The mindless praise thread

[Androcid]

So, I know this is a support forum, meant for bug-hunting and troubleshooting, but I thought there would be nice with a dedicated thread for some praise and glory, both for the app and the customer support and everything.

So, I have been a 'dormant' electronic musician for years now, loosing abit of passion for music making after not having neither the cash nor space for analoge hardware, and feeling abit disconnected from computer music through the mouse and keyboard. Still listening to alot of synthmusic, and after exchanging my computer for an iPad alltogether (!) I started playing around abit with mainly Korg's music apps, and was blown away from the ease of use, powerful soundengines and the FEEL of playing on the iPad, it was just so much more hands on doing it with my fingers instead of with a mouse and keyboard. I started hoarding synths and drum machines and started playing around.

I had a ton of fun but was left frustrated when I was starting to piece it together, I mainly used GarageBand due to the interface, tested out MultitrackDAW but was always left frustrated, and with GarageBands 8 tracks and no effects or EQ I didnt get very far. Then I stumbled upon the Auria website! Dadaaaa, it was everything I had hoped for gorgeous mix of analog and digital feel (like I love with all things iOS music), all the features and more. So I started waiting. I swear to God I checked the site five times a day. And suddenly it was there, in the app store, on my iPad. I spent an hours time exporting and importing from GarageBand and sat down with it, the feeling of the knobs, the design and interface, the possibilities, the feeling that it was easy to use but still packs a serious punch is overwhelming and amazing.

After spending some time mixing and editing I saw that I missed a synth part. I recorded it in Animoog and copy-pasted it in and found the first glitch, it was mono and sounded horrible. Long story short, some excellent customer service and the first update later everything was in place. Now the last thing that bugged me was mainly my own skill, but my lack of audio-theoretical skill made EQing without visual aid or a easy band-interface a challenge. So I bit the dust and bought the ProQ eq, it was, after all, ridiculously cheap concidering how powerful I read it was and how much it sells for as a normal VST. This just made my experience complete, it sounds AMAZING, feels amazing to use, makes it easy yet powerful. I reccomend everyone to pick this up, it's worth twice of what you pay for it. At least.

So, sorry that this got a bit longer then i thought, but I just feel almost religious about this, and this is actually one of the reasons I'm doing music at all right now, and that I feel inspired again to do music and sounddesign. You have done a VERY good job and are clearly invested in this product and its future.

[ChrisG]

Ya I got the ProQ also. Did'nt really get along with the ones included (although they sound fantastic too). I'm more used to the visual feedback it provides too. It's way fun and easy to use! One weird thing I noticed is that having the pre/post visuals ON reduced the CPU usage, but that's good I guess lol. It does eat CPU tho but that's understandable.

[Navpack]

I was going to put this in its own thread, but this mindless praise one seemed appropriate...

Much of my post-production time is spent going between two facilities and also traveling. More often than not a client will ask for a change and Auria has been an exciting idea for handling change requests as the iPad is generally always with me. Last week I was given several smaller post-mix projects and it seemed the right time to jump in to see what Auria could do.

Client provided .m4v video and OMF files. Nuendo has been my main DAW and I used that to convert the .aif file to .wav (needed at this point for Auria to see the 48k header). Exported out AAF to Dropbox. (Once the conversion from Final Cut via Automatic Duck's AAF is straightened out I won't need this step.)

Import of video and AAF was straight ahead. Video scrub even while highly zoomed in was responsive. This particular client always seems to shoot in difficult sound locations, and while I didn't have my normal noise reduction plugs available, Pro-Q handled the need to notch out unwanted source sounds well.

Over the course of moving around the timeline I did run into three instances of the waveforms and track lanes going blank. This seemed to occur when during playback I would attempt to move the view from a lower track lane to an upper one. Restart cleared this, and in each case all my edits were intact.

I keep many of my usual SFX and underscore cues in .mp3 format on Dropbox. Since Auria has come along I've been looking for a good way to index and search, so I can find that particular sub-folder when importing to Auria. I've tried McLoud, but after a few thousand cues are indexed, the search entry crawls along very slowly. This isn't really an Auria thing so much, but if someone has found a way to index and search across dropbox I would be very interested. I realize the native iPad app has a search function, but it only shows the file in the results, not the folder where it is located. AudioCopy would also work, but I hadn't found an app to start the copy with.

Anyway, these videos called for about a dozen or so sfx and underscore music cut per video. Import via Auria worked well. One thing to keep in mind is when doing any further imports from DB, you will start at the top of the file tree each time.

Cleaning up the editor's timeline edits were not any more difficult than in a typical DAW. Automation and editing those node points were spot on.

Really like the metering, and even when editing the screen never felt too small with the meters turned on.

Exports went without problem - just had to keep in mind the 300MB limit on uploading to dropbox.

Client was happy with my turn around time. I am happy that I now have an extremely mobile solution to get my work done. Not for every project, as I realize this is still an iPad. But the fact that I turned out something that matched my big-boy DAW using the iPad just impresses me to no end.

Thank you, Rim and company.

Phil.

[Navpack]

Follow up: came across an app 'AudioShare' that seems to AudioCopy from Dropbox search results. For some reason Auria doesn't see the clipboard audio... AudioPaste works in some other apps - strange, unless I am doing something incorrect.

Phil

[distraub]

Phil, not sure if it will work for you, but I have come across something similar in my own app and other apps that use Sonoma Copy and Paste, if you don't have anything in the Sonoma Pasteboard but only something int he General Pateboard, then the app may not think you have anything in the pasteboard at all.

Try first copying a sound from Auria into the pasteboard, then going into Audioshare to audiocopy the sound you need, then come back into Auria and see if you have the sound in your pasteboard.

-distraub

[Navpack]

Thanks for the tip. You are correct, that seems to be the only way at this point to move audio easily across things.

I've been successful searching across the dropbox app, then 'Open In' Hokusai, swipe my area of interest and AudioCopy over to Auria. Working pretty well, with the only downside that currently Auria doesn't conform sample rate of Audio Paste. Rim has indicated this could be in a future release. I'm getting work done which makes me happy!

Regards,
Phil.

[Geronimo]

I feel exactly the same about this as you, Androcid.

I love sounddesign and everything that comes with it. I've been doing it on a pc for years, up until the day that i've stopped it all, because i couldn't take it anymore that i've been using illegal software since day one. I just had to stop, because i couldn't afford Logic, and Kontakt, and Reaktor, and VSL, and, and, and... So i just quit for quite some time. Then i got the iPad this year, and there was this feeling that came with it, like excitement, joy and just pure anticipation, which is still there nearly half a year later.

I'm enjoying Animoog, DM1, ThumJam, iDensity and Grain Science so much, as i can just load them up and play around with them whenever i feel like it, just casual, like playing a good game. I've never had that with a classic DAW on a PC, that is needed to play with the synths and effects and everything. And the best of it, i can afford these things. I can actually make some music now without feeling like a mug all the time, which lessened my joy significantly in the past.

And now there's Auria, where i can put all the pieces together and do something real with it. Creating sounds just makes sense for me now. It's now the way it's always supposed to be... just pleasure. Even the hard parts, like EQing and finetuning for hours, where your mind easily fatigues after a while, are, at least to some extent, joyful. I think that's mainly because you're really physically involved with it. You're using your whole body, and not just your head, all the time. Regardless whether you're creating a beat, working on a synth, or finding out which frequencies actually suit this sample now...

I've never thought i would say that, but the iPad actually is something... engaging, and for me a game changer. I'm skeptical about Apple's behaviour in general, but this time i'm thankful (i really am) for this device.