Strike-Export Midi Problem......

[filosofem]

Steve, Strike 1.5 has a few bugs, legacy and PT 9 unique. If and when, are questions I can not answer but I'm sure they are aware.

[Bushpig]

Hi Guys,

Aaron is correct. It's supposed to be channel 15.

DTS. I'd be intrigued to know what result you get when trying the 2 patches I mentioned above. Specifically whether or not you get the message flashing up in the dialogue window indicating a change of parameter and the blue compare button coming on to indicate a change also.

I'm wondering if there's a layer of controller information that's embedded in the Style patterns that I just haven't figured out how to access yet, ie: some of the "performance" aspects of the current pattern are being encoded but not playing back correctly. Or is it to do with trying to allocate the midi notes as strictly GM compatible only?? But then why does dropping the exported midi onto a track, immediately send a controller value that seems random? Like I mentioned above, it's almost always "master volume" and it's often a spurious value, including off altogether (-inf).

Aaron, did you try the patch "E+Offbeat 126" on the first pattern (D1)? The note of the drone underneath the beat transposes up a semitone here!??! Most odd.

Any chance we can get an AIR group bod to chirp in here??

Ta all.

Steve Bush

[filosofem]

Originally Posted by Bushpig

Aaron, did you try the patch "E+Offbeat 126" on the first pattern (D1)? The note of the drone underneath the beat transposes up a semitone here!??! Most odd.

Yes but no noticeable difference here however E-Ragga HiHat Decay is all over the show.

[Bushpig]

Aaron,

Hi. Been a bit busy, haven't had a chance to check in.

Do you mean that on your system ( I hadn't realised you're PC based, but maybe that's good for isolating this prob) the patch "E+Offbeat 126-note D1" doesn't transpose the drone note up a semitone when you export midi?

DTS?

Any love on this? Any chance the Air team member who wrote the program and/or tested Strike would be available to comment??

Thanks all.

Steve Bush

[DigiTechSupt]

I'm working on getting more time to test this - I'll report back as soon as I'm able.

[filosofem]

Originally Posted by Bushpig

Do you mean that on your system ( I hadn't realised you're PC based, but maybe that's good for isolating this prob) the patch "E+Offbeat 126-note D1" doesn't transpose the drone note up a semitone when you export midi?

It certainly does Steve. The Bass Channel in any E+Offbeat 126 Pattern transposes the Bass drone up when the Performance is exported.

[Bushpig]

Aaron,

The Bass Channel in any E+Offbeat 126 Pattern transposes the Bass drone up when the Performance is exported

however E-Ragga HiHat Decay is all over the show

Exactly. Sorry to DTS for sounding a bit annoyed, but REALLY Air Instrument Group?? I can't believe this would have escaped beta testing, but assuming it did, what on earth is going on that a midi note triggering a sound, will force that sound to play a semitone higher? My suspicion is that a buffer load of controller nonsense is getting encoded in the exported midi recording and sending the control parameters temporarily haywire (in fact I SEE it everytime with the "master volume" control on my systems). I am seriously disappointed with this aspect of Strike (I do love the sounds though). Can Aaron and myself be the FIRST users to notice this?? I guess it can only be our two systems playing up. I've been using Stylus this way (drop the midi performance to a midi track and customise the pattern) for years with not one misbehaviour.

Please, please can we encourage someone from the Air Instruments Group to try this and report back? I'd love to find out it was an operator error on my part or a general system failing (my only option then is to rinse both my machines and start from scratch to find out if this is the case) and I'll gladly apologise for my indiscretion at that point.

I'm led to believe from the chat of users on the DUC here who are involved with using VE Pro, that Vienna as a company have the actual programmers participating on their forum and often revisions and fixes appear very rapidly. I don't expect Avid to be in a position to offer that sort of response, but someone who's involved with the writing and maintenance of these plugs, should at least be sufficiently interested to help with investigating claims that there is a potentially major bug in the software. Even just a response from someone in the Air group that all this works fine at their end, would be a big help.

Sorry again for the show of frustration.

