V4 "Link mixer faders to CC7/CC11" discussion

[Lawrence]

Let me put the fader and pan reset thing in proper context...

1. You have a synth workstation and you work on it, making a multitrack sequence right on the keyboard sequencer. Cool, mix is decent, everything sounds good. Now you want to fire up your software sequencer and dump the midi there (playing it in realtime, record it to multiple tracks in one pass) so you can edit better there. Cool.

2. You fire up your default midi template with all of your 16 midi tracks already set up and what happens? All of your faders and pans on the midi mix you've worked on for the past 45 minutes on your synth keyboard get reset to the position of Reaper's template's midi faders and pans, destroying your previous work.

I assume (haven't tried it) if you have TCP knobs for FX sends those would also get reset to 0, losing your internal FX level tweaks. Obviously, if you saved the song you can just reload it (hopefully) and bring those things back but it's not good to change things without intent.

This is partly why Cubase's midi faders and pans and similar default to "off" and why a default midi template (or a bunch of new tracks you create) like that in Cubase would have all faders and pans set to "off".

Now, normally when you play that song from the keyboard sequencer in real time to record it, you can optionally have it spit out those things, program changes, fader levels, pan settings, FX 90 & 91, so those things - the static mix - would be in the recording anyway and Cubase's faders and pans would reflect that probably right at the start of the recording.

But if they all got destroyed as soon as you launched the midi template you're kinda screwed.

Make sense?

I also question what might happen if you (for instance) click somewhere in Reaper while recording someone playing midi piano and Reaper sends out sustain resets on every channel while the sustain pedal is down just because you're editing or clicking during recording?

[captain caveman]

That's what I've been saying re multi-timbral VSTis.

[Lawrence]

Originally Posted by captain caveman

That's what I've been saying re multi-timbral VSTis.

Oh... yeah, I get you.

You mix up something on the VI's UI and then *afterward* link the faders and it destroys your mix settings. When what you would have done in that case to capture those settings (if it hadn't been reset) is (hopefully? dunno) turn on the CC automation envelopes for those things, and maybe click in one node, which should capture the current static settings.

[gofer]

Yep, it really seems that an off state will be needed and the linked faders should launch into that state when invoked. Thanks for backing that up.

And MIDI faders definitely need to be freed from the min/max preference settings. I think they should basically loose any connection with their audio incarnation. Change their look, get an on/off switch, have no 0dB margin (value 0 at the low and 127 at the high end, no unused area) and all things I am not thinking of now.

I am happy there hasn't come up a problem yet which can't be sorted without ditching the trim thing or even Reaper's one track for all paradigm .

[Lawrence]

Originally Posted by gofer

I am happy there hasn't come up a problem yet which can't be sorted without ditching the trim thing or even Reaper's one track for all paradigm .

Yeah, it looks like they might sort this all out which is good. Another thing I just discovered...

Midi faders and pans don't send out anything at all unless there is a media item on the track. No way to just mix hardware that way, like if you wanted to use Reaper to mix a console via midi, just as an interface without having media items on the tracks.

This actually might be a good thing for the potential "template" issue above so keep that in mind if this behavior is changed to actually allow mixing out of hardware ports without events on the tracks... like using Reaper's on screen mixer to fine tune your hardware sequencer mix.

[gofer]

Aaah I was trying hard to find a reason in that (no media-no send). Not sure whether that was really the thinking of the devs but cool enough. I am a big fan of positive thinking .

[Lawrence]

Originally Posted by gofer

Aaah I was trying hard to find a reason in that (no media-no send). Not sure whether that was really the thinking of the devs but cool enough. I am a big fan of positive thinking .

For sure. If it wasn't intentional it's a happy accident... it will serve that purpose well by not spitting out random midi messages on song launch, assuming your basic midi song templates have no empty media items which they shouldn't.

But to cover all of the bases there should also be a way to just mix midi without anything in the project so maybe that "mode" can be coded as an option. As I suggested above, it's not all that unusual for people to use their sequencer mixer as a remote interface for a hardware sequencer's internal mixer. Not a huge deal though since I suppose one could make a template with 16 empty media items to do that.

Given the very positive move here towards better midi control maybe there should be another pre-release thread addressing some of the other things that (perhaps) can also be cared for in the pre-release period.

[gwok]

been keepin an eye on this thread, things got a lot trickier once multi-channel hardware synths came up

one thing i thought though is if a hardware synth could be added as a plugin, (i know cubase does this), that might be a way to deal with hardware synths - so load up a plugin with

audio I\O
midi channel
midi I\O


then the tcp\mcp faders could still be linked, but they would be linked through that plugin to the hardware

then software synths could still function like they do now pretty much, and the concept is the same relatively for hardware or software, except hardware midi info is ported through the plugin

some thoughts anyway

edit: kinda like reainsert meets reamidicontrol, though routing the tracks volume fader and pan to the hardware

[Tale]

Tonight I finally played around a little with the MIDI linked volume/pan and my SW1000XG. The SW1000XG is not only a sound card, but also a hardware MIDI sound module, so I think it makes a good real-live testing object.

Adjusting volume and pan seemed to work fine, although thusfar I have only tried it on MIDI channel 1. In fact the MIDI volume slider works better than ReaControlMIDI does (in REAPER v3), because with ReaControlMIDI I can't properly play notes while changing the volume. The MIDI volume slider even worked fine when automated.

I still feel that the default (double-click/reset) value of the volume slider should be at 100 instead of 127.

I guess I should test this more if I have some spare time. Perhaps I should record/load a couple of MIDI tracks, and then send them to different channels of the SW1000XG, and see if I can succesfully mix it using only MIDI sliders.