[RWP] midi controller

Fri Aug 19 04:28:56 EDT 2011

Oh, another thought, I read several posts in Cockos forums complaining 
that Reaper lacks a midi thru feature, like many other daws have, 
allowing midi to bypass processing and be delivered directly to external 
hardware
.
  Maybe that is why latency processing would affect your setup, nobody 
gets around going through buffers and all that.

On 8/18/2011 10:46 PM, Jim Snowbarger wrote:
> holy moley maow,
> That's a bunch of options, ain't it? Can you imagine if car dashboards
> had knobs where you could set the oil pressure, vary the coolant flow
> rate, tweak the ccelerater gain, adjust the start point for the brakes,
> the engine idle spead and maximum rpm, the fuel/oxygen mixture ratio,
> etc etc etc? Who the hell could drive one.
>
> Thanks for digging that up. It should, if you knew what you were doing,
> make it possible to pump up your audio performance, which mostly means
> the number of simultaneous tracks you could deal with.
>
> Of course, it seems to me that simple midi should not be involved with
> any of this stuff. VST synths will be affected by audio thread behavior.
> But, the case I'm dealing with is an external keyboard, and an external
> synthesizer module. The load on the cpu for handling that kind of midi
> is infinitescimal, extremely small. So small, that an old IBM xt running
> at 4 megahertz could do it seamlessly. How far have we come.
> There is absolutely no need for any buffering on simple midi events.
> Reaper does have a challenge, as Derek alluded to, of getting midi
> events to synchronize with audio playback. But, I would not expect that
> to be done in a way that massively delayed the input monitoring. That
> should be virtually instantaneous, and we should not have to tweak
> indefinitely to achieve it.
>
> Again, I am running reaper 3.77, because I could not find the midi input
> controls in 4. . Did this improve any in 4?
>
> To work with this in it's current form, you have to be constantly
> switching your sound module between a direct connection to the keyboard
> when your recording , and over to reaper when you are playing back.
> It's really not workable. But, I'll keep poking around too, and post
> here if I find out what, if anything affects it.
> Again, thanks heaps for the help.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Indigo" <33indigo at charter.net>
> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
> Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 3:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>
>
>> Jim, I got my midi recording latency down somewhat, though it's still
>> more than I would like.
>> I compared Reaper's latency to Sonar 8.5.3 and Sonar's latency in my
>> system is about half of Reaper's right now, but there are oodles of
>> Reaper settings I haven't tweaked yet.
>> For reducing latency in general and optimizing my C P U useage, I need
>> to go around and shut down indexing, print spooler, all wireless and
>> networking services, ethernet output, anything that I don't need to
>> run an offline music only computer.
>> Also, in a forum I saw advice to click on the asio control panel and
>> optimize the settings there.
>> I don't think I've found the asio control panel from Reaper yet.
>> Next session I'll try right clicking the asio driver where it's shown,
>> and try going to the number pad and fishing around there.
>> If your midi interface has an accessible control panel, maybe you can
>> down size the buffer in there.
>> I need sighted help with my E-Mu PatchMix control panel, maybe
>> tomorrow for that project.
>>
>> According to what I read in to cockos forums, 128 samples should be
>> plenty for the buffer.
>> Here is a quote from Reaper Wiki on optimizing audio buffer settings,
>> some of which are said to affect midi latency as well.
>> quote:
>> Preferences Audio Buffering
>> Audio Buffering Settings
>> Auto-detect the number of needed audio processing threads
>> This will scan your registry and find out how many C P U's you have,
>> and will tune
>> the number of threads accordingly.
>> Audio reading/processing threads
>> Enter a value into this field to manually set the number of threads
>> that are used
>> to process Audio. The recommended setting is 1 thread per CPU. You can
>> also set to
>> 0 to force all audio processing to happen in the audio thread.
>> Thread Priority
>> Click on the down arrow to select a Thread Priority setting from the
>> list. Raising
>> the Thread Priority will force the audio threads to be processed
>> before other threads
>> (e.g. graphics).
>> Thread Priority.png
>> Thread Behavior
>> Click on the down arrow to select a Thread Behavior setting from the
>> list. Raising
>> the Thread Behavior will make the processing threads try more
>> aggressively to keep
>> various buffers full (at the expense of added CPU use).
>> Reaper 0b6 preferences thread behaviour.png
>> Source material buffer size
>> Enter a value into this field to set the buffer size for reading track
>> media items.
>> The default is 600ms. If you lower this, you may use less RAM and CPU,
>> but you may
>> experience underruns. If the transport flashes red and you hear audio
>> drop out, then
>> raise this setting.
>> Wait until buffers are (xxx) percent full to start playback
>> Enter a value into this field to set the amount of audio that is
>> buffered before
>> playback begins. It is recommended to leave this at 100%, but if you
>> have a very
>> fast system and wish for playback to start more quickly, you can lower
>> this.