Steve Bush

[Wolfram K]

Hey DUCers,
the problem with the HiHat sound described in this thread is a known issue.
I know it's a drag but let me try to explain what's happening. As you might imagine the Strike engine is doing a lot more things internally when playing back drum patterns than just triggering samples by MIDI. It is actually using it's own internal message format that goes way beyond the possibilities of MIDI (a technology nearly if not exactly 30 years young). It is actually offering a lot more control on timing, variations in timbre and playing style and selecting samples from a multi-dimensional mapping (believe it or not) thus the Strike engine delivers great results which are closer to what a real drum kit with a real drummer than nearly anything else. That's also the reason why we wen't with export to multiple MIDI tracks in 1.0 - we needed them to rebuild at least some of the complexity in order to give you a very close reproduction of what's going on in the engine. (It's impossible to rebuild the exact same experience - otherwise there would be also no need for a tool like Strike, right!?) Still the multi-MIDI-track-experience was dissatisfying to many users as from a workflow perspective, so we came up with a simplified version that uses one track because that makes editing much easier, yet we had to sacrifice another little touch of detail. Long story short: Exporting MIDI is not meant to be re-building the exact same thing. It's rather for experimenting with patterns outside Strike, e.g. assigning the track to another electronic drum kit in Structure to enhance your drum sound. I didn't have a chance to re-build the exact scenario from above but it seems like the open HiHat events are not being cut off by the triggering of closed ones as they would inside Strike. A pragmatic workaround could be to copy and paste the corresponding MIDI notes and trigger HiHat samples another instrument, e.g. Structure that allows for this kind of behavior also known as "exclusive group". Hope that helps. Let me know if I got something terribly wrong.

Cheers,
Wolf

[Bushpig]

Hi Wolf,

Thanks very much for coming over and giving us the low down on this.

As I'm a first time Strike user, I was sure I was doing something wrong or not understanding properly how the export midi function was supposed to behave. Having worked with Stylus for years and loving the drag & drop midi in that program, I was disturbed that Strike didn't seem to respond as I expected.

the problem with the HiHat sound described in this thread is a known issue

OK maybe, but not that anyone would know that from reading the manual. I read the whole manual through before even loading up the plug and then went through it again as I explored the plug. If what you've explained above was written in the section "Exporting MIDI", then I would have been less surprised at the result I was getting. Can someone please address this.

As you might imagine the Strike engine is doing a lot more things internally when playing back drum patterns than just triggering samples by MIDI. It is actually using it's own internal message format that goes way beyond the possibilities of MIDI (a technology nearly if not exactly 30 years young). It is actually offering a lot more control on timing, variations in timbre and playing style and selecting samples from a multi-dimensional mapping (believe it or not) thus the Strike engine delivers great results which are closer to what a real drum kit with a real drummer than nearly anything else.

Brilliant. Love it. I understand what you're saying, but sometimes a nice predictable, repeated pattern loop without any variation is what's required and I naturally assumed that using the Export Midi function would give me exactly what I heard when playing the pattern internally.

It is actually using it's own internal message format that goes way beyond the possibilities of MIDI

Which leads me on to the problem of the unpredictable midi messages that are being dumped along with the notes when exported. I tried this again last night and it randomly sends controller info to the master output level, including completely off (-inf) sometimes. Several times I thought the plugin had crashed because there was no sound coming out. Is it going to be possible to stop the "internal message format" messages from messing up the controls in the plug when exported as midi? Then the question is, where in the style editor do I interact with these internal messages? If as you say there's a missing cutoff between the hihat instruments, I don't see it.

That's also the reason why we wen't with export to multiple MIDI tracks in 1.0 - we needed them to rebuild at least some of the complexity in order to give you a very close reproduction of what's going on in the engine. (It's impossible to rebuild the exact same experience - otherwise there would be also no need for a tool like Strike, right!?) Still the multi-MIDI-track-experience was dissatisfying to many users as from a workflow perspective, so we came up with a simplified version that uses one track because that makes editing much easier, yet we had to sacrifice another little touch of detail.

What chance of getting an option on this? I would have actually preferred to have these laid out on separate tracks, but I appreciate that this is not helpful for some users. Having the choice would be the proper way to do this I feel.

A pragmatic workaround could be to copy and paste the corresponding MIDI notes and trigger HiHat samples another instrument, e.g. Structure

Well, the thing I like most about Strike as I've started to learn it is the quality of the sounds. Excellent work from everyone BTW. I would be happy to reprogram the sounds in Structure, but I don't expect I can load the sound format used in Strike, into Structure. I think I'm going to have to either meticulously recreate the patterns by hand using midi tracks in PT (midi channel 2 layout) or better figure out how to use the Style Editor. It's very small and fiddly though, which immediately puts me off. But of course I understand there are always limitations with layout and design, not least of which is "screen real estate".

Thanks again for coming over here Wolf, I look forward to hearing back from you.

Regards

Steve Bush

[filosofem]

Originally Posted by Bushpig

If what you've explained above was written in the section "Exporting MIDI", then I would have been less surprised at the result I was getting.

Most deferred bugs and/or known bugs are written up in a ReadMe .pdf that is supplied with the plug-ins documentation.