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Helium or Atom Piano Roll?
which one do you prefer?
Comments
and why... no less than 1,000 words please. Start.
Seriously, I only have atom2, and it does everything I need launching any number of variable length midi clips and pattern selection is easily controllable through cc messages, keys or program changes.
I've got plenty of Aum sessions with lots of Atoms and they don't crash.
If I'm jamming in Aum I just launch a bunch of atoms and use mozaic to pick random patterns.
Are you trying to decide which to buy?
What are you trying to achieve musically?
We can't tailor you a suit if we don't know your measurements!
What host are you using? How experienced are you with MIDI? What are you compositional styles and needs? What are you trying to achieve?
The vast majority of the time i would recommended Atom2, but there are some situations where Helium may indeed be the more appropriate for the particular user/needs.
Atom2 is more accurate, more configurable, supports many different workflows and is very light on ram and cpu. In many ways it is ahead of Helium, even after a large gap in updates. Although i am slightly biased here.
..but... if editable automation matters, Atom2 is a little bit behind Helium.
It's sad that development of Atom 2 is stopped, or seems to be stopped. The developer @blueveek doesn't reply anymore since months. Don't know why.
I would assume it's any combination of the following: life, day job, health, personal and family commitments, etc. Like many other part-time indie iOS developers, they have to balance their passion for making apps with the need to pay bills (and other disruptions).
I'm sure we'll see him again soon.
4Pockets has a good playlist of short videos showing what Helium can do:
Any comparison chart?
I can't comment on Helium but Atom 2 takes care of all my sequencing and I can't see me swapping any time soon. It works great in AUM and is good for use with external synths. The only thing I would like to change is if you bring the probability down the notes it plays on each loop stay the same until you change the probability again. That's a minor thing though, in general I love it.
Why not consider LK in this shoot out? If you want Live like MIDI sequences in one instance, it’s the best by a mile.
Helium, like a lot of the other 4Pockets apps, is extremely intuitive, feature packed, and easy to use. The MIDI clip library is great for drag and drop. It isn't easy for me to use for long editing sessions (it's a lot of yellow, orange and red on black), but it has become an integral part of my app collection for dumping sequences into from other apps.
Edit* My dream is to one day wake up to my beloved Xequence 2 as an audio unit...
For me Helium is much better than Atom 2. You can record midi in 'as you go' (while Atom needs a given patternlength first!), you can edit CC's (Atom can't), importing multitrack midifiles is flawless (Atom 'hangs' (sort of crashes) after importing long (multitrack) midifiles - max-length not indicated!). Also: Helium gets regular updates, while Atom 2 feels like abandonware....
ATOM2 is NOT abandonware...
The dev has other things to do in his day to day. He made a FULLY featured midi sequencer and clip launcher (with hardware integration - launchpad etc) that can non-destructively manipulate your midi (aside from automation).
The first Atom was out and worked for a couple of years then with a GIANT push Atom2. Both still work.
I'd expect another development push when Veek has time.
I mean this in the nicest way possible.
If you consider this abandonware I'd suggest giving up on the WHOLE of the iOS platform considering how long software from almost ANY dev lasts as Apple keeps moving the goalposts of API and hardware.
Go buy some analog gear. ;P
I like both. I find Atom very immediate, and Helium a little more clunky -- YMMV
Lately I've grown to like LK a bit more...
...sometimes the events do get so small it's impossible to see them without zooming
I hope that you are right. It would be great if Vic would at least post something somewhere indicating that he intends to finish Atom 2 by implementing cc editing and reasonable velocity editing.
On my iPad Air 1, the Atom2 interface is sluggish, whereas I don't notice any lag in Helium at all. That's not a criticism, just information for anyone in similar circumstances. (I look forward to upgrading soon.)
Air 1 gang checking in, it’s miserable lol. But yeah atom runs badly on my air 1 as well but perfectly fine on my iPhone. I think the gui stresses older models
just watched a tutorial for Helium: no semitone/ octave transpose buttons available?
What‘s the performance like on Air 2?
On he iPad Air 2 Atom 2's UI can be/feel a bit sluggish especially with longer clips...
...I suspect this is mainly because Atom 2's UI is a 'html/web-page'.
(Thus all CSS tricks work to stylize the note-events etc.).
Atom 2's playback timing however is always rock solid!
I'm actually quite surprised how much LK's UI performance has improved from the initial releases...
...it's now super responsive even on the old iPad Air 2!
