Unrelated Posts

Passing clouds of inconsequential observations.

Tag: iPad

  • Connecting iPad/iPhone to GarageBand on a Mac – Wireless

    There is an old post, from 2011, that is regularly visited (I assume it is linked on a forum somewhere) and so it is probably time to do an updated version expanded into several posts covering all the options available today.

    To connect using a WiFi network:

    Open Audio MIDI Setup which you will find in the Utilities folder within the Applications folder – or hit the Command and Space keys and type Audio MIDI into the Spotlight search box.

    From the Window menu select Show MIDI Studio.

    Menu selection in Audio Midi SetUp

    This will open the MIDI Studio window from where you can select Open MIDI Network Setup from the MIDI Studio menu.

    Menu selection in Audio Midi SetUp

    You need to create a new session by clicking the + button

    Creating a new session panel

    The default name is Session 1. Tick the box to select that as the network session you wish to use

    New session selected

    With an app sending MIDI signals your device will be available. Click the Connect button for it to join the network session.

    iPad available

    Your device will be listed as a Participant in the right hand panel – from where it can be disconnected if required.

    iPad connected and good to go

    In the iPad’s/iPhone’s app you will see the Session 1 option within the MIDI settings – sometimes shown as a Settings button or three dots …

    Dots

    or a cog wheel icon

    Cog

    Once connected to the Network Session it is all happening in GarageBand…

  • icePad

    It has been very chilly lately but it is returning to a normal temperature today – which should please the iPad…

    iPad screen reporting that charging is paused due to cold temperature.

  • Restoring sounds to the iPad via memory lane.

    I was confused as to why the iPad would play music and the sound on videos but fell silent while playing games. I eventually realised it was in Silent Mode. Swipe down from the top right corner to open the Control Centre and tap the Bell icon to toggle Silent Mode on and off.

    Best of all – this also restored sound to the wonderful SoundForest app which had been silent for a while. Created by Justin Alexander it seems to have been abandoned but still functions on the latest devices.

    Many (many!) years ago I wrote a little thing for the Amiga called Beat Sheets which triggered brief sound samples. It was part of a series I created for children called Kids Disk, which were distributed on floppy discs for free from Public Domain libraries via snail mail. It was written with AMOS, which was pretty fancy for the time, probably in 512 kilobytes of memory. I did add a hard drive to the Amiga at some point which added 20 megabytes of storage – which I described at the time as “like having a vast empty warehouse to store stuff”; for context the SoundForest video below is 155 megabytes.

    Lo and behold (isn’t the Internet wonderful?) someone had a video of Beat Sheets in action which they seemed to be running in an Amiga emulator…

    Beat Sheets on the Amiga 1993

    Fast forward several decades and SoundForest is a far more sophisticated app, downloaded from the App Store and running on a hand held device with a terabyte of memory. It follows the same idea of tapping sound samples into a grid. You can extend your song by swiping to the left for a fresh sheet. Tapping the top bar stops and starts the player and double tapping changes the speed. Different sounds are available in the various environments – jungle, desert, ocean etc. Great fun.

  • Ten Years After

    Rummaging around in here I discovered I still had a YouTube account, from the days before it became the quagmire of advertising and tracking it has become, which lead me to this old post from a decade ago:

    http://blog.duncanmoran.net/archives/2437

    The iPad was a mere one year old at the time but was already showing signs of its potential for making interesting noises. I suspect the missing video was for an, alas short lived and no longer available, app called Konkreet Performer which was an early attempt at new ways to interact with sounds on iPads:

    A 2011 Konkreet Performer promotional video

    Things have evolved over the years and today you have AudioBus to pump sound between apps, AUM to connect and mix instruments and effects and countless apps like TouchScaper and SoundScaper and even some that are not called somethingScaper. Although Smule still have some apps available their MadPad has also vanished; as has the Levenshulme Bicycle Orchestra.

    The other video in that old post was a young Frank Zappa performing on a bicycle during the Steve Allen TV show in March 1963. Many years ago I read about this but who could imagine that decades later and thousands of miles away you can sit on a sofa with an iPad watching the video and also learn how, in late 1962, the young Zappa would hang out in Don Preston‘s garage improvising soundtracks to various film clips. Preston had a range of junk percussion ‘instruments’ he used including a bicycle.

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