i would love to see a partnership with expert sleepers for a adulus branded product
the FH2 or ES8 would be my fist pick
EG: (bitwig )
https://bitwig.bandcamp.com/merch/es-8-bitwig-edition-usb-audio-interface-for-eurorack?_ga=2.133184654.1618612795.1524685378-1030409206.1454334735
any plans , on going this route or getting in to custom hardware ?
do you think adulus would benefit from a standardized dedicated interface?
We’d love to partner with Expert Sleepers! It’s been in the back of our mind for a while. It’s tough though since Bitwig can easily give out codes for their software with every purchase, whereas Audulus we’re limited to 100 per Mac/iOS version per release.
We’d love to make something with Audulus built-in natively to the module, but the module would be super expensive. It would basically be the cost of something like an ES-8 + a computer, not to mention all the time it would take to make a special edition of Audulus that would run on a FPGA processor. It would certainly be over $1000.
I would love to find a DIY solution - possibly with a small Hackintosh built in to a box, but dunno if it would be easy to turn it into a module for Eurorack.
I’ve been noodling on the idea of a DIY Audulus companion with a form factor and some of the function of a Koma Electronik Field Kit, but haven’t really gone very far with the idea. Idea would be to provide a set of preamp/buffer pieces for high impedance inputs in addition to other cheap inputs, exposing each via a USB audio interface.
@biminiroad This actually leads to a question… is there something special that a USB interface needs to do to work with the ADC inputs in Audulus? How do the ADC inputs relate to the normal mic and speaker nodes? I should probably poke around the docs…
The ADC node represents the same inputs as the Mic node, but allows you to specify a channel, whereas the Mic node is hardwired for channel 1 and 2. Similarly the DAC node represents the same outputs as the Speaker node. The only real difference is support for up to 16 channels of I/O. The actual hardware connected is controlled by the operating system. With iOS there is only one system audio input and output device at any given time. Connecting a USB audio interface automatically sets it as the system device and disables the internal speaker and mic. In theory any USB audio device supported by the iPad should work with Audulus as long as it has a 44.1 kHz sample rate. In order to work with the iPad the device needs to be class compliant. I’ve used a Focusrite iTrack, a Focusrite 6i6 interface and sent audio from a Mac to the iPad via USB using the Studiomux app.
A Mac Mini is probably hard to beat at $499. By the time you build something with the necessary horsepower to run Audulus and all of the necessary I/O you’re going to be close to the mini’s cost in any case. The mini has two channels of audio I/O built in (digital and analog), HDMI and Thunderbolt for video, 4 USB 3 ports, bluetooth, wi-fi, etc. If I wanted to build a dedicated Audulus unit, I think this or an iPad would be the simplest options.
eurorack please not desktop
In my case, I have no Eurorack equipment, so doing things standalone tends to be easier. I don’t anticipate actually building anything beyond a prototype, so any plans I publish should be adaptable. I’ll aim for 12V power.
So it sounds like we’re talking about two things:
I think I misread @FSK1138’s original post as a request for #2, but obviously the ES-8 already exists.
This may have been discussed before, but a top-of-the-line Raspberry Pi is clocked about as fast as my iPad Air: 1.4GHz. Of course, Raspbian is probably not as good as iOS for running programs efficiently. There are some alternatives, but I don’t know if they’re good enough.
I’m assuming the Linux version of Audulus requires X Windows? If it could skip X, then perhaps it could run a leaner system.
Actually, it’s the display that is probably the biggest stumbling block for an embedded version of Audulus. It would certainly be possible to extract the audio engine from Audulus, and if you were willing to restrict your control of a patch to MIDI and/or CV inputs via a device like the ES-8, I could see a patch running without a display, but you would still need a way to load patches. On the other hand, without having to deal with displaying graphics, the audio engine could probably run on a much more modest processor. Part of the issue comes with all the services provided by the operating system. Currently Audulus doesn’t have to worry with providing support for all the various peripherals that make up a typical system. Even with dedicated hardware you would still need an O/S of some sort to provide connectivity, a file system, etc. Some Linux variant would be the most likely candidate, since that seems to be the most widely available. My point was that while it would certainly be possible, it might be quite difficult to do in a cost-effective manner. With an iPad starting at $329, the Mac mini at $499 and an iPad Pro at $649, plus of course all the various Windows devices, it would be hard to justify building something for $1000. The ES-8 is a wonderful device, but it’s main benefit is the fact that it is DC coupled and so can send and receive CV voltages from Eurorack hardware. For those of us without Eurorack, MIDI is really a more practical way of communicating control information, and hopefully will be much improved soon. From my perspective, if an embedded version of Audulus costs more than an iPad with similar performance, why build it?
I can see some advantages to a branded interface since presumably you could be confident that it would work well with Audulus. I think something that is DC coupled like an ES-8, and ideally could run either stand-alone or in a rack. Four or six channels of IO and maybe MIDI as well plus a couple of powered USB ports for USB midi devices.
