My cursor is hovering over the purchase button

Offtopic
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I’ve been trying for weeks to recreate a breathy pad synth of a Rodgers Trillium organ using my iphone. I’ve gone from Synth One to Synthmaster One to Mitosynth to MiRack. None of them seemed to be able to do it. MiRack’s only real problem being its lack of polyphony.

So yeah, I’ve been avoiding Audulus. I could tell pretty quick just by the description that it was more powerful, but also harder to learn than the others. I guess I started with the easier (or less expensive) synths, and have worked my way to here, kicking and screaming.

I see that Audulus 3 claims to have polyphony. I’m literally hovering my cursor over the buy button, but there is one problem. I’m not rich. $20 would be the most expensive app I’ve ever bought. But that’s not the holdup…

My concern is that literally tomorrow morning, Audulus 4’s gonna be released, and I won’t be able to afford it since I just bought Audulus 3.

So I’ve been all over the internet trying to confirm for myself that Audulus 4 isn’t about to be released right this second. And all I see is stuff suggesting that it’s… Well… Already actually supposed to have been released months ago.

So should I wait for 4? I mean, I’m kind of itching to get to work on my organ recreation. But oh my gosh if I was to buy it and then see 4 come out immediately, I would cry. :frowning_face:

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Welcome to the Forum! I can certainly understand your dilemma. Firstly, just to confirm, Audulus does support polyphony up to 16 voices. As you might expect, the practical limitation on the number of usable voices is the speed of the CPU. Since patches vary considerably in their CPU demands, it’s advisable to use the minimum number of voices required to prevent CPU overload. While it is certainly more flexible than many iOS soft synths, that does introduce some additional complexity, however there are plenty of pre-made modules included with the app and available here on the Forum. Audulus 4 is currently in early Beta but there has not been a release date announced as yet, although I would expect it to be at least a couple more months. Do you have an iPad as well as an iPhone? Given the difficulty of building a workable interface using the smaller display size of the iPhone, the developer is currently assessing whether iPhone support is practical for Audulus 4. No decision has been made afaik but it is possible that Audulus 4 will be an iPadOS/macOS app only.

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Ah, well if he is still trying to figure stuff like that out, then probably it isn’t going to be released soon. Good to know.

As for me, yea I just have only an iPhone. I’m sure it is a pain to make an app universal. But to drop iphone support? Hmm lemme think. Fewer sales… check. Disappointed users… check. Fake quotes from Einstein about not understanding anything that you can’t fit on an iPhone screen… check.

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Like anything it’s a trade-off. The current design for A4 has an inspector sidebar which is used to change various parameters while editing a patch. Since both the sidebar and the patch need to be visible simultaneously it’s difficult to fit everything on to an iPhone screen. Remember that if you support iPhones in your app, you have to support all the screen sizes including the SE. In any case I don’t believe a final decision has been made at this point, I just thought I would give you a heads-up that it’s a possibility. A3 supports all current iOS and iPadOS devices.

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All the bars and menus would need to be collapseable and adjustable in size. If there is both a bar along the top and also the side, then it could be possible to adjust both the top and side bars simultaneously with a single finger swipe. Basically, if you started to drag horizontally, it would be adjusting the side panel, but if you dragged vertically then the size of the top panel would get adjusted, so with one swipe it is possible to adjust two panels at once. You could also adjust both the panels down to the size of nothing, which would leave only the icon in that corner (the icon obviously being the thing you must grab to adjust the panel sizes) and you could then drag that icon to begin adjusting the panels again to being them back. Just a suggestion for one possible way to make it fit on smaller screens, but I’m sure you guys already thought of this and many other possible solutions already.

Actually it probably would be best to put away the iPads at first, when designing a universal app. I mean, I’ve never designed apps for ios (I’m a windows programmer), but I never touch a high end PC or high resolutions when I’m creating a new product, until very much later. I actually do all my work on a trash computer. Forces me to make it work really well on low end PC’s.

I just realized that I’m talking like I have low and high end PC’s, but I still stand by my original post where I said that I’m neigh pennyless, lol. I actually do have a good PC but I got it back in the day when I had money lol.

