Buried in the deluge of developer announcements that Apple made at their World Wide Developer Conference yesterday was an interesting development for iOS mobile music making: Audio Unit Extensions.

Here’s what Apple has to say about Audio Unit Extensions:

The Audio Unit extension point allows your app to provide musical instruments, audio effects, sound generators, and more for use within apps like GarageBand, Logic, and other Audio Unit host apps. The extension point also brings a full audio plug-in model to iOS and lets you sell Audio Units on the App Store.

It will be months before we can see how this plays out – but it looks like this is an attempt to combine the benefits and flexibility of audio plugins with the sandboxing and distribution benefits of the App Store model.

It also promises to make it easier for developers to create audio effects and synths for both iOS & OS X platforms, and to make it easier for end-users to buy and install them.

Developers can see the App Extension Programming Guide for additional details.

What do you think of the idea of audio plugins on iOS? Leave a comment and share your thoughts!

via CDM’s Peter Kirn