Atom2 was optimised to be very lightweight for small-medium size midi patterns. This was very much a deliberate design decision (which had numerous other advantages for RAM and CPU use) since Atom2 was primarily designed as a modular MIDI clip launcher, and clips were not usually expected to exceed 32/64 bars in length.
These 'optimisations' sometimes cause slowdowns when importing or working with very very long MIDI files.
One of the big advantages of this approach was how having a large number of Atom2 instances in your project only uses fractionally more resources than one instance, and as Samu noted, Atom2's super-accurate timing is never affected by the UI slowdown that can happen when editing very long MIDI files on older processors.
There are - may be hard to see in the video because they’re not distinguished from the piano roll background well enough, but they’re all the way to the right. Up/Down semi-, Up/Down octave, Left/Right nudge iirc
This is a case of Helium being rough around the edges that people talk about
This screenshot is taken off of the dev‘s tutorial for Helium - for the life of me I can‘t see those up/down buttons?!
edit I found them in a tutorial on updated/ added features!
I’m curious for everyone here: what exactly is the benefit of something like Atom or Helium over using other sequences like Zoa, Autony, MidiSteps, etc. I’m assuming because you can sequence multiple AUs at once within the same app?
LK is the only one I have and I haven’t bought the full unlock yet, but I’m always on the fence about the big DAW-like sequencers because I can’t decide if I’d use them that much.
I tend to veer towards other sequencers like Autony, LK, Zoa, Scaleplay, MidiSteps, Cykle, Octachron, etc or apps like Dot Melody that can send midi out. It seems better for my workflow as I like to have vastly different sequencer parts for everything.
Sweet! Much appreciated. For me the answer is ignorance. Did not know about most of those.
@HotStrange Zoa, Autony and the like are more or less stochastic compositional tools. They have a range of settings that make what they generate not directly determinable to a degree. Zoa's example being it runs off of "game of life" which while CAN generate midi that is apprehendable as a repeating pattern but good luck on you getting the settings to do that.
Anyway, generative sequencers are a boon. My "workflow" recently has been to jam in AUM with a beat to find something interesting and freeze that idea (motif) into something that records the midi. There are any number of tools for this MIDITapeRecorder is great and ROCK solid (and records parameter tweeks), or you could directly record into ATOM or HELIUM. I prefer two step process of recording into MIDITapeRecorder (free) and then importing the midi into ATOM2 for further NON DESTRUCTIVE (transpositions, quantizing, flipping etc ) manipulation.
My next step is further jamming in AUM by launching any number of ATOMS and finding a greater compositional flow. I have recently found CELLS (Bram Bros Rozetta) to be a great in adding the underlying chords and less setup fiddly than using MIDISteps (which is still great).
Moving the midi into a timeline is the next process. You could use a DAW or something like Xequencer and route that audio to AUM and keep your initial AUM routings from previous jams. Importing channels in AUM is an AWESOME underrated feature.
At other times I might just put the midi into LK and sequence/launch clips there.
Hope this helps give you ideas.
TL;DR
I use Atom as an editor inside AUM for created or generated midi. Your different sequencers can be used to different effect then pulled together.
Also @HotStrange there isn't anything preventing you from using Midi sequencers with other midi sequencers inside of AUM with complete clip launch automation.
Use LK by itself. Or setup a control Atom to trigger/launch other Atoms sequences using AUM's midi controls.
Cells is good for setting up a song mode for other sequencers.
Midi Tape Recorder is a great app that I don’t use enough. But thanks for giving me a peek into your workflow. I think for now I will use what I have and then potentially make the purchase once I see Atom/Helium/etc go on sale. I’m not unhappy with what I’m doing now, I was just interested in how everyone else is using them because I see a lot of love here for Atom and Xequencer, and to a lesser extent Helium. Thanks again!
@lukesleepwalker :Is LK primarily for Ableton users though?
I've spent the last year whinging about looking for a piano roll that can record patterns that I can play back routed through to different synths in AUM for eons. That worked on iPhone. Little did I know that LK has all of that accessible from the first screen. The chord generation and midi generation is -almost- on par with Pure Acid's sick sequencer generation and it automatically routes each new track to different midi channel so you can pop it in to AUM.
I have no plans to use LK with Ableton and still don't really understand the appeal of using a mobile app to use ableton... so I can lie in bed and use it?
I'm blown away that LK doesn't get more love. I've had it for eons and it always just looked like a big fat Learning Curve for me to avoid. But then I peeked under the surface and I'm pretty sure everything I've ever wanted is whirling around under there