

Any truly useful effects app should also be able to process live audio from a mic or one of the many audio interfaces available for iOS, like the iRig guitar interface. While multi-track recording apps primarily serve as hosts, effects apps end up having to play host when consuming audio from a synth app, and act as a node when routing the processed audio on to a multi-track recording app.

Some apps, like GarageBand, serve both roles, letting users record a synth sample from a node app or send a GarageBand guitar riff to different host like BeatMaker 2. In iOS 7, Inter-App Audio apps are known as either “nodes” or “hosts.” Essentially, any app capable of publishing an audio output stream is a node, while hosts connect and manage node applications. How apps communicate using Inter-App Audio One details how you can build and publish an audio delay to be used by other music apps in iOS, while the other covers a sampler instrument able to play audio when it receives MIDI note information from another app. In the pre-release developers documentation for iOS 7, Apple also provides two code examples for Inter-App Audio. Inter-App Audio also allows users to access the audio stream at a lower level, theoretically providing superior performance. One major differentiator between Inter-App Audio and Audiobus is its ability to keep the routing at the operating system level so users won’t need to access another app in the process.

Inter-App Audio provides system-level access to the audio stream As described on Apple’s iOS 7 Developers page, this functionality allows developers to send and receive audio between apps in real-time, while providing MIDI-controlled rendering of audio, making it easier to develop music instrument apps.Īudiobus introduced similar capabilities to the iOS platform last year, and it ushered in a revolution among iPad- and iPhone-loving musicians, with big names like Korg and Moog adding Audiobus support to their synth apps.Īudiobus made it possible for musicians to use an iOS device to send audio from a synth app like Animoog through an effects app like Jam XT, and record the results in a multi-track recording program like GarageBand or BeatMaker 2. One of the more obscure features announced for iOS 7 is Inter-App Audio.
