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Quick Start Guide

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2022 11:46 am
by jorge

Quick Start Guide


Updated on the 11th ofJune 2022

Introduction

This document shows you how to get started using VisualSwift, it will evolve over time. You can click any of the linked images to see them in high resolution.

File Browser

When you open VisualSwift you're presented with the standard iOS File Browser:


From here you can execute any of the standard File Browser operations like creating a folder, creating a new document, duplicating a document, sharing etc.

Create Document

When you create a new VisualSwift document you should see the following:


The image above shows you an almost empty schematic, it has only one component, the Audio-Out component:



Instantiating an Instrument

The first thing you probably want to do is to instantiate an instrument and connect it to the Audio-Out component.

When you double-tap on an empty part of the schematic where you see the grid, you should see a popup menu with a list of components that you can select:


Effect, Instrument, MIDI Effect and MIDI-Processor have a chevron pointing to the right as they will open a further menu with a selection of relevant Audio Units.


If you tap on Instruments, you should see something similar to the following screenshot. In your case you will see the Instruments that you have installed on your device.


In this example, I've selected Pure Acid from my list of installed instruments:


The Pure Acid instrument is showing a red translucent background, that means that it isn't loaded, it will load when it is plugged to the Audio Engine and unloaded when unplugged. The plugin's front panel will show when loaded otherwise it is replaced with an icon.

Inputs and Outputs

The Pure Acid instrument is showing one MIDI Input and one Audio Output. Inputs are shown on the left side of components and outputs on the right side. MIDI Connectors are represented by a Musical Note with a red circular background and Audio Connectors by two white circles on top of a blue filled circle.

Connecting

Now you can connect the Pure Acid instrument to the Audio-Out component by dragging from the Audio Output Connector of Pure Acid to the Audio Input Connector of the Audio-Out component.


During linking, while dragging, the components that are being connected are highlighted with a white border. When finished dragging you should see the following:


The Pure Acid instrument is now connected to the Audio Engine, try tapping on the piano keyboard, you should hear the notes being played.

You might have noticed that the Pure Acid Component now has 2 extra MIDI outputs. This is because after loading the Audio Unit, VisualSwift enquires which extra outputs it supports. To find out the names of the connectors you can tap the header of the component ( where you see the name and type of the component i.e. Audio Unit and Instrument ) which will show a control panel around the component with action buttons (N), (L) and (X). Tap the (L) to enable showing labels and you should see that the two extra MIDI outputs exposed by Pure Acid are labeled "Bassline Midi Out" and "Drums Midi Out":


You can tap the (L) again to hide the labels as most often they are not necessary and will just clutter your schematic.

Resizing

You probably want to interact with the Front Panel of the Instrument. Although you can fully interact with it as it is you probably want it to be much bigger. The most useful is to make it full screen by tapping the top left corner of the component.


The top navigation bar remains visible so that you can interact with the transport controls i.e: Start, Stop, Rewind, BPM and the (X) button to minimise the front panel back to where it was.