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I know what you mean about coding for low end devices. I ditched my last PC a couple of months ago because it had gotten too slow to be usable even though it was state of the art when I bought it. I’m now down to a single desktop Mac. One aspect of coding for iOS and iPadOS that’s not generally an issue for Windows is the need for approval to even market your app. Apple has pretty strict guidelines regarding the “user experience” which place some constraints on UI design. I understand their reasoning for wanting a consistent look and feel but even so, things that are technically possible often don’t meet Apple’s guidelines. That being said it’s certainly not impossible to design something that will work on both platforms. It’s really more of a question of the additional coding and testing required to support both. I can’t speak for @Taylor, the developer, but I suspect he’s weighing whether the potential additional sales to iPhone users will justify delaying the launch to add the necessary iPhone support…

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Support for iPhone is very important because of the cpu advantages. I was starting patches on my MacBook, but finishing them with the iPhone (both are currently broken so I have to use an older iPad for everything). Many people have newer phones, but old computers and iPads. I mean, how many people are using iPad pros? Personally, I don’t like the size. Also, it is nice to be able to load up Audulus on an iPad as well as an iPhone. It is a world of people with lots of different gear they are trying to interface.

I can’t speak highly enough of all the reasons to support iPhones. It’s just one of those jaw dropping features. You might bring your ukulele to the beach and hook it up to your phone with an apogee jam and Audulus. Etc., etc. IPad only? I get it. But I don’t get it.

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All valid points. Personally I would be happy to have a universal app, although I rarely use it on my iPhone. There are challenges in supporting the wide range of display sizes necessary to cover all the iPhones and iPads. I have no idea what decision @taylor will ultimately make regarding iPhone support for A4 but I can understand why he might be considering it.

1 Like
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Welp, I took the plunge and got audulus 3. Within almost no time, I’ve got my FM modulator popping. I’ve added an ADSR and tremolo. Then added a delay / chorus node, and hmm… 116% CPU already?

I’m on iphone 6s. It goes from 30% to crackling-level CPU with that chorus node. I don’t actuality want the delay, just wanted some stereo width actually, so the chorus, but couldn’t find a chorus-only node.

Anyway, uh, should I be worried? I wasn’t planning on stopping anytime soon on adding nodes. ;p But I’m already seeing max CPU and I’ve hardly started.

I mean, I previously was using… a different modular synth… that is also polyphonic… And in fact I just tested it, with even more nodes than this… I gave it an FM module, ADSR, vibrato node, delay node, reverb node, and flanger node, strung them all together and it’s at 5% CPU playing with all that.

Actually the only reason I left that other synth to come to audulus, is because it had a bug in its ADSR behavior. And I didn’t want to wait for it to get fixed, if ever.

I get it that audulus is more powerful but ouch, the CPU usage here. O_O.

I imagine the thoughts around here might be that audulus is super optimized code, and any CPU usage is simply the result of it being so powerful. But uh, 116% CPU vs 5%, while running fewer modules?

I mean, I’ve got more modules in the other synth, but they aren’t editable in their internal guts, like the way they are in audulus. Maybe the fact that audulus allows you to edit the modules internally, brings with it a large amount of overhead? Still though, ouch.

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Erm hold up, I may be doing something wrong. Here’s my whole patch:

MIDI In -> FM module -> delay / chorus module -> out.

With that setup, it’s 80% CPU or higher. But if I disconnect the chorus, it drops down to a more reasonable CPU.

BUT, if I leave the chorus attached, and disconnect just the midi in, the cpu drops down to 15% (the FM module keeps making sound).

??? I’m confused now. ;p

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Ah, so it’s the the 16 polyphony I had it cranked up to. Hmm.

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I tried adding a polyphony to mono thingie, coming right after the FM module, but before the effects such as chorus. The CPU is down, everything seems to sound the same and I still hear the polyphony, did I do the right thing? UwU

Okay I think it’s fixed, ignore everything I said above about unoptimized code, lol. Just another noob here blaming the app.

1 Like
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Polyphony in Audulus works by duplicating the nodes that are downstream from the polyphonic element, so if you use a 16 voice polyphonic keyboard node anything attached to its output is duplicated 16 times. Your first patch would have had 16 FM modules, 16 delay/chorus modules etc. This is appropriate for oscillators and envelopes but is not generally what you want for downstream effects. The polyphonic to mono node you used is the correct solution. With it inserted in the signal path you combine the 16 voices into a single channel so you only have one instance of the delay/chorus. For poly signals up to 4 channels there are also nodes to split and combine the individual channels. So if you are working with 4 notes of polyphony you can split them out and treat each voice separately (stereo pans etc.). A4 will have splitters and combiners up to 16 channels which will allow for more complex routing.
BTW what source are you using for the MIDI? The gate signal from the standard keyboard node varies with velocity when set to legato but is fixed at full velocity when you use polyphony. If you need a poly MIDI module that is velocity sensitive I came up with a hack that allow you to use to use velocity with poly output:Polyphonic MIDI interface with Velocity Demo.audulus (11.0 KB)