[SFE] Routing and/or recording midi-data sent by VSTi

Posted Tue, 2012-12-04 - 15:22

While still demoing SFE I'm a bit confused if this is possible. Scenario:

a) Channel A hosting a midi plugin (i.e. Sugarbytes Thesys or an Arpeggiator), fed by a phrase
b) Channel B hosting an Instrument, fed by processed (=post plugin) output of Channel A
c) optional: recording this input of Channel B as a "Take"

Possible? Thanks.

janamdo

Tue, 2012-12-04 - 17:53 Permalink

Interesting.. to record the midioutput of channel A on Channel B
On this way you got a phrase generator!

Ofcourse this is possible in Cubase to do this , but not yet in SFP/E ..or do i miss something ?

Pauli Zwo

Tue, 2012-12-04 - 18:10 Permalink

"On this way you got a phrase generator!"

Exactly... ;-)
Guess one can do it the other way round (DAW [plugin] -> virtual midi port -> SFE) but what I mostly like with SFE is to work in a single environment.

janamdo

Tue, 2012-12-04 - 18:56 Permalink

Yes , i know where you after for :)

It is possible to work together SFP/E and your DAW ( with Drones ) and do the phrase generating in DAW

what I mostly like with SFE is to work in a single environment.

Yes it is the most easy workflow to do this solely in SFP/E ..but there is no midi routing in SFP/E possible

Pauli Zwo

Tue, 2012-12-04 - 19:30 Permalink

"...but there is no midi routing in SFP/E possible"

Ok, that's what I wanted to know. I use HN2 to date so I'm aware of a workaround (poor man's drones, so to speak) but as I said was looking for more comfort. Thanks for your efforts though.

Bellerophon

Fri, 2013-01-11 - 13:03 Permalink

Hello there!

I'm new to Synfire and the forum (hello everybody!) but I just wanted to add to this thread. I found a solution to this problem - I found the thread from Googling how to do it, but fixed it myself using Plogue Bidule (a VST toolkit and hosting plugin that I believe André himself uses - I've seen it on his plugins list on some of the demo videos ;) ).

I inserted Bidule as a VST plugin on the source track, then (as Bidule is also a VST host) I loaded my MIDI-generating/processing plugin into Bidule itself. I then set up Bidule to send a duplicate MIDI output to the IAC MIDI loopback Bus which I already enabled (this is on a Mac, but you could also do this with any loopback driver on a PC). I also had the IAC Bus enabled for MIDI input in Synfire.

Then with the destination track set up for record and with another instrument VST on it, I hit record in Synfire. The MIDI coming out of the source track gets recorded directly onto the destinaton track - with whatever settings you have. It didn't play live, but when I stopped the recording, the new take was there :0)

I won't rave about Bidule too much, as I don't want to sound like I'm shilling for the company, but it is an incredibly useful tool for this kind of rerouting stuff, and I'm not surprised to see André using it. It certainly adds to the functionality of Synfire (which I am loving!) if André could incorporate a simple way to to redirect MIDI internally, it would be awesome, and would cut these steps out of the workflow (and save having to buy Bidule!)

Hope this helps! I can post screenshots or explain more if you like.