Developer Bram Bos – creator of Ripplemaker, Ruismaker, and other iOS apps – has introduced Mozaic, a new platform for making custom AU MIDI plugins for iOS.
Here’s what Bos has to say about it:
I’m creating a new product, codenamed Mozaic, to make it as easy as possible to roll your own AU MIDI plugins, ranging in complexity from simple/basic filters to moderately sophisticated apps and generative plugins. Mozaic will be able to cover a lot of plumbing ground.
Mozaic consists of two main ingredients: (A) a very readable and flexible scripting language and (B) a programmable AU MIDI plugin container.
The MIDI plugin part is like a MIDI controller with lots of features (such as ready-to-use LFOs, AU Parameters, host communication, tempo syncing, timer events, scales, programmable metronome, etc.) which you can tap into using the scripting language.
This means all the heavy lifting is done for you by the plugin. As with all AUv3, each plugin instance can run a different script.
The scripts are powerful and designed for MIDI and music applications; you can set up an LFO using a single line of script and get usable MIDI values from the LFO with just one additional line.
You can freely use (and dynamically label) all knobs and buttons on the provided plugin GUI to let your users interact with your plugin as if it were a MIDI controller device. Built-in LFO support, pedal support, musical scales support, etc. makes it easy to do interesting stuff with just a few lines of code.
See Bos’s article on Mozaic for additional details.
Very cool!
Awesome! Makes sense, plugins will go the same way as webpage coding… it’ll be drag&drop in a few years.
Seriously cool concept !
Awesome, I have been doing the groundwork on an LFO generator using a Teensy to modulate the OP-Z which sorely needs more LFOs but doing it in software would probably be even better. Super excited.
There’s quite a bit of cool stuff happening on iOS and Bram Bos has been central to it. His Rozeta suite of MIDI plugins (and his article describing how to make similar ones) paved the way for MIDI processing through AUv3. For instance, we’re soon getting a piano roll plugin which will make DAWfree musicking as easy as it can be.
Something which is a bit hard to explain in words is that plugin hosts on iOS make for fun workflows, especially in live settings.
The title for this piece makes it sound like Mozaic is ready for primetime. Bram is quite prolific but he makes it especially clear in his blogpost that this plugin will take longer to complete than his usual work on synths and effects. He usually only announces something a few weeks before releasing it but, in this case, he’s still figuring out the syntax Mozaic should use and the plugin may only come out at the end of 2019.
wake me up when its reaktor for ios
Audulus
this is cool and I am totally interested but i would love to see something like synthedit for ios that I used to use constantly to make my own vsts whenever I was looking for a device that I could package up and reuse that sounded or behaved differently that things out there. I know that he says that the visual creation wasn’t working compared to code but it seems like part of that is because the scope is so big on this rather than narrowing to just a synth creator or midi plugin creator or effect creator.