I've been meaning to write this for a while now, but everyday the situation gets more complex / interesting. So, here's my attempt at getting the whole picture on audio sharing on the iPhone OS.
ioLibrarySo, sadly we have said goodbye to ioLibrary from Amidio, and I think most of the apps that supported it have now been updated to remove it. The only one I can think of that hasn't been updated is
iSequence which is a great app. Also,
Equalizer still supports ioLibrary. Hopefully Apple have enough on their plate with getting rid of lots of other apps to worry about these two.
Of course, it isn't clear what Amidio will do next. Amidio haven't said which standard they might support for their own apps in the future, or if they might bring something completely new to the party!
Sonoma Wire Works AudioCopy / PasteSonoma Wire Works have had a lot of developers take up their audiocopy / paste standard. The apps that have this functionality are:
DopplerPadFourTrackReverbThumbJamI think there was also talk of
Bleep!Box going down this route, but no further news has come out. I'm not sure of any others planning the Sonoma way, although
Argon developer IceGearMusic has said they are thinking of it. Amidio have now said that they may go down the Sonoma route too with
Noise IO Pro, which is excellent news.
Intua's PasteboardNext we have Intua's new pasteboard standard which only got introduced as a direct result of ioLibrary being removed at Apple's request. Apps that are supporting Intua's standard:
BeatmakerBassLineDrum Track8 There could be more. If you know of them, or if you're working on an app that implements either of these standards please get in touch.
It would of course be nice to have a single standard for audio sharing, but I doubt that we will get anything like that for a while. There was talk of some form of common directory being in iPhone OS 3.2 when the iPad comes out, but the noise around that has died down.
Another possible solution would be for a single paste app (like PasteBot for example) to have the ability to hold audio from an app and then paste it out. That would be great too.
There are also a lot of apps out there which haven't declared any intentions. Apps like
RecTools08,
Sunvox,
Xewton,
iShred,
Jasuto,
PatternMusic, and a host more I'm sure.
So this post is really just the start of where we are with audio sharing. I'm sure that over the next few weeks things will change a lot and more apps will adopt either or both of the standards.
An OS change could alter the situation completely, and who knows how the iPad will change things. It just gets more interesting every day!
UPDATE 24/2/10-2:17pm - Correction MultiTrack will support Intua not Sonoma.
UPDATE 24/2/10-11:48pm - Correction to apps supporting Intua.