Midi Sequencer with Vegas

UmbilicalBungee wrote on 11/10/2011, 5:33 PM

I've always been one of the users that would like to see midi sequencing in Vegas. I deiced to put some effort into some solution using third party software. I had some success with using the midi time code in and out through virtual midi ports to sync to external sequencing software, but the syncing is never quite accurate or reliable enough.

I recently started exploring another route using sequencing software that will run as a vst plugin. I tried a few and had varying success with Temper, EnergyXT, and Pharzor. Run as VST plugins in Vegas these can read the transport state from the host (vegas) and so will actually start and stop playback with vegas, and the sync seemed good at first , aside form a few glitches.

I got the furthest with Temper. The midi in and out functionality seems to get disabled when running these inside Vegas, but I found that you can get around this by running VST plugins inside the sequencer plugins, using them as hosts. The MID2VST and VST2MID by Tobybear worked best for me. This page listed a few others. I was able to link the VST plugins to virtual midi ports to external sound software and devices. I could actually arm the midi track in the plugin, press play in Vegas and record from a keyboard. Then press play in vegas to play it back. The syncing seems rock solid except I was disappointed to find that some times the two time lines would play back from different places, and though the tempo from vegas gets sent to the VST sequencer making changes to the tempo seems to cause things to not work well and get out of sync. I found some information on what transport and syncing data can be read by a VST plugin from this SynthEdit software. So I'm hoping that it would be possible to improve sync between Vegas and a VST sequencer. Unfortunately Temper is no longer being developed. I was thinking of getting on some forums for some opensource sequencers and see if there is interest in creating VST versions of those.

So after way too many hours of experimenting and hoping for a perfect solution, this is as far as I have gotten, but I wanted to post here to see if there is any interest especially if someone else wants to help experiment and discus solutions. If so I can post in more detail how I set things up in Temper (its not always straightforward).

Thanks.

Comments

Geoff_Wood wrote on 11/10/2011, 6:58 PM

I gave up asking for a simple MIDI file player to be integrated into Vegas years ago. I now render MIDs to audio, or use a separate player with VAC to loop back to V.

What you suggest will never happen in Vegas, but why not use Acid, which is designed for this purpose (+ more) ? Iknow, V is intuitive and easier to use, but all this tempo and MIDI stuff would soon alter that.

Thanks for the tips on work-arounds.

geoff

musicvid10 wrote on 11/10/2011, 10:07 PM

"What you suggest will never happen in Vegas"
Never say never. There appear to be vestiges of experimental work already in Vegas.

Randy Brown wrote on 2/17/2013, 10:46 AM

Is there not some kind of software that has the MIDI/audio (VSTI) capabilities of something like Sonar X@ or Cubase and simple video manipulation?
I use VP12 and Sonar X2 ...Sonar allows 1 video track and only one clip of video on that one track.
VP12 has all the video manipulation I would ever need but no serious VSTI support.
Surely this combination is inevitable sometime in the near future right?
If the technology is here (and is reasonably priced) I'd sure like to know about it if you guys have any suggestions.
I read somewhere about being able to sync 2 PCs (one vid software and one DAW) but it was too much for my little monkey brain to understand.
Thanks,
Randy

rraud wrote on 2/18/2013, 8:52 AM

Sonar, PTs and some other 'DAW' apps, are primarily for audio only, and offer video playback for post production purposes. VP on the other hand, is more of a NLE' (video) app., though it has the audio capabilities of a dedicated DAW.. but MIDI ain't one of them.
BTW- the OP on this thread is Nov. 2011.

UmbilicalBungee wrote on 10/9/2013, 2:49 PM

Yep 2011 and now here we are at 2013 with no better option. I'm still wishing for the ability to record and edit midi tracks along side video tracks. The one peice of software I've found out there that is trying to do this is http://www.acoustica.com/mixcraft .The video editing is slow and clunky but it does allow for multiple tracks and fading and other fx. I've been planning a project to put it through it's paces, but haven't got around to it yet. Hopefully the company will keep improving the video editing part of it's software. The audio part seems decent.

On the vegas side I've started looking into using this VST plugin http://www.robertvanya.info/midevice/Products.aspx to atempt to patch together a sequencer that is synced through audio track automation. Also I wonder if there is a solution out there using some sequencing software that can emulate a hardware control surface since Vegas can talk to those. If my programing skills were only up to snuff I'd build something myself.

UmbilicalBungee wrote on 10/11/2013, 12:28 AM

I just discovered that Ableton Live supports multitrack video editing, and does some nice things with video stretching ans beat mapping as well. Only drawback is it doesn't do video fades.