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I have fully stepped away from iOS music production
For the last month I stopped using the iPad for music (and really everything else) and I don’t think I’ll be going back. For the last couple years I immersed myself in the iOS production paradigm and while I enjoyed myself to a degree I found myself running into walls constantly. I know limitations inspire creativity but that isn’t my problem.
My biggest issue with ios anything is the necessity to keep buying better, faster processors I.e newer iPads. Before iPadOS I was running my 2018 iPad without too much issue. I’m not saying iPadOS ruined the ipad I’ve been using but things went downhill all too quickly. It got to a point when I could only have 5 or 6 tracks with fx in ns2, anything beyond that crackles galore would ensue. The same happens in Gadget and Cubasis.
While shopping for a new iPad back in early April I started missing making music on laptop. I found a great, souped up laptop online for a great price and pulled the trigger on that instead and frankly I couldn’t be happier. Using my old favorite DAW again (Reaper) in conjunction with some newly acquired hardware OP-Z, Modal Skulpt I have decided to stick with this way of music production. I have 18 tracks going in my daw right now without a single hitch. Something my iPad could never have done without buying a new iPad but then I would have had the same cpu issue in two years time and would have necessitated buying yet another iPad when I can just simply upgrade my laptops RAM for a fraction of the price.
While I do still enjoy using some iOS synths stand-alone (Sunrizer and Drambo) I just find iOS too limiting for a proper creative studio and I am tired of spending more money on Apple hardware every two years. Maybe I will return to this platform down the road but for now, I think I am done with iOS. T’was an interesting journey and when you’re on the move as much as I have been the last few years it is very mobile and works well for staying creative on the road but when I am at home and want to create tracks I see little reason to divert myself from the laptop and Reaper.
Sayonara for now @McD and other forum posters. This might have been the best part of iOS music, this forum. Thanks @McD for the welcome you gave me when I came on board. I didn’t post much but still read thru it daily. Sorry for the rant folks, it’s not trashing iOS music it’s simply a conclusion to my two year long iOS experiment.
All this said, if Apple would allow users to expand the cpu, instead of buying a totally new system I would certainly return. Forcing their customers to purchase new hardware every 1-3 years is such a wasteful approach. Make the hardware upgradeable, save your customers some money and Apple saves themselves some manufacturing costs etc. it’s a win-win.
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That makes sense, Bill. Good luck to you and stay healthy.
I’ll be back to hear your music good sir. Always a pleasure.
I’ve shifted back to desktop for creating finished tracks, due to my Air 2 getting progressively more knackered. But some of the apps - in particular the sample manglers like Spacecraft - are just too good on iOS to resist, so I plug the iPad straight in and record it as an external instrument.
Totally understood
Maybe investing on Ableton&Push2 , Maschine , even on used MPC touch/Studio/Ren would be better
I can understand your journey very well. I see the creations and workflow of the pros... with hundreds of tracks and really subtle mixes. But I also see that they have audiences to justify that level of investment into project.
What you'll miss most will be the ability to post a project here and get some feed back even if it's just "nice one". There's a feedback loop... so I'm going to encourage you to share your work here with the "OT" proviso. I'd also like you to document the new sets of issues and joys that surface in your journey. Using Reaper will expose a whole level of stories and testimony I'd like to have in the discussion.
So, don't say goodbye... just post with updates from the "other side" tagged with "OT".
I do think IOS as a sound module to save you from buying boxes of purpose built hardware will be a great
strategy and visit here looking for the "big stories" will help alert you to the next "Drambo".
Thanks for the update on your journey but please stay in touch. I did see that there's a Reaper Forum but
product specific forum never seem to have the richness of the conversations that happen here. We even allowed a discussion of the Covid-19 experiences and the rages that generated.
I always say "Bill Brasky" the way Will Farrell did... larger than life.
I find my self in a similar situation especially after the latest Logic Update popped up...
The iPad Air 2 works pretty good as a sound module as well as a remote for Logic
Good luck. Sounds like you made the right decision for you.I feel your pain. I enjoy the iPad experience up to the point when I know I can’t do something I could do on my laptop but the opposite has happened too. I will never give up my Ableton Live / laptop workflow - I see both workflows as complimentary and wouldn’t want to go exclusive either way at this point.
Music making on the go. It's always been about the ability to make music on the go for me. Yeah, it's not FL Studio or Ableton, but having NanoStudio2 on my iPhone, along with several AU instruments and effects, and I'm always just a tap or two away from composing something, is way more than enough for me.
Sad to see anybody go.. but hey if it ain't working then it ain't working.
I think the workflow I developed over the years with Reaper drew me back in. I had developed a pretty nice workflow with ns2 and I love that daw but my iPad cpu just got overworked too much and I can’t fathom giving more of my money to Apple when I can have a nearly unlimited workflow on my new laptop.
That’s a very good point to use iOS as a sound module. I do love working with Sunrizer to make patches.
This forum is interesting in that we are always waiting for the next app. And when a great app releases we are again awaiting another app. The Drambo drama was endlessly interesting. Maybe someday I’ll get the balls to post up my patches in Sunrizer and maybe some of the music that I made for advertising.
As long as I think of my phone and iPad as "instruments" and the PC as the "studio" I don't run into these kind of frustrations. It's when I try to make the iPad the studio that I bump into walls.
It’s a good point. I think my frustration certainly got the better of me. I like to centralize all of my creative energy and output. A couple hardware instrument and a central workstation to connect everything. This rant I suppose is more a knock on Apples approach to not letting iPads be upgraded, instead forcing your hand to buy a new system entirely which I find very wasteful.
