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Multitrack Studio for IPad- opinions
So I see that Multitrack Studio has just had an update three days ago to version 4.1.
I’ve never used MTS and I’ve used just about every other DAW available. I can’t deny that it has tons of great features and undoubtedly makes great music.
I’m comfortable with Auria, Cubasis, n-Track, Audio Evolution, NS2.
How FUN is it using MTS? Does it have any drum loops? Does it connect well with Audiobus? How nice are the installed instruments? How nice are the effects (fabfilter, tonebooster-ish quality?) How is the Final-mixdowness capabilities without having to go to Barkfilter or what have you. How great are the Automation abilities? And lastly, how real life easy & smooth is it to change tempos and time signatures in a single song?
Thanks for whatever wisdom you can share.
Comments
Hi Noisehorse,
After my last disappointment with Cubasis (been using steinberg since my Atari St 520) I tried every daw available on ios. It finally clicked with MTS and there hasn’t been a day gone by without working with this great daw. It does have a learning curve, but every day I find it makes another bought app obsolete.
The internal instruments are ok as basis but while sculpting your music you will soon replace these with AUi. The effects are superb and I seldom use external ones. On almost all of your other questions I can answer a big yes.
I”m an 52 year old musician. I play piano, bass and like to write songs in the old fashioned way. But I do use the pattern feature frequently in MTS for drums and synths. Also the build in matrix sampler is sufficient for me. With MTS I don’t have the need to leave my project and switch to another daw for something MTS can not do.
Changing tempo and time signature is a breeze as you can see on this screenshot.
So, is this the right daw for you? I don’t know, it is for me.
I’ve have bought so many apps which I have closed just minutes after starting them up. MTS has been one of the major exceptions and has never limited me while creating music but only surprised me with all the possibilities when I needed them.
And that is my last advice. Creating music should be fun, and your daw is part of that proces. Learn the daw that feels right for you inside out and try not to leave it when your missing a feature you expect it to have, but find how it can be done.
Have fun making music
Thanks @Arvis
There are a few videos but I wish there were more .
I don’t know how I managed to never see or hear anything about this app for so long. I’d love to be able to work with time signature and tempo changes again in my tracks. And the app is so small (file size)... I don’t know how they do it. If Apple doesn’t release their own version of Logic for iPad tomorrow, I might have to give this a whirl.
@Arvis wow. Thank you for such a well written reply. I think you’ve sold me on it. I am a confirmed appaholic, so nothing like a new DAW to get my juices flowing.
Seriously thanks again!
This thing has had the same price for 7 years, with no sale ever. Wow. Respect. I'm starting to think this kind of pricing might be a good idea if you're in it for the long term. The potential customer never has to worry about buying it at full price just before it goes on sale, so it makes no sense to wait once you decided to get it.
I am also a big fan of MTS. The expansion was also worth it for me as it added multi-layer MIDI/score mode as well as sample stretching.
It has a long history and is also being actively developed which is good to see on iOS.
The way the tracks are laid out is not going to suit everyone so make sure you watch some video of it in action.
If for nothing else, MTS has a vocal tuner in it. It's no Melodyne, but it does its job well enough to justify buying it just for that.
I probably would prefer NS2 over this IF they ever added the audio tracks ..
I also hold out hope for Cubasis evolving but the MTS developer seems to always be on the case, apparently and the manual seems quite good .
You mean the old school hardware -like looking layout (not going to suit everyone)?
@NoiseHorse
MTS is a sleeping giant. Listing the features (many of which are either iOS exclusives or best on platform) would give me writer’s cramp.
Excellent app. But it could’do with a metronome and a count-in, because the click track is a bit of a pain.
Just record a one bar count in
Yeah, it presents the track data underneath the track when you click on it rather than taking you to a different page to edit the MIDI or audio. Once you have a number of tracks going then you can get a little lost but you can colour code each track.
It is also difficult to view the whole song vertically. There is a “song mode” but this presents every track as a rendered waveform rather than a mixture of audio and MIDI data. With the multi-MIDI option though you can at least see the MIDI lined up on the one screen. I use NS2 for full song arrangement as I need to be able to see how things line up and move them around easily. NS2 also has alias clips which MTS tries to do with its patterns feature but I seem to recall in testing that if you paste a pattern to another track then change the original then the copy does not receive the updates.
Despite the interface not being the same as other DAWs you get a lot of functionality for your money. For me the MIDI editor is up there with NS2 and the score editor is really well thought out. I have used MTS a lot for audio as well and despite not being clip based I was able to easily edit out large waveforms of guitar takes to pick out the best, using timeline markers to highlight the best takes and then further tweak individual sections to silence fret squeak or time stretch sections.