>> FX render-ahead
>> FX render-ahead (enables SMP support)
>> This option, enabled by default, allows FX to be rendered before they
>> are needed
>> by the audio device. This enables better performance with certain
>> plug-ins on single
>> processor systems, and allows better utilization of multiple
>> processors on SMP systems.
>> Because FX may be running in multiple threads and/or processors at the
>> same time,
>> this option may cause occasional problems with some (incompatible) FX.
>> render ahead size
>> When using the FX render-ahead mode, this option sets how far ahead
>> REAPER will render.
>> A setting of about 50ms or greater is recommended, the default being
>> 200ms.
>> render ahead on non-fx tracks
>> If this option is enabled, all tracks are rendered ahead as if they
>> had FX on them,
>> applying envelopes and routing, etc. This can use more CPU, but may
>> slightly improve
>> overall playback performance.
>> Optimize track buffering for low latency hardware
>> This option, which is enabled by default, makes media/disk reads
>> happen asynchronously,
>> such that the audio playback never waits on the disk (which causes
>> noises to happen
>> on certain hardware, i.e. RME interfaces). This only affects the
>> action on certain
>> underrun conditions, and it's probably best left on.
>> Advanced I/O
>> Disk reads (used when playing/etc)
>> These options do nifty things to Reaper's Audio Playback behaviour.
>> Preferred Disk Read Mode: This pull down menu contains the following
>> three options:
>> Discread.jpg
>> Asynchronous unbuffered (Default):
>> Asynchronous buffered:
>> Synchronous:
>> Disk Writes (used when recording)
>> These advanced preferences are used to determine Reaper's write to
>> disk behaviour.
>> Careful tweaking of these settings can dramatically enhance performance.
>> Preferred Disk Write Mode: This pull down menu contains the following
>> three options:
>> Discwrites.jpg
>> Asynchronous (Default):
>> Asynchronous (write through):
>> Although it would likely make the system less tolerant of hardware
>> errors, Asynchronous
>> (write through) shortens the path that data takes to get to the disk,
>> making it less
>> likely for another process to interrupt and prevent the data from
>> being written.
>> Synchronous:
>> room for more info
>>
>> On 8/17/2011 11:01 PM, Jim Snowbarger wrote:
>>> Yes, I think it is lined up pretty well on playback.
>>> It's just the monitoring that is almost useless.
>>>
>>> I dropped back to 3.77 for now.
>>>
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Derek Lane" <derek at pdaudio.net>
>>> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
>>> Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2011 1:58 AM
>>> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>>>
>>>
>>>> exactly why I haven't bothered switching.
>>>> if you don't moniter the midi itself, just that which comes from your
>>>> keyboard, does everything line up on playback?
>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Snowbarger"
>>>> <Snowman at SnowmanRadio.com>
>>>> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
>>>> Sent: Tuesday, August 16, 2011 10:16 PM
>>>> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> It is much larger than the audio delay.
>>>>> I would estimate the audio delay here at about 50ms, without having
>>>>> played with any buffering or latency settings.
>>>>> This should not require any buffering. It is just a one byte midi
>>>>> note on message, going form my keyboard, though midi, to the PC, then
>>>>> being echoed back out a midi port to an external sound module.
>>>>> This shouldn't have anything to do with buffering audio, unless
>>>>> somebody is tryint to play some games like you maybe suggest in
>>>>> lining the midi delays up with audio. But, if you play the keyboard
>>>>> this way, and listen to the sound module lagging behind you like
>>>>> that, it really messes you up. <grin>
>>>>>
>>>>> Now that I've switched to reaper 4, I can no longer get the correct
>>>>> context menues to appear, probaby connected with the invalid track
>>>>> handle problem.
>>>>> Ah yes, the bleeding edge of technology.
>>>>> Do you feel yourself bleeding?
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Derek Lane" <derek at pdaudio.net>
>>>>> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
>>>>> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 10:56 PM
>>>>> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>> is this delay equal to or greater than the delay you get when you
>>>>>> moniter audio?
>>>>>> Just curious if, reaper in its infinent wisdum is trying to keep
>>>>>> everything in sync.
>>>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Snowbarger"
>>>>>> <Snowman at SnowmanRadio.com>
>>>>>> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
>>>>>> Sent: Monday, August 15, 2011 9:48 PM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> This was a very helpful post, and lead to a major step forward
>>>>>>> for me.
>>>>>>> I now can record and playback midi. The trick, for me, was the
>>>>>>> options, preferences dialog, midi devices. Oddly, this midi devices
>>>>>>> item was hidden when the audio tree node was collapsed. Would you
>>>>>>> look under audio for midi stuff? Unless you expand audio, you won't
>>>>>>> see that one.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Well, there it was. And, in the tab list for Midi devices, you
>>>>>>> don't get any clues that there is one panel for input, and a
>>>>>>> separate panel for output.
>>>>>>> Indigo's suggestion to mouse around for it is the only way to get
>>>>>>> there. Anbd, once you set focus on the section you want, using the
>>>>>>> mouse cursor, JAWS, at least, will lie to you about whetehr a
>>>>>>> device is enabled or disabled. Reviewing with the mouse cursor
>>>>>>> seems to tell the truth.
