I am quickly developing a love/hate relationship with SampleTank iOS. I love the sounds, but I hate hate HATE the MIDI implementation. I can get midi to it from Genome fine, but not from Meteor for some reason. Meteor can send MIDI ok to Sunrizer and ThumbJam for example, but even using MidiBridge, SampleTank just kind of sits there like it's waiting for something.

Has anyone managed to get this working?

It's very frustrating, it seems that Sampletank not behave the same with all the Apps. I can't make it communicate with Meteor, don't know why. And Midibridge is always useless with Sampletank.
Actually, It communicates well with ThumbJam, Genome, Nlog Pro and that's it. Not in sync, but it's better than nothing I guess...

This App is extremly disapointing if you try to compose without computer and external hardware. It doesn't integrate in the iOS music world at all...

And I don't know what they are waiting for an update....


And why the hell, is the recorder so stupid... Would it start on the first note played, wouldn't we beg for MIDI Sync!!!!!

Sounds are great, but the rest...

MidiBridge definitely can control SampleTank, so if Meteor can be made to push events into MidiBridge (either by MidiBridge's own virtual input or Meteor's virtual output (I am not familiar with Meteor)) then this should work (see caveat below). There's a few tricks to getting MidiBridge to control SampleTank. These are the important points:

1. Start MidiBridge *before* SampleTank to ensure SampleTank will listen to MidiBridge.

2. In MidiBridge make sure that 'Run in Background' on prefs page is 'On'

3. In MidiBridge route the events you want to go to SampleTank to the 'MidiBridge' (output/destination on the right).

4. In SampleTank make sure 'Background Audio' in settings is 'On' (button must be highlighted in red!)

There's some information about all this in our Understanding MidiBridge guide:
http://j.mp/v7WfYC


OK, now if that still doesn't work then it may not be a MIDI problem at all but an audio engine problem. SampleTank is very unforgiving if another app changes the (shared) sample buffer size resource on iOS. Basically all sound just stops.

A simple way of testing this is to setup Little Midi Machine driving SampleTank with MidBridge and with everything playing in the background and then start up Meteor. If the LMM pattern sounds stop, then you'll know the audio engines are incompatible and unless Meteor or SampleTank update to behave nicely there is not much you can do.

Thank you for the sympathy, J.C.! My hope is that one day, all of ST's little peculiarities will be resolved, because it really sounds great!

Thank you for the quick reply, Audeonic -- especially since I was just crying out into the void for help . MidiBridge is a really slick app. I saw the tech notes on the MidiBridge website about SampleTank (start-up order, etc.) but still couldn't make it go. I'll try again with the Little MIDI Machine test. Perhaps the audio engines just are incompatible, but at least now I have some good troubleshooting information to go on. Thanks again for the reply! MidiBridge is awesome, and the customer service can't be beat!

Thanks for the infos Audeonic, I'll try the LMM test!

So I did the test and it seems to confirm that the audio engines are not conpatible...

Everythung run well and then the sound stop when I launch Meteor.

That's too bad. Maybe this is something we can propose to the IK team to fix, but I don't know if it'd involve a huge rewrite of the audio engine or is something more simple. Thank you for doing the test, though!

The sadest thing is that I realised that there is no virtual midi capable multitrack MIDI sequencer for iPhone on the market!

I'd love to have Genome running on the 4s even without MIDI editing!

What about Beatmaker 2?

Yes you're right sorry, but it doesn't work with Sampletank...

Have you tried it with MidiBridge? I could have sworn I got BM2 working with ST using MB (on the iPad). It's a $9 app, but it's really slick and robust and kind of a necessity, as it turns out. I will have to recheck this again tonight to make sure... I was kind of in a ST-induced haze of frustration last night and I'm not remembering everything clearly.

I know that too well

Yes I tried MidiBridge, without success, but I keep trying, as the BeatMaker UI is not the most intuitive

For BM2, you need to tell it to send midi to MidiBridge using MidiBridge's virtual in (not BM2's virtual out). Under BM2's MIDI SETUP (from the 'i' info box top right) make sure that the only MIDI OUTPUT selected (make sure MidiBridge is already running and MidiBridge in is connected to MidiBridge out)) is 'MidiBridge' and that this is 'on'.

Order of apps should be MidiBridge, SampleTank and then BM2.

Of course, do the LMM test that you did with Meteor with BM2 to make sure the audio engines are happy with each other. I don't currently have a device (not at the office) with BM2 and SampleTank to do this test on, sorry.

Thanks a lot for your help Audeonic, I really appreciate it!

I followed your advice and achevied to make BM2 to send MIDI to ST. Unfortunately the sound is not clean, there is a lot of "noise" or interferences. I tried to switch between low and ultralow latency in the ST settings but the problem still remain.

The LMM test ist negativ with BM2, so there is maybe another audio engine compatibility issue here...

Yes, this happened to me too (noisy sound from SampleTank) when I was developing MidiBridge. Here's a crazy suggestion (this worked for me). If you have Arctic Keys, then run this in the background. It also changes the sample buffer size but to a value that SampleTank likes and that some other apps will work with too.

You'll need to experiment in the order to make this work (if it will work) by bringing various apps into the foreground and then backgrounding them again until there is a combination that might work.

I'm considering adding a feature to MidiBridge that forces (and keeps forcing) the sample buffer size to a certain value but I'm not sure if it will work or will cause more problems than it creates. Right now I'm concentrating on new MIDI features for MidiBridge but if I have some time I might look into this.

Of course all this stuff is completely bizarre in 2012!

If you do experiment with running Arctic also and you find something works, let us all know. If you've had enough of all this workaround experimentation and just want to make music instead, then do that too!