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Subject:some unclear bits about midi...
Posted by: ATP
Date:8/22/2002 3:38:17 PM
alright, i installed the ACID 4 demo. got everything set up relatively quickly. now i have a few things i don't quite understand. - if i want to play VSTi's on my midi keyboard i have to make a midi track, and then assign a soft synth to it. that enables me to play live over a looped beat for example. all good so far. now, if i want to record it, i press Record, choose MIDI, and record the stuff. but here comes the part i don't understand: it creates an entire new track, with my midi playing recorded into it. and i notice i can edit, quantisise and do all that stuff from within the Track's Properties panel (General - Piano Roll - List). but then what is the MIDI track good for? just for playing live without recording? if i throw away the midi track after playing it doesn't screw up the recording. so can i see MIDI tracks as temporary tracks of some kind? - if i have several VSTi's enabled, and i want to listen to only one of them, i have to Solo it in the Soft Synth Properties. that seems kinda odd. it would make more sense to simply stand on the midi track of your choice and mute all others. as it is now, i actually have to set Solo to ALL Soft Synth channels, and only then i can listen to one indivual VSTi by muting other midi tracks. - finally, i seem to have an awful lot of latency, despite the fact that i have a SB Live. i have much better latency in Cubase for example (46ms, still too high), but in ACID it seems like i have much more. i have installed the 35.21 Station drives and i'm using Windows Classic Driver (SB Live! Audio B800) in ACID. it's either that or MS Sound Mapper. am i not using the ASIO drivers? and no matter whether i let ACID detect the latency automagically, or whether i try to set the slider myself, i always have the same amount of latency. --- sorry for the long post, and i apologize if these questions have been answered before. i actually did a search on the forum but wasn't able to find any answers. so, if anyone could provide me with some that'd be very much appreciated. thanks for reading all this. ATP |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: pwppch
Date:8/22/2002 4:23:38 PM
>> if i want to play VSTi's on my midi keyboard i have to make a midi track, and then assign a soft synth to it. that enables me to play live over a looped beat for example. all good so far. now, if i want to record it, i press Record, choose MIDI, and record the stuff. << You don't have to add a MIDI track to play/audition your softsynths. - Set up your input port(s) - Add the softsynth. - Assign it to the input port you want on the synth view - Enable Realtime MIDI from the options menu. - Play away. No need to add a track. As far as which synth recieves the input, the selecting track model wouldn't work. A track does not have an input port associated to it. What if more than one input was enabled? Which input would be routed to the softsynth? We added the solo button to permit you to select which synth listens to the input. I don't see any other direct way that would work on the fly, but I am wide open for suggestions. In general Wave/WDM emulation will have too great of a latency to work with softsynths. The results are not terrible if you set your buffering down to ~50-100 ms in the Audio prefs page, but it wont be as good as using and ASIO based driver/hardware combination. This is the main reason we added ASIO support. Peter |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: Spirit
Date:8/22/2002 6:45:45 PM
I'm on 5ms latency with ASIO on a PulsarII - that's better than some hardware ! |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: pwppch
Date:8/22/2002 7:35:38 PM
Have you tried the XTC mode with the Pulsar Softsynths? I had my Pulsar go south, and am working with Creamware to get it back up running. One of there tech guys had 32 channels of ASIO running in ACID 4. (I'd like to see that myself.) Peter |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: ATP
Date:8/23/2002 12:07:29 AM
thanks for your response, Peter. so, apparently i'm not using the ASIO drivers. that's odd, since other sequencers seem to find it just fine. but in ACID (and SF for that matter) my choice is restriced between Classic Windows Driver and MS Sound Mapper. where is the ASIO DirectX Full Duplex Driver? as for the multiple inputs, i'm not sure what you mean. if i assign a VSTi to a track (by changing the track properties to point to Soft Synth no. 2 for example) that seems pretty straightforward to me. logically when i mute that track i should not be able to hear that VSTi play unless i stand on the muted track and play something live. seems simple enough to me, but apparently it doesn't work like that. i guess i'm not understanding fundamentally how it works. |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: pwppch
Date:8/23/2002 1:23:02 AM
We don't expose the Steinberg DirectX Full Duplex driver. >>as for the multiple inputs, i'm not sure what you mean. if i assign a VSTi to a track (by changing the track properties to point to Soft Synth no. 2 for example) that seems pretty straightforward to me. logically when i mute that track i should not be able to hear that VSTi play unless i stand on the muted track and play something live. seems simple enough to me, but apparently it doesn't work like that << Many tracks can be assigned to the same VSTi in ACID. ACID treats VSTis just like an external synth. It is a destination for MIDI data. The track does not control the synths routing or its mute/solo state. The ACID mixer does. I don't know what you mean by "standing" on a track? Do you mean "selecting" a track? What my point was is that if you have two MIDI Inputs enabled, which input goes to the track you are "standing" on? Also, what if you have multiple tracks selected? Then where does the MIDI input(s) go to? Doing this muting/soloing on the track is not intuative at all. You click away from something, and the synth stops previewing or another starts previewing - and out of context. If you are the "engineer" and an artist is "performing" for you, then you can't do anything in the UI until you the performer is done. Unless I am missing your point, I just don't see how this would work consistently. Peter |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: Spirit
