can import channels between sessions, and duplicate channel strips.
- And you get tons of new MIDI mappings: program changes, tap tempo, loading presets, and even loading whole sessions can now be done via MIDI. I imagine that could see this used in some pretty major stage shows.
Jakob Haq has shown some useful ways of approaching the app, including MIDI mapping control:
Lots more tutorials and resources on the official site:
The full feature list:
High quality audio up to 32-bit 96kHz
Clean and intuitive user interface with crisp vector graphics
Extremely compact and optimized code, very small app size
Unlimited* number of channels
Unlimited* number of effect slots
Inserts and sends are configurable pre/post-fader
Internal busses for mixing or effect sends
Supports multi-channel audio interfaces
Supports Audio Unit extensions, Inter-App Audio and Audiobus
Audiobus state saving
Highly accurate transport clock
Metronome with selectable output and optional pre-roll
Sends host sync to Audio Unit plugins and IAA apps
Send MIDI clock to external hardware
Play in time with Ableton Link
FilePlayer with sync and looping, access to all AudioShare files
Records straight into AudioShare storage space
Record synchronized beat-perfect loops
Built-in nodes for stereo processing, filtering and dynamics
Latency compensation makes everything align at the outputs
Separate Inter-App Audio / Audiobus output ports
Built-in MIDI keyboard
Fully MIDI controllable
MIDI Matrix for routing MIDI anywhere