Recording without reason or logic
January 7, 2012 4:04 PM   Subscribe

Dabblers in ios music production, I seek your advice. I'm traveling without my laptop for the first time, hoping to use an ipad and iphone combination instead.



I've started collaborating with a singer/songwriter, and I'd like to come up with some arrangements/production ideas for his songs while I'm away. I want to produce demos or mockups that can later be rerecorded in a studio, not final products. Ideally, I'd have both midi tracks and audio tracks, but audio tracks of midi-produced sounds is okay too.

I've pieced together a tiny studio (less than 7 lbs total?) but I'm still figuring out what is possible, depending on both the hardware and software constraints. I'm trying to figure out how to come up with a workflow that isn't too awkward. It's a puzzle.

Here's what I've gathered:

An akai mpk mini midi keyboard controller
A usb splitter cable and external battery so that the akai can be connected to the ipad via the camera connection kit without it telling me that it doesn't have enough power to work
A line 6 mobile in audio interface with one guitar input and one stereo 1/8 inch line in that works with either the iphone or the ipad
A sony digital audio recorder with a stereo mic and an 1/8 line in, as well as a usb out.
A great sounding acoustic/electric uke
iphone 4s
ipad 2

apps:
garageband
sampletank
fire
fire studio
animoog
ellatron
reactable
nanostudio

the line 6 amp simulator app

Here are the challenges I've found so far.

First, I'm baffled that it's tricky to start with a background track (.wav, .mp3 or .m4a) and then add more tracks to it, even in garageband, which has the feature of importing garageband projects, but not audio tracks, as far as I can tell. This seems roundabout, but I'm thinking that I might have to use a 1/8" splitter cable that brings together two audio streams (the iphone playing the background track out of itunes, the ipad producing new sounds I play) since the itunes automatically fades out when the other music app is placed in the foreground on the same device.

Second, the sony recorder sounds great, but I haven't yet succeeded in pulling the .wav files it creates off of it without a laptop. Is there a way to do this with the Camera Connection Kit? Am I going to have to jailbreak the ipad?

Are there any other apps and/or tricks that I've missed? I feel like it's very promising territory, and most likely versions of Logic, Reason and Live will be on ios within a year or two. But until then, what would you do?
posted by umbĂș to Technology (2 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
You don't say if you're using Windows, but I'm guessing that you are, if you're working with WAV files. You might try this application to get recordings off your iPad. If it works as described, you don't need to jailbreak.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:51 PM on January 8, 2012


Korg iMS-20 synth.
posted by xtine at 1:01 AM on January 9, 2012


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