Date:8/23/2002 1:51:55 AM
Peter, your comments about your CW card "going south" make me nervous. I never use XTC mode myself, but one CW guy I spoke to (maybe the same one) said that AP4 in XTC worked brilliantly. He was a bit mysterious about it (this was pre-release), but it sounded tempting. But I'm not convinced. Think I'll start with ASIO. I'll try that tonight and report. S |
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Subject:RE: Acid 4 and Pulsar2
Reply by: KjipRecords
Date:8/23/2002 3:33:45 AM
Spirit, Peter, Please report your findings with Acid 4 and Pulsar2. I have the same setup, and I tried to get things to work using XTC yesterday. No luck. I did notice that I got a lot of crackle and pop using the ASIO driver. That did not happen with the regular wave drivers. I'm still on the demo version, but I don't think that should mean anything? Lars |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: ATP
Date:8/23/2002 3:38:01 AM
>>> What my point was is that if you have two MIDI Inputs enabled, which input goes to the track you are "standing" on? <<< simple. i make a midi track and then assign it to a soft synth bus, which i just added in the mixer channel. so logically when i have that track selected, and i play a note on my midi keyboard, i should ONLY hear the VSTi that is assigned to that particular track, and not all other VSTi's as well. do you know how Cubase works? i expected the same kind of setup for ACID. you know, add a midi channel, assign a VSTi to it, and play. Mute the track if you don't want to hear the VSTi, but you can still hear it if you have it selected and you play on the midi keyboard. i'm really confused with ACID's current midi setup. i just don't understand why i have to listen to all VSTi's simultaneously at the press of a key, even tho i have the tracks i don't want to hear muted. yes, i can mute the VSTi in the mixer panel, BUT ... say i have recorded a piece with the FM7 VSTi. now i want to listen to this piece and play along with Pro52. every time i press a key i will not only hear the Pro52 sound, but also the FM7 synth. if i mute FM7 in the mixer panel i will only hear Pro52, but then i can't hear the FM7 piece i played previously. see the problem? i'm sure there is a solution for this, but it eludes me at the moment. |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: pwppch
Date:8/23/2002 9:04:38 AM
>>yes, i can mute the VSTi in the mixer panel, BUT ... say i have recorded a piece with the FM7 VSTi. now i want to listen to this piece and play along with Pro52. every time i press a key i will not only hear the Pro52 sound, but also the FM7 synth. if i mute FM7 in the mixer panel i will only hear Pro52, but then i can't hear the FM7 piece i played previously << The idea is to solo the synth thru from its view. Solo the input, not the output to the mixer. I agree that we need to make this flow a little bit better, but I don't buy into your approach. It depends on track focus, and the track and playback are removed from the notion of MIDI thru. Peter |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: ATP
Date:8/23/2002 9:43:56 AM
ah i think i'm beginning to see what you're getting at Peter. i'll give it a try. sorry to nag on about it, but i just didn't understand the whole core of the current implementation of midi. but i think i may have been looking at it from the wrong viewpoint. thanks for clearing it up a bit. :) |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: pwppch
Date:8/23/2002 10:10:56 AM
I am playing around with this internally. MIDI is a complex thing in that it has so many details. Inputs/outputs, toss in softsynths and it can be come very complex. I see how the big sequencers permit this "use current tracks" input/output settings for echo/thru. Problem is ACID doesn't have an input port assigned to the track. The synth has the assignement. While it would be possible to auto detect the thru based upon current track focus, I still have a problem when multiple tracks are selected and not having this dynamically change in the engineering/performer scenario. Have to think about this some more.... Peter |
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Subject:RE: some unclear bits about midi...
Reply by: chaircrusher
Date:8/23/2002 11:23:18 AM
Maybe you've heard enough of me for one day alread, Peter, but ... 1. Once I figured out there was a solo button, I didn't worry about it so much. 2. I brought up Cubase to see what it does. It's impossible to select more than one track. So they don't have to worry about multitrack selection and which device midi is supposed to go to. 3. Cubase doesn't bother with assigning specific inputs to devices OR tracks. You enable inputs, you select a track, and that's where the input goes. Not only that, it gets re-channeled so that no matter what channel your controller is talking on, the notes saved to the track match the channel # for the whole track. That's the default, anyway. You can set up multichannel record but I'm too lazy to figure it out -- I'd do it if I had to transfer a sequence into Cubase via MIDI. I think that selecting multiple channels is a good thing. But if you were to change the MIDI thru solo to follow track focus, it would pose a problem. You could deal with it a couple different ways: 1. For all the selected tracks, send MIDI thru to the corresponding instruments. 2. Figure that selecting multiple tracks is an editing operation, and don't bother trying to choose one instrument to send midi to. 3. Punt and only send midi to the topmost selected track. None of those options are ideal, but if you implement one and stick with it, people will get used to it. The real problem is that you don't do it the way that other programs, and you're surprising them. Again, people will get used to it, and might learn to love binding input devices to vstis |