Apollo MIDI over Bluetooth App Reviews

I had been searching for a way to control SampleTank for Ipad (AIR2 here)….just bought it on the Black Friday sale - found that the sounds were beyond incredible and so bought a few of the in app upgrades. I have an x-key portable keyboard…but that is not remotely the same as my piano keyboard (midi outs/ins). I was deciding on the cable route - looked for several ways to attach my Technics digital to my new iPad Air 2 directly. Then, in doing my research, I came upon this - what????? If you have a current Mac you can attach it (and the attached midi keyboard you may use) directly to your Ipad via the Apollo iOS midi app for ipad and related free app available for OSX (bluetooth basically zero audible latency)…. AND control your connected keyboard (mine is connected already to a Macbook Air) and drive ALL the sounds within ipad’s sample tank (thor/animoog, etc.) directly with the external keyboard (that is already connected to your mac). What that means is your ipad’s synths/sounds, etc. (audio bus app’s are growing), may be driven/received wirelessly via midi signals from your computer. This is insanely amazing for me!!! On top of that, with Audiobus, you can then record those sounds directly into Garageband or other compatible DAWS (and if i’m understanding this correctly, it works both ways and you can drop what you’ve played back into your main DAW - like mine - Logic Pro X). All in all, even at the stage of just being able to trigger the IPAD library of sounds with my keyboard in real time over bluetooth without connecting any cables to my ipad is frankly a miracle of modern technology. GET this app - you will not regret it!

very useful app! thanks for that! :)

This does work with Garage Band (I was able to play the keyboard from Apollo iPad app which feeds into GarageBand). No issues there. I cannot get it to work with OnSong though. I have been using MIDI over WiFi with my Mac, but my WIFI connection drops out a lot so I wanted something more reliable. This app stays connected without issues, at least for the 5 minute demo period, but I could not get it to send the commands after about a dozen tries of the 5 minute trial. I’m simply sending commands from Show Buddy to OnSong telling OnSong which lyric page to display. This process works over WiFi, but as stated above, WiFi isn’t super reliable. I’m open to suggestions…watched the video on your site about how to set it up on my Mac and that’s exactly what I have been trying to do. I also disable WiFi on both machines because I don’t want that getting in the way. I will definitely buy the app if I can figure it out, and so will everyone in my band because my MacBook Pro sends the signal to everyone’s iPad since we all use OnSong.