A Journey with Auria: Frustration and Elation

[GreyMediumMild]

Since November 2012 I decided that all my further musical creations would be entirely based out of iOS. Partly because I wanna join the cool club of an emerging musical medium, and also because, at its core, it's the most convenient way to put together musical ideas. Since then I've done the bulk of my creations on my daily bus ride between San Rafael and San Francisco. See... convenient. Now, my previous efforts also utilized iOS as the base (mainly creations started in GarageBand and ikaossilator), but this time around its definitely different. I've got rad synths. I've got kick ass drums. And, most importantly, I've got me some legit mixing love. Enter Auria. Dammit, I truly love this kid, but I also hate it so hard sometimes.

Previously I had done most of my early songwriting and sketching in ios GarageBand and would later, painstakingly, transfer all tracks to Mixcraft on my laptop. Don't judge me, I'm making music on a budget. I'd never wish on my worst enemies to go through the process of iTunes transferring/emailing/hacking ever, since it generally sucked balls. It was horrible, but yet worth it since getting ideas down on GB and ikaossilator was so easy. That was about a year ago. At the end of last year I discovered that iOS music making had dramatically changed. Way more app selection, faster ipad 4, Auria was out and Audibous was in the horizon. So I dropped some big money and now I'm swimming in waveforms and oscillators. Yeahhhhh.

Auria: awesome. Its awesome because its the missing puzzle piece preventing me from having a musical pipeline entirely in iOS. Synth-out in Animoog, bang the drums in DM1 and bring into Auria for a bit of mixing, cutting, eq-ing, tweaking and finishing. The mixes sound perfect. Everything is crisp and clear. Basically, hit mixdown, post to soundcloud and get grammy awards. Now, Auria does have challengers. Honorable mention, Beatmaker, is good but lacks any sort of mixing/mastering. Multitrack daw/meteor are essentially also on the same boat. Cubasis is great, but still would require me to move files to/from laptop for further mastering. But let's hold on Cubasis for a bit. While Auria's mixing console window is exactly what I had been dreaming about, it's editing window is exactly what I want to un-dream.

Frustrations. Let me just scroll this way... freeze. Let me just duplicate this region... Incorrect placement. Let me just trim this region... actually moves your region. Let me just go through unintuitive menus to do common tasks like cut, copy, paste. Clearly Auria's biggest failure is its interface. Cubasis is a darling in this respect. Everything is placed at your fingertips. Things are easy to find, buttons are big icons and not hidden or awkward (trimming in Auria, for example, is an exercise in patience and carpal tunnel). Steinberg understood the idea that this is an app for a touch screen and having it be skeuomorhpic to a traditional computer UI doesn't make any sense at all! From the clunky top menu bar, to the wasted space used for zooming/waveform display/region info (this is begging for task specific buttons that would pop-up like for trimming and editing), to the impossibly editable automation points, to the gambles of editing regions, it just never feels comfortable. Truthfully, it even feels dangerous at times. Can you guys imagine the headaches of dealing with editing midi events when Auria finally gets midi!? I can feel them already.

Even with a major shortcoming in the UI department, Auria still is my best finishing tool in iOS, and its future holds even more cool things. More audio warping capabilities, bigger/better/delicious plug-ins and of corse MIDI. Yup, I can't wait! Elation. Neither Cubasis, nor the other DAWs, can claim to make well produced/mastered masterpieces and that's why auria is still the heavyweight champ.

Ok, I'm done. Don't know why I wrote this, but now I feel better.

[GreyMediumMild]

And here's my previous iOS extravaganza. New Auria masters coming soon

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[gsv]

Amen brother... how much would I pay to be able to use a mouse on teh pad instead of my hamhock fingers!!!

[instinctive]

@gsv: Uhm, get a laptop?

[Dcramer]

The one I like about Meteor as compared to Auria is the audio edit window. I wish Auria had a dedicated edit screen for audio editing, that would make a huge difference. On the other hand Auria is the one app that sounds good, plugins do what they should and sound more like a desktop DAW then anything else.