It’s great isn’t it - the Mac picks up digital audio and MIDI via IDAM, so I can still enjoy all my apps, and I don’t need to clear the desk for MIDI keyboard space as I can use Remote instead
I would stay in desktop DAWs, but I got to the point that my mind and creativity go blank as soon as I sit down at the PC. I left music making other than playing guitar for several years for that reason. I think it was because I was working on PC's 10 hours a day. Somehow staring at one for fun and creativity ceased to work for me. It was only when the iPad came along that I was able to get back into it.
That's just me though. If I could be as creative sitting at the PC as I am on the iPad, or if I could drag my MacBook Pro everywhere with me, and if apps didn't cost 10x more on the PC, I'd ditch the iPad too.
I gone trough a similar thing. Started with iOS when it all started there with music apps, gone to mac, came back, and gone back. At the end i use both and use the idevices as sound module and controller. A great combo. There are pro and contra for iPad/iPhone or just using my laptop. There are unique tools on both of them for me. Some tools are to find on both and sometimes i like them using more on iOS due to the touch control and sometimes i like it more inside a big DAW and are able to run a lot more instances on my laptop (that said sometimes apps are really good optimized and might run as good or better as on my laptop). But then more and more tools i love on my mac coming to iOS. But all OS, especially the mobile ones are so fast changing which is not always great for a mature, great and stable music platform.
However, good luck and i understand your way. Since i never make music on the go a laptop is the most powerful single but yet mobile enough device for me. But it is still amazing and fun to run things like Drambo on a phone or apps like Animoog which i still use often and record them into my laptop DAW.
Most important have fun and music is music, no matter which tools you used. I learn from iOS apps things i use then also in my mac tools and vice versa. We have so much choice (well, too much often).
Yeah same here. All the main DAW type apps chug a bit on my Air 2, and I don’t enjoy editing audio and MIDI clips with my fingers. Much easier to do on a laptop, though AUM is great for capturing jam sessions.
Good points again. As @McD stated I will continue to use the iPad as a sound module. With Reaper on my laptop I find myself more creative and less thinking about what workaround I can use to get a certain task finished on the iPad. Certain tasks on pc that take me 30 seconds on the iPad they may take 20 minutes just to sort out a different approach for the same outcome. Ehhhhh...I’ve just had enough of that.
This! You can't play piano with a guitar. But both are usefull.
I wish you would. Many will immediately suggest changes... which often makes you regret sharing but some will give to encouragement to stay creative. There's a lot of "I liked it but..." We need a an optional "but" filter.
With a pattern of creative posts you will develop an small audience that shares your interests and asks "How did you do that?" Rather than "Why did you do that?" and the failsafe "That's interesting." I get a lot of "very mellow". But it's worth doing. You finish something and maybe you'll get something to encourage you to keep at it.
Please do. Meta music us (which means, leave a legacy that others can build off your work). Who knows, someone could make a top 10 hit and it was your patch that made the difference.
It was fun, but I don't really use iOS anymore, either. I'm fully invested (and then some) in PC music making.
I still enjoy coming here, though!
This, even if i make maybe 5-10% with iOS apps i must say this forum is one of the best music forums. A lot great people here. And maybe the most friendly forum as well.
Remember to:
Oh I know. I’ve dealt with PCs far more than iPads.
Opposite for me, studio collecting dust, new ipad pro coming next week..
I feel like the more powerful IPads get, ( and I’m really hoping to be proven wrong ) we’re not going to really benefit from it, at least not in the way I’d like to, which would be just being able to create and not have to be thinking about how many tracks I can add before my iPad craps out and starts to crackle , and while my IPad isn’t the latest and greatest, is not many at all compared to my MacBook Pro. I could be wrong, but while the hardware could be better as far as ram goes etc, I don’t place all the blame on the hardware, I feel like software developers want to take advantage of the new IPad CPU’s and develop apps that NEED the latest hardware to run one or two instances smoothly, as opposed to taking advantage of the hardware to let us run more instances. I don’t think it’s true of all developers because I have synths that don’t beat up my cpu like other apps. I don’t want to name names or throw anyone under the bus so I wont, but I will say sometimes I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football when making music on the IPad.
Anyway I haven’t given up yet and plan on getting a new 2020 IPad Pro shorty with as much space I can get and will see how it goes over the next couple years and if it doesn’t pan out I definitely won’t keep buying IPads to make music. I’m really hoping 2 or 3 years from now we should be good with doing what we need to do producing music on the IPad as we are with desktops.🤞🏼
From what I understand the Pro is not necessarily better for music production but the extra power is for visual design apps and gaming apps. In terms of design apps I feel the iPad is even further from catching up to PCs than with audio programs and I don’t care about gaming at all. That’s not a knock on the hardware but on the apps themselves like the Adobe apps are stripped down versions of the actual program on pc. @dendy explained this better in another post but in terms of raw music production the Mini5 and Air3 are just as good as the Pro’s. Again, this is just based on things I have read here and in other forums.
i personally enjoying getting a new ipad every few years 😎
hehe yeah
It’s horses for courses, obvs, but I will just observe that I spent nearly 40 years trying to make music using computers (starting with the 1984 release of the plug in Steinberg Pro-16 16 hardware module for the Commodore 64! -https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/a-brief-history-of-steinberg-cubase-406132) , and it was only less than two years ago when I started using music apps on iPad that I actually got anything done that sounded , a bit, actually like music. Yeah, slow learner...
I still have a load of hardware, and Ableton, to scratch the occasional need to twiddle a knob (Oo-er missus!) , but when I consider the amazing range of sonic things I can do on this little slab of glass any time day or night, in bed, in front of the tv, wherever... My biggest problem now is needing to upgrade, not just to keep up, but because I’ve just got too many apps clogging up the space on my pad.
Well, that, and still not actually being able to play anything, of course...