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Old 05-09-2012, 08:07 AM   #41
gibi25
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Hi captain.
Could you explain the way you get bars and pipes on a PC?
Coz I'm pretty interested.
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Old 05-09-2012, 12:43 PM   #42
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Excellent stuff, Cap'n!

Hopefully those screenshots are worth a thousand words!

Worth pointing out to the rest of you that in one of those shots you can see both the conventional notation stave AND above it the hybrid stave. Hope this is self-evident.
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Old 05-09-2012, 03:43 PM   #43
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Originally Posted by gibi25 View Post
Hi captain.
Could you explain the way you get bars and pipes on a PC?
Coz I'm pretty interested.
You need an Amiga emulator. You can either download WinUAE and search the internet for all of the required files or just buy Amiga Forever.

After that you can download Bars and Pipes from somewhere like here.

I now have MIDI working again, but only in v2.5b and only in a virtual hard disk I created last year. I have no idea what 2011 Cavey did to get it working... I think I had to install the CAMD Amiga library.

I did it with WinUAE the last time, although I have just bought Amiga Forever. I've emailed the developer to see if he can include a configuration with the CAMD library installed (which makes MIDI work in it) so people don't have parts of their memory wiped out with the traumatic experience I assume I must have had in getting working the first time around.

Last edited by captain_caveman; 05-10-2012 at 03:28 AM.
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Old 05-09-2012, 11:12 PM   #44
gibi25
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thanks, captain.
I'm not a strong "pc tweaker", and this is a little bit complicated for me.
but I'll give it a try.
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Old 05-09-2012, 11:49 PM   #45
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Captain - Now you know why I have been hanging onto my Amiga1200 with version 2.52b on it! Originally installed in er um 1991 and although I have bought the 3.9 AmigaOS cd AND have the 3.1 chip installed, I am reluctant to change anything as it all works so well.

And of course I still use Procalc to do my business taxes after losing a shedload of stuff to Windoze MS Orifice XL.
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Old 05-10-2012, 02:30 PM   #46
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Originally Posted by gibi25 View Post
thanks, captain.
I'm not a strong "pc tweaker", and this is a little bit complicated for me.
but I'll give it a try.
If you get Amiga Forever (you need the Plus edition to unlock the Amiga 3000), I can send you the hard drive (folder) with a working Bars n Pipes on it. All you need to then do is tell Amiga Forever to use that folder as a virtual drive and the emulation will see it as an ordinary hard disk.
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Old 05-10-2012, 02:54 PM   #47
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Captain - Now you know why I have been hanging onto my Amiga1200 with version 2.52b on it! Originally installed in er um 1991 and although I have bought the 3.9 AmigaOS cd AND have the 3.1 chip installed, I am reluctant to change anything as it all works so well.

And of course I still use Procalc to do my business taxes after losing a shedload of stuff to Windoze MS Orifice XL.
Btw, how do you get SuperJam to work with MIDI in BnP?

I can run the standalone SuperJam and it plays the Amiga soundcard sounds, but I'm not sure what's supposed to happen when I run it as an Accessory inside BnP?

edit: n/m I found the new tools.

edit2: how do I copy/paste a section in the Song Construction window?

Last edited by captain_caveman; 05-10-2012 at 05:32 PM.
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Old 05-10-2012, 11:38 PM   #48
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Originally Posted by captain_caveman View Post
If you get Amiga Forever (you need the Plus edition to unlock the Amiga 3000), I can send you the hard drive (folder) with a working Bars n Pipes on it. All you need to then do is tell Amiga Forever to use that folder as a virtual drive and the emulation will see it as an ordinary hard disk.
thanks captain.
if/when I decide to go this way, I'll PM you.
my dream is a huge midi update/improvement in reaper...
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Old 05-11-2012, 02:07 AM   #49
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Originally Posted by captain_caveman View Post
Btw, how do you get SuperJam to work with MIDI in BnP?

I can run the standalone SuperJam and it plays the Amiga soundcard sounds, but I'm not sure what's supposed to happen when I run it as an Accessory inside BnP?

edit: n/m I found the new tools.

edit2: how do I copy/paste a section in the Song Construction window?
dead easy. select it by point-and-click then copy and paste as usual.

from what I remember you should be able to select either individual time-lines (tracks) or whole sections, which is how I work mostly.
Individual sections/cells is slower but more flexible.
Never did bother with SuperJam myself, although I would love to have found a Sunrize audio card back when I had an A3000.

It is somewhat humbling when you realise how OLD this code is, how well it was implemented and of course it becomes immediately obvious why Bill Gates bought them out!