As @Littlewoodg said, you could spend a long time listing the things thats MTS does better than other DAWs or that other DAWs simply can’t do. Little things like being able to select some MIDI and then paste it directly to an audio track (or vice-versa!) or immediately export that selected MIDI to AudioShare, or directly copy and paste audio between the app and Auditor now that it supports the pasteboard. Lots of little workflow enablers in there which means MTS can be used for its strengths even if you prefer another DAW for your main workflow.
I mentioned it elsewhere but it also has ongoing support and big feature updates (e.g. first to support MIDI 2). I had reported a number of minor bugs in the last couple of months and all have since been fixed. This level of support on iOS is very valuable and means I am happy to invest time in and recommend a piece of software which is not being left to wither on the vine.
@MisplacedDevelopment : Thanks SO much for that . Yeah even though NS2 seems to be ahead of it in some respects, looking five years down the road , where will NS2 be compared to MTS? The answer is clear. How did you learn all this stuff? The manual?
I do that, but it leaves the bar counter out for those of us trapped in a four-bar mindset (with poor math skills too).
I am still looking for a DAW to finish my tracks. I recently started doing most work in NS2, it works just as I want it to, despite the lack of audio tracks.
Since I'm hitting high CPU when most of the track is arranged in NS2, I want to export the audio tracks into another DAW, so I can load the effects and mix the channels for final mastering. The final DAW will only need to use effects for audio and will not need to do midi or in depth arrangement editing. So I am looking for something simple that can do the work for audio.
I have Auria Pro, and it is a vast mixer, but the UI doesnt click with me anymore after having tried several projects using it.
MTS has only upto 16 tracks, sometimes that would be a limitation for me.
What do you guys recommend?
If it were me then I would render the heavy tracks and then load them back into NS2 using MultiTrack Recorder, assuming the mixing options in NS2 are sufficient for your needs. I can’t say for certain but I would assume this is less CPU intensive than driving a load of synths etc. You can then apply effects and re-render with those applied. Check that any dynamic fx to be used can be controlled from NS2 via MIDI, or use this hacky workaround https://forum.audiob.us/discussion/44574/ns2-live-aufx-automation
(TFW you click on the link and read something, and you know it's written in a clear and concise manner but you realise you just don't know enough to get it... 😔 My next ios musician life goal is to understand explanations like this
)
Having been spurred by this thread to go back to MTS, I’m reminded how outstanding the midi editing is.
Wow, this is intersting, many thanks!! Any reason why MultiTrack Recorder... is it possible with other apps?
Can you freeze effects on tracks in multitrack studio like in Auria? And unfreeze again. So I can add a load of au instrument effects without overloading cpu.
Edit: although looking at my screen seems to overload cpu and crash auria.............
Sorry about that. If you are confused then others surely are so I’ll try and break it down a bit:
Do say if anything else needs more explanation
Awesome explanation! Many thanks for the time you put into writing it. Super clear now.
This will definitely fix my CPU issue and the good thing is: I can keep working in NS2
You can freeze individual tracks like this:
I think this creates a “dry” copy of your MIDI as played through the instrument. It copies any effects plugins to the new track which you can then choose to apply using this option on the new track:
MTR lets you position things on a timeline and syncs to the host timeline which I’m not aware of others doing. For example, if you position the song pointer to bar 4 then hit play in NS2 then you will hear from bar 4 of your rendered audio, in sync with whatever else is playing at bar 4 in NS2.
Thinking more about it, for your use case you could try just loading the rendered stems into pads in Slate and trigger them as samples from a new MIDI only track. You won’t be able to position the song pointer like I described with MTR as you only hear the sample when it is triggered but if you just need to re-render with effects then it should work. There is actually a workaround that I think @dendy came up with that does give you the ability to use the song pointer with Slate samples. I never used Slate that way myself but it was the accepted way of adding audio to NS2 before MTR came along.
Wow. Thank you. But please know I didn't mean it as a snark at all. It was just some good old-fashioned self-reflection on how some of you in this forum obviously know so much more about this topic than I will ever know.
You DID manage to make it much clearer this time though, even when seen through my dummy-filter.
🙏
I think they are different beasts for sure but both are written by talented developers. I can’t see MTS becoming as user friendly as NS2 without a big redesign. If the developer expanded on the idea of patterns some more then they could add a proper arrangement interface where you could lay out your song using your palette of patterns and audio. You can already use the drum editor interface to knock up a basic clip launcher by naming notes and pretending they are part of a drumkit, e.g.
Cheers. I did not take it as snark so no worries there, glad to help
Also...the MTS upgrades opens up that track limit - Pro Extension to 32, Track Pack to 64. The full feature set is worth the cost of the IAPs...