AUBE - Audio Unit Box Explorer for Android

Just what you need

One click, open one app, and see everything you have. If your like me you probably have dozens of effects, instruments, sequencers etc. all over your desktop. I remember trying to organize the desktop with tons of hyper specific folders each named to make it easy to find what I’m looking for. Well I couldn’t usually find what I was looking for and I just stopped maintaining the desktop. It’s a mess now. Pages and pages of cool icons, most of which I have no idea what they are. This app fixes all that. I think I even sleep better now 🤔

Update in the works even if it’s paid?

I will start off by saying that I am a fan of this developers other apps and own several of them. For that reason I purchased this without question. I am very sad to say, however, that I cannot in good conscience give this a good review in the current state. In the current state, this app feels more like a proof of concept, or a tech demo. The concept is sound, exciting even, but I seriously question considering it a tool that one should pay for. I will list a few points that have triggered this reaction from me. * Other than a “favorite” flag, there is very functionality in this app to make it your own in a meaningful, workflow enhancing way. ** No custom meta data within the schema. I would expect things like the ability to enter some of my own notes to the entries. ** No ability for the user to provide care and feeding of the discovered entities in the app. As it stands, you must click a button to send your entire manifest to the developer for review and potential addition in a future update. This is the type of scenario that can take an app from productive to potato in a very short time should bandwidth of the development team become an issue. Many App Store applications do unfortunately hit the single point of failure at some point, but I expect for a paid app that it not be so front and center. It did not know what Vocal Synth was, for example, and that plugin is well seated in the top tier of the category. ** Related to the above. No ability to edit meta data associated to the apps, including classification. As it stands this app knows a lot about the plugins, but it’s not necessarily being put to use. For example - at the most basic level of plugin classification, the data points regarding capability are subject to the application’s logic/interpretation. If you dig deeper, the detail is there regarding the multi-faceted nature of a plugins exposed capabilities, however that information in many cases is not contributing to the high level mapping/display. E.g., a vocoder in some cases may also be a synth, and a sequencer, etc. Classification in these cases can be highly subjective and specific to a particular users workflow and usage. I had to scan through the plugin list multiple times due to odd placement, and it is not placement I would choose to adjust/adopt to even if it may be technically accurate for that singular item. Sans the ability to customize/override this determination, I would expect at least to show said plugins in the categories matching the functionality, even if it means showing the same plugin more than once. * No custom filter criteria or search. Now, you could argue that such an app does not need a search, however if one can have enough plugins to warrant a filter capability or basic search. * Typos in the already very short help documentation. This is not necessarily a huge deal, but it definitely sets the stage for the early release/tech demo vibe that I get from this given how easily avoided it is. I could go on, however, I trust that this makes my reasoning clear regarding my personal assessment. I will continue to watch this app, and I am HONESTLY hopeful that I can update this review should functionality be released that make demonstrable progress in bridging the deltas holding me back from being able to call this an app that one should pay for. The 40% off was nice… but even at that price it’s still not immaterial.

Great little app to keep tabs on all your AUv3 apps. I feel like it should be FREE however, as there is no ability to customize your collection… Fred is constantly updating his apps so maybe this will be a feature sometime in the future. (i.e. I wish you could add notes to a specific App to indicate favorite presets, etc.)