miRack - Universal

MiRack is just a terrific modular experience on the IPad! For example, the Mutable Instruments clones sound fantastic and are simply a delight to mess around with. Modular synthesis can have a steep learning curve, but thanks to numerous VCV Rack tutorials on the internet you can get up to speed fairly quickly on how to make patches. I hope this app continues to receive support as it really sounds and feels like your working with real modular gear in ways other apps just can not match. Moog Model 15 is outstanding but it is not even a quarter as flexible in routing and sound design as MiRack. The control voltage routing options alone are almost limitless. Honestly, MiRack could easily be used to teach a full year course on electronic music if one desired to do so. It is that authentic and true to real modular hardware. Needs AU3 support, IAA or Audiobus like yesterday. Would love additional modules like Plateau (lush reverb) to be added. Even reasonably priced modules for purchase would be a fantastic way to always upgrade the app. As is, it is easily a 5 star app that can take you places only $10,000 worth of gear or more could take you previously. Kudos to the developers for bringing VCV Rack to IOS!

Sometimes you don’t realize what you are missing or that you’re missing anything at all until you go looking for the variable unknown. I’ve been involved in music making of all kinds for decades - from playing the drums, guitar, bass, and synths, in bands and in the studio to running live streams of mixes made on the fly in AUM to Mixlr that incorporate frequency filtering of found sound and reappropriating recorded political addresses with beats and effects - hammering the insanity we have in the top levels of government in the US ... but when I turned to this app I realized it was a supplement for my cptsd symptoms. It helps me relax when anxiety starts approaching the dangerous threshold. There’s something about loosely controlling the arbitrary nature of these devices, which if I had the cash I would surely be engaged in the real deal since the experience is just drastically different, but for a ten spot this is doing me just fine while giving me the knowledge of what I will need when I start buying individual modules for a real rack. Thanks to the devs for this ✪✪✪✪✪

I love the UI. Everything feels so organized and not chaotic at all. The wires are perfectly made not to obstruct the view, so you can clearly see the labels and controls. There’s even an option to hide them, but they haven’t bothered me yet. I stumbled upon this app through YT about a month ago, and was a bit reluctant to buy it, because I already got couple of other “wired” modular synths, and they get zero usage. Well that is so not because they have a bad sound, it’s because I don’t like their UI. This miRack has a very pleasant UI. Easy to see everything on a 10.5” iPad, zoom in to get to actual knobs... just well designed with user in mind. You can use this as an instrument, play with any controller keyboard. Or you can put it into FX slot as IAA, to process the sound in many interesting ways... One huge request for the developers though: please make a polyphonic module, Playing like 8 note would be really cool for some patches. Oh and one more request, please make the patches manual-only save. We all love to experiment, and when you do that, it’s easy to get carried away and mess your good patch, or maybe come up with something completely new that’s also good. So pressing save/“save as” can be of great help! :)

The developer has added a lot of new features and modules so hopefully all of the startup challenges will be a thing of the past. Old Review: The VCV Rack developer was able to successfully pressure the miRack developer into removing all of the original basic/fundamental modules. This has broken every patch I’ve made. Right now they’re a bunch of yellow rectangles with cables attached without any text describing which module they were. Many of the modules do not have a description. Presumably if you’re already a VCV Rack user, these modules will already be familiar. I do not feel comfortable or optimistic about this app as the dispute with the VCV Rack developer means I do not feel ethical about using their website to find out how to use modules I don’t know how to use in miRack. The miRack developer doesn’t really have much of any support information on his website. At this point I’ll just wait to see if the miRack developer is able to provide better support for the app, otherwise I feel it’s not worth my time to learn more about it. Perhaps the VCV Rack developer might pressure Apple into crippling miRack even more?

With the latest introduction of Plateau Reverb I’m pretty happy. I wonder how far this port will be developed, which thus far seems to be moving along quite quickly! I’m seriously impressed with the speed at which the developer responds to requests and gets things implemented, with IAA it becomes possible to now process things using external plugins for some final polish. I’ve also tested out sending MIDI from Patterning 2 and that works great. I’m excited to see where this ends up, its an extremely fun app.