Secret Base Design has made Apollo MIDI Over Bluetooth – designed to let you use MIDI over low-latency Bluetooth LE connections – a free app for a limited time.
With Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth, you can connect a pair of iOS devices, or an iOS device and a Mac, using Bluetooth LE. Bluetooth LE is designed for low latency, which makes it a good option for music applications.
It’s currently a free download in the App Store.
I was psyched to try this exciting app, but sadly, when trying to connect my iPhone 6 to my mid-2014 MacBook Air (purchased at the end of August; less than one year ago), I was informed that my Mac doesn’t support Bluetooth LE. My iPad 2nd gen supposedly doesn’t support it either, so it looks as though I can’t use this app at all, despite being surrounded by very modern Apple devices. 🙁
Peter — can you drop me an email ([email protected])? A 2014 MacBook Air (actually, any MacBook Air, I think) should have BTLE built in, so it should work fine with the iPhone 6. Something funky going on here, and I’ll do my best to help sort it out.
Sick. Any chance youll be porting out to android or windows 10 api?
very cool,
useful app
Thanks for the coverage!
WRT Windows & Android — I’m part of the team working on Music IO, and we’ve got a free MIDI-only version of that. It gives you MIDI over a regular USB sync cable, to either a Mac or a PC. Latency is lower than Bluetooth, and the bandwidth is higher. For connecting to a desktop, that’s the way I’d suggest going. I did look at the Windows Bluetooth API — I still have nightmares about it, so that’s not likely to happen. For Android — have not looked at it yet, but it’s something I think about periodically.
I may leave Apollo free from here on out; I’ve always had mixed feelings about charging anything for MIDI, even if it’s only a couple of bucks. MIDI is sort of one of those things that should be free, and available everywhere.
Be sure to get the message to apple about hardwire interface then.
To do so now requires at min 50 bucks
Music IO already handles hard-wire MIDI connections — free, and you just need a standard USB sync cable. Midimittr is also available (and also free).
https://itunes.apple.com/app/music-io-midi/id989656108?mt=8
Apple might roll this sort of thing into a future version of iOS and OS X — it’s obviously do-able. We had Apollo out for about a year before they announced their own MIDI over Bluetooth solution, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this happened in iOS 10 or 11. Audio over regular USB will be coming in iOS 9 (although I feel pretty good about not getting badly Sherlocked on that — they’ve got latency issues, and it looks like it’s only one channel and unidirectional).