These days I am absolutely in love love love with koala and what it does paired with my digis over a simple usb cable - especially the digitakt. did this update last night and its awesome
theres so much to love about this app with the digi’s. heres a few reasons:
-an instance of koala followed b y a decent AU eq plugin like fabfilter etc (and whatever other effects) is an excellent workaround for the absence of track eqs in the digitakt. super easy to quickly resample in and out.
-audio and midi over usb into digitone allows able to hear ipad audio out of digi, resample it in Koala and resample the koala back in the digitakt.
-empty koala slots, if triggered by a prepared digi midi sequence. will automatically sample the digi audio (meaning all the samples are perfectly sliced in timer) and continue to play it through the koala fx. This is a very similar outcome to using trig records on an octatrack or sequenced record machines (cant remember if thats what they are called) on the machinedrum.
-if you use a usb hub into the ipad that has both a digitakt / digitone connected. if it is the type of hub that allows the port to be stitched on or off you can quite easily bounce between sampling either in koala pretty much on the fly.
-koala FX app - also awesome, in front of Koala sampler (with audiobus) allows any of the koala fx (not just the record specific ones) to be usable to sample the digitakt with FX on the way in. sick
-the usb over audio leaves the physical audio in out port free.
-depending on if you use digitakt or digtone to sequence koala allows 2 different methods of polyphonic play styles per track to whatever taste you fancy.
long story i think Koala and the digitakt is the most perfect combination of any gear Ive ever paired. totally worth it. and with the samurai its even better. bi-directional sampling between 2 samplers is amazingly fun and creative
the one thing that gets in the way that i hope is included in a future update: if you are using external midi to sequence koala, whatever note is pressed will jump to the ‘edit’ window, the same it works on the touch screen pads. which is fair enough - but it means you kind of have to stop the sequence to find enough time to edit whatever is just sampled if wanting to trim / normalize etc. - the option to disable midi input selecting the current sample for editing, thus allowing just the touch screen pads for that purpose would be the ducks nutz.
and obviously proper AUv3 format would be next level.