An interesting discovery

[Dewaine]

As you know if you read my post here on KVR, I am a pretty big fan of music making on iOS. The biggest hold up for me, and I am sure many of you, is the lack of "VSTi" type instruments. As it stands now you are pretty much locked into what ever synth or sampler the sequencer of your choice has built into it.

The big "work-a-round" is copy/paste. It works, but is often awkward. Some synths don't have a metronome (I use a metronome app running in the background)and even with one it is hard to "feel the grove" of your song if you can't hear it. Well, I made an interesting discovery.

I was messing around with Additive Synth (LOVE IT), and got a wild hair.... I opened Beatmaker 2, and looped a song. Hit the button to switch to Additive Synth and noted BM2 kept playing. I started playing Additive Synth and was still hearing BM2! I could actually play along in real time with BM2! I had tried this in the past with Sunriser, but it didn't work. So then I opened up iSyn Poly (another Virsyn synth) and it worked too! I tried Nanostudio and FL Studio but they did not work. But in BM2 I can play these synths along with my song in BM2 and record. Then copy/paste a better "take" into BM2... I am very pleased

So what is going on? What are BM2 and Virsyn doing that makes this possible, but not possible with other sequencers and synths?

[kuniklo]

When you say it doesn't work with Nanostudio or FL Studio do you mean that if you run them in the background you don't hear them anymore?

If so, it's probably because they haven't been explicitly coded to run in the background. On iOS if you want to keep your app running and generating sound in the background you have to explicitly ask the OS to do this for you. By default it puts your app to sleep when you switch to another app.