Re: [Lmuse-user] MusE and MIDI monitoring

[nradd <nr...@la...>]

> It took a small brainstorming session but I think I see it now. 
> I'm slow sometimes.
> You can't hear (monitor) incoming midi unless the track is rec enabled, 
> and that's bad if master record is on and you really want to record
> on other tracks, not the monitor track. C'est ca?
> 
Oui, par exemple. I had not this case in mind specificly, but this can occur. To sum up, the ideal goal would be to separate monitoring and recording. And allow the recombination of the two as the user wants. In fact the question is what do we do frequently and what we do rarely, and how important are thoses rare cases and how to preserve them. As far as i am concerned, i rarely record several tracks at the same time. In fact, this only happened once in my life when i had to transfer song files from my Ensoniq EPS16+ toward Logic audio, a long time ago. Since then i only have recorded one track at once. :)

Other people may do that more frequently, i don't know, but there are great odds that most users record track by track most of the time. It could be a great improvement in usability if monitoring and recording, both on their sides, suited better this situation (in the case everybody agree on the current analysis). 

Then all this needs some carefull thinking. May be we need to look how its done on the various mainstream sequencers, to prevent wheel reinventing (and to end up with one not totally circular on top of that). ;) 

Amongst the unfrequent things i do, i like to route my keyboard to 2 destinations. This allows me to play live 2 external MIDI modules from my master keyboard. Whatever change occurs i would want to preserve this possibility as well.

As i am typing, there could be a nice connection with the fix you were dealing about earlier. Imagine you are like me, recording one track at once 99.9% of the time, it would perfectly make sense to refine you fix so that the default configuration force 1 track to be recorded at once. Here is the deal, you have a set of tracks, you play them live to find inspiration. Then you pick one, you hit record and not only it put the record flag on the selected track but it removes any other rec flags. So you don't have to care about removing them. It's basicly the defaut setting on the internal sequencer of the Ensoniq EPS16+ (wich is very fast and intuitive because of this), i am not even sure there is a way to record several tracks at once on this machine. But with MusE, this defaut configuration would need to be a choice, not imposed. 

> If that is at least part of the problem, I envision a fix for it.
> It may even be called a bug...
> You know that record 'echo' square button in the midi track info pane?
> Right now its purpose is to allow/disallow incoming midi to be sent 
> (echoed, monitored) to the output device, when the track is rec armed.
> But *only* if the track is rec armed.
> So how about if we allow incoming midi to echo to the output device,
> *even* when the rec arm is off? 
> Would this be a good first step?
> 
Yep i think it would. But if the tracks are set to "ALL" for incoming notes, all the tracks would trigger at once for a massive multichannel synth. :) 

So you need after that an easy way to restrict the amount of data, that's why i suggested to use the track focus as a filter. That way when you select a track with the mouse you can immediatly hear its routing. Select another track, hear that other routing, on so one. That's quick. 

The only problem is that it prevent fancy routing, or you have to be able to select several tracks (shift + click ?), or find another mechanism. I don't see the whole picture yet. I remember that Werner Schweer has changed the way routing is handled on the MusE2 branch, may be some idea can be grabed there.

> Perhaps we should rename 'echo' to 'monitor', as you call it...
> 
I used this term because i had to find one for the discussion. Echoing is ok too. 

> It seems to make sense to me, programming and operational wise, so far. 
> Tomorrow will tell... But thank you friend, hope that helps.

Thanks for taking care of this issue. I don't claim to be an expert in this field, and hope what i am saying makes sense. Would be happy if someone could confirm how its done on Cubase/Logic. And everyone interested in the subject owes to himself to study what has been done in the field by the other major players. I have switched to Linux 10 years ago and i regret not to have tryed the last softwares of the commercial world. I am sure there are some usability improvements since the old Cubase paradigm. 

Cheers,

FE


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