The two devs actually posted on the Yahoo BPP group a year or so back to see if there was enough interest in a PC version or a Linux version but by then we were to thin on the ground to make it viable, although they did give Alfred Faust their blessing on his work updating their original code.
Such a shame that his health deteriorated so much that he could no longer work on it.
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Old 05-11-2012, 02:47 AM   #50
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dead easy. select it by point-and-click then copy and paste as usual.

from what I remember you should be able to select either individual time-lines (tracks) or whole sections, which is how I work mostly.
Individual sections/cells is slower but more flexible.
It turns out there are a couple of sneaky tools that need depressed....



Quote:
Never did bother with SuperJam myself, although I would love to have found a Sunrize audio card back when I had an A3000.

It is somewhat humbling when you realise how OLD this code is, how well it was implemented and of course it becomes immediately obvious why Bill Gates bought them out!
Yeah, I love this old stuff. I cut my teeth on Cubasis in 1995 and I have that running in a virtual PC as well as Cubase circa 1990 on an Atari ST emulator. My laptop is a shrine to past MIDI apps.

I have to say though that all of these MIDI tools are news to me in terms of how old they are when you compare it to what Steinberg were doing at the time which was "just" multi track MIDI recording.
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Old 05-11-2012, 05:21 AM   #51
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...and what ticks me off is that nobody seems to have recognised the sheer power of this way of doing MIDI.

Just the idea of treating each end of a track as a place to insert tools was so revolutionary at the time, few people realised the amount of power and versatility they offer and STILL do to this day.

90% of what I do effortlessly in BPP I cannot do in ANY other sequencer I have tried.
Part of what makes me such a militant campaigner for some of this stuff.
I m usually one of those "anything for a quiet life" guys but quite seriously I am now seriously considering going back to two PCs in order to run BPP under WinUAE on one of them, just in case the Amiga dies.


Anyone care for an explanation of what just the most recent set of icons posted by the good cap'n do?

A clue: The first two on the left SHOULD be obvious, Draw and Apply Current Tool. Next one is grab, next one is erase, but how about the rest?

This could be fun, but I suspect I m about to have to start writing a document to go with the pictures!

And let me remind you this thread is really about Reapers MIDI implementation and how it could be improved.
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Old 05-11-2012, 06:36 AM   #52
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90% of what I do effortlessly in BPP I cannot do in ANY other sequencer I have tried.
Could you give a couple of examples of this?

From what I can see, what Reaper lacks vs Bars n Pipes in terms of functionality is....

- ability to easily apply MIDI plugins (see my old FR here.)

- track based MIDI editing (see popular FR here.)

- an arranger track (several FRs for this) (thinking BnP Song Contruction repetitions here)

The Master Parameters stuff in BnP is great, but that could be done with plugins in Reaper. I wrote a transposer VST plugin ages ago that could control other instances on other tracks, so similar ones (JS even) for snap to scale, force to range and velocity/CC scale could be rustled up to have a master track controlling all others in the same way.
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Old 05-11-2012, 06:59 AM   #53
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Originally Posted by ivansc
90% of what I do effortlessly in BPP I cannot do in ANY other sequencer I have tried.
Could you give a couple of examples of this?


Have you discovered the plugin holder area in ALL editors?
It is a black box shown in your icon screen shot fourth from the left.
You can drag and drop ANY tool (plugin) into this and whatever you have set its parameters to, you can simply apply it to either a track as a whole or an area you have lasso'ed.
There are so many ways the tools can be used either at the front of the chain or on the output for non-destructive use, it is hard to know where to begin.

I usually have two or three different velocity editor tools in there - each set up to do different things - same goes for transpose tool, as sometimes you want to be able to do an octave and a couple of tones up/down on one track and just the couple of tones on others.

The other thing I love about BPP is the way you can jump from one view to another similar to reaper, but with everything customisable with a few clicks, not wading through a sea of menu options.

Just go back and look at the curve editing options for things like rallentando and accelerando, for instance. where it is possible to do this in Reaper you still have to go through all kinds of clumsy workarounds to do what should be a very simple edit.
I like to be able to quickly compare different curves and rates of rall. at the end of a song, for instance. Would take me forever to set up in reaper.

It is very hard to get over all the tiny little things that speed workflow, but it speaks volumes that everyone I have ever demoed BPP to has been gobsmacked at how easy everything is to both understand AND do, also how few of its advanced tools are even available in other sequencers.

And yes you are right the song construction window/editor is a HUGE time saver and should be ridiculously easy to implement in a system that already prefers to work with items rather than tracks.
But somehow I anticipate comments along the lines that "because of the way Reaper is designed this will not be easy to implement"

I have just about decided I m going to be sticking with BPP for MIDI for some time to come, which is fine by me as it is really easy to import my MIDI into reaper from BPP and once I have it in reaper it all works how it should (actually I havent needed to do any sysexes yet so I dont know about that side)

Anyone else interested in BPP's way of doing things? I am a little concerned that the thread is getting away from my original intent which was to find ways round Reapers MIDI shortcomings.
But I would also like to add how pleased I am to see a little MIDI love in the most recent pre-release
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