[ChrisG]

The one I like about Meteor as compared to Auria is the audio edit window. I wish Auria had a dedicated edit screen for audio editing, that would make a huge difference. On the other hand Auria is the one app that sounds good, plugins do what they should and sound more like a desktop DAW then anything else.

Another idea to keep it all on one screen would be a "zoom selected region" button (NOT hidden inside a menu, menus don't belong on touch screens) placed somewhere on all the space still available. That button would zoom into the selected region as best it could to fit the screen, instead of the user having to manually pinch around the sluggish edit window. Just an idea, but I think it would make some things alot easier and faster.

[Dubhausdisco]

Grey- no offence, but you should start a blog. What exactly was your question/point again?

Another "iOS exclusive" artist who in reality wants a laptop but is too cheap to buy one, so they rip on ____ app...

[mtingle]

I couldn't disagree more on the issue of interface. Auria has it right. On an ipad 4 it's fast intuitive and effortless, a breeze to get around. All it needs is a few tweaks IMO. Its heading in the right direction.

an ipad 1 or ipad 2 may be a different story in this regard.

[ChrisG]

Grey- no offence, but you should start a blog. What exactly was your question/point again?

Another "iOS exclusive" artist who in reality wants a laptop but is too cheap to buy one, so they rip on ____ app...

Huh? Don't be a fanboy. He's right about every single point. The app is 2 parts, the edit part and the mixing part. The edit part is a _mess_ in a lot of regards. And obviously he should be able to express himself on that without some fanboys attacking him.

[GreyMediumMild]

Grey- no offence, but you should start a blog. What exactly was your question/point again?

Another "iOS exclusive" artist who in reality wants a laptop but is too cheap to buy one, so they rip on ____ app...

Ah, yes. No question, or point really. Mainly a thought on how Auria has affected my musical making workflow. A personal case study. Maybe the point was to hear differing opinions on how it's being used... Hmmm.
And yes, I am pretty cheap.

[Geronimo]

I'm not really happy to hear it so often that editing and arranging is so much easier on Cubasis. With MIDI coming relatively soon for Auria, i don't want to pay another 40€s for another DAW.

What exactly is it that makes it so much more intuitive?

[Geronimo]

@Geronimo If I had to pick one thing about the editing window that's more intuitive in Cubasis I would have to pick the 'Double Tap' function for selecting an audio part to edit.

With this you can double tap any wave form on Cubasis and it opens an edit window half the size of the screen for the specific part selected in an instant.

I would love to see this specific function in Auria, this would definitely make Auria a lot slicker to use when editing.

Sounds good to me. The "on the fly" editing in Auria is nice in theory, tbh, but it just doesn't work very smoothly. Often i'm tapping several times on a specific function until it does what i want.

[louparte]

Amen brother... how much would I pay to be able to use a mouse on teh pad instead of my hamhock fingers!!!

I agree. Editing tracks & sliding them around is more difficult on an iPad than on a PC w/a mouse IMO.

Even so - I'm through with computer-based DAW's except for MIDI. I'm sticking with Auria.
If it becomes too buggy or complicated, I'll jump back to Sonar. But I'm happy so far w/iOS 1.05.

[GreyMediumMild]

Amen brother... how much would I pay to be able to use a mouse on teh pad instead of my hamhock fingers!!!

I agree. Editing tracks & sliding them around is more difficult on an iPad than on a PC w/a mouse IMO.

Even so - I'm through with computer-based DAW's except for MIDI. I'm sticking with Auria.
If it becomes too buggy or complicated, I'll jump back to Sonar. But I'm happy so far w/iOS 1.05.

Yeah, thing is, I'm not necessarily wishing for PC workflows to make it back onto iOS. We have 10 fingers now, instead of one cursor. We're pretty much 10 times more awesome on a touch screen - like evolved octopuses! But I do understand though.
Hopefully a great UI and workflow combo will come around in the near future that will redefine the idea of moving around in a touchscreen DAW. Hopefully it's Auria!

[Rim]

I'm reading these posts and getting some ideas...


Rim