Looking for ES-3 / ES6 Modular tips & advice

Hi Audulus denizens. First post of many I’m sure. I picked up the iOS app on BF weekend and have tried out dozen patches posted on these bords. Thanks, I’m looking to dive in deeper.
Seeing as most of the Expert Sleepers threads on this forum are ES-8 specific, I’m hopeful that a rig I’ve got with an ES-3 / ES-6 and a usb sound card with optical in and out are « adequate » to be interfacing between a M-32, iOS devices and a lappy running VCVRack/Reaktor Blocks.

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I actually just got an ES-3 on the way myself! But all that you need to make sure of is that your interface doesn’t put the ES-3/6’s I/O out of the maximum 16 channel range. So if your interface has 16 channels i/O you wouldn’t be able to access the ES-x’s. In Audulus 4 we’ll have support for an arbitrary number of I/O but at the moment it’s limited to 16. You may be able to swap them in software to make the ES3/6 appear “first” if you catch my drift?

Doh!
I was unaware of the 16 channel I/O range limitation. As the ES-6 is “on the way” and I have yet to try patching from the ES-3 HEK up till now, I don’t know if the usb 5.1 channel sound card I was planning to use meets that requirement.

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Either way, you’ll be able to use it with Audulus 4 next year. I have the ES-8, so it’s just expanding from 8->16 outputs. I know it sucks and I’m sorry you maybe ordered it without knowing the limitation, but it will be useful in the future. I personally am excited for Aggregate Device support, which would let me use all 16 outputs of my audio interface without having to reserve 1-2 to loop back into a separate interface to record. I could instead just use soundflower to route the audio internally back into a DAW (that said, we’ll have recording in Audulus 4, so I might not even need to do that and can be DAWless finally!).

Two things to look forward to then, aggregate device support & AUv3.

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For iOS you are limited to a single USB audio interface (at least at this point). This is not an Audulus limitation, the underlying iOS operating system will only recognize a single audio device. It is possible to connect multiple USB MIDI devices to iOS using a hub, but only a single audio device.

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The only way you can get around this is if your interface can expand with ADAT (lightpipe) cables. Not many can do it, especially portable ones.

Taylor said Apple’s probably never going to fix this bug, so he’s looking into other possibilities of working around it. It probably won’t debut on v4.0, but I’m holding out hope for a later release…

I’m not sure Apple would consider this a bug. In any case, you’re not limited as far as the number of I/O channels, they just have be a single interface as far as iOS is concerned. With the Expert Sleepers you could have as many as 16 channels, which really ought to be sufficient for an iOS device. As far as iOS to CV connections are concerned, I think ultimately the answer will be high res MIDI CC to/from from the iPad through a MIDI to CV converter to your rack, rather than using an audio channel. Even with a single MIDI channel you could potentially have 64 14 bit channels. Don’t know if such a beast exists yet, but all the technology is there.

Thanks @stschoen for piping in.
Quote: “ I think ultimately the answer will be high res MIDI CC to/from from the iPad through a MIDI to CV converter to your rack, rather than using an audio channel.”

In a week’s time or so I will be experimenting with the config in the original photo and this:

I’ll report back…

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