>>>>>>> Double clicking on the item lets you tab to a checkbox that will
>>>>>>> enable it.
>>>>>>> Once I got both input and output enabled, I could arm recording
>>>>>>> with monitoring, and could hear midi coming out the back side.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> But, here's the weird thing. There is about 200 milliceconds of
>>>>>>> latency. Once I strike the note on the keyboard, I can wait at
>>>>>>> least 200ms for the note to come out the back end and hit my sound
>>>>>>> module
>>>>>>> It is a very, very noticeable, intolerable, even annoying, delay.
>>>>>>> What the heck is that all about.
>>>>>>> Buffering? for midi? come now.
>>>>>>> Maybe I need a faster computer <big grin>
>>>>>>> Or, perish the thought, do you suppose I need to use shorter midi
>>>>>>> cables?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Anybody have any ideas what causes the delay?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Indigo" <33indigo at charter.net>
>>>>>>> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
>>>>>>> Sent: Friday, August 12, 2011 3:56 AM
>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Hi Jim,
>>>>>>>> I realize it's only beginner's luck how easily I got Reaper Midi
>>>>>>>> Devices enabled, but here's how I do it:
>>>>>>>> This is in Winize, you'll have to translate to Jaws equivalents,
>>>>>>>> okay.
>>>>>>>> I'll refer to the arrow keys below the 8 pack as T cluster arrows,
>>>>>>>> and otherwise just say arrow when I'm at the number pad.
>>>>>>>> In options/preferences,
>>>>>>>> If I go over to the number pad and arrow down line by line from
>>>>>>>> the top of the screen, I find the topics as follows: General,
>>>>>>>> Paths, keyboard, project, defaults, audio, device, midi devices.
>>>>>>>> At the number pad,I left click on the topic midi devices.
>>>>>>>> Then, tab down to Midi input devices to make available.
>>>>>>>> For me that tab always says no selected item, even when I have
>>>>>>>> devices enabled.
>>>>>>>> Then, when I arrow down with the T cluster arrows I immediately
>>>>>>>> find a list of my midi input devices
>>>>>>>> with their name, the number of the midi port, and their mode,
>>>>>>>> either enabled or disabled.
>>>>>>>> The procedure, to enable these devices is coming in a second.
>>>>>>>> Meanwhile, if I continue to tab down I next find add joystick
>>>>>>>> midi, then another tab down and I find midi outputs to make
>>>>>>>> available, which, for me will also say no sselected item.
>>>>>>>> Okay, enabling either midi input or output devices is exactly the
>>>>>>>> same procedure.
>>>>>>>> In winize, with my midi devices's name speaking at the T cluster
>>>>>>>> arrow keys, I route mouse pointer to list view, jaws has a similar
>>>>>>>> move to get that midi input devices list focus over to the number
>>>>>>>> pad.
>>>>>>>> At the number pad I arrow up or down and make sure I'm on the name
>>>>>>>> of my midi device, then right click at the number pad.
>>>>>>>> I get a context menu, I arrow down with the T cluster arrows to
>>>>>>>> configure inputs C and hit enter.At the tab key I get enable input
>>>>>>>> with a check box, and at the next tab down I get enable input for
>>>>>>>> control messages, also with a check box.
>>>>>>>> Put a check in both of these boxes with the space bar, tab down to
>>>>>>>> okay and hit enter, and you've enabled your midi input device.
>>>>>>>> Do the same for your other midi input devices, and the same for
>>>>>>>> midi output devices.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> There might be an easier way, but I know this works, I record midi
>>>>>>>> with no problems, control soft synth parameters from my control
>>>>>>>> surface, etcetera.
>>>>>>>> I only wish I had half as much luck with Sonar 8.5.3.
>>>>>>>> Indigo
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> On 8/11/2011 10:14 PM, Jim Snowbarger wrote:
>>>>>>>>> I have an old Mark of the unicorn Fast lane midi output device.
>>>>>>>>> It works
>>>>>>>>> great with sonar.
>>>>>>>>> Actually, I have never managed to make midi work at all with
>>>>>>>>> reaper.
>>>>>>>>> Congratulations to those of you who have.
>>>>>>>>> Following the options preferences path, I have both channels on
>>>>>>>>> the midi
>>>>>>>>> device enabled.
>>>>>>>>> So, I create a track.
>>>>>>>>> Focused on the track, I presss tab, and get to record mode. Up
>>>>>>>>> and down
>>>>>>>>> arrow reveal, among other things midi replace, midi overdub, midi
>>>>>>>>> output. Not sure what midi output does. But, one of the others
>>>>>>>>> seems
>>>>>>>>> applicable. So, I choose midi replace.
>>>>>>>>> Continuing to tab across, I see midi output set to fast lane
>>>>>>>>> port A,
>>>>>>>>> which seems correct.
>>>>>>>>> But, escaping back to the track, then shift+context key, and
>>>>>>>>> arrowing up
>>>>>>>>> to Midi output, reveals none, or another midi output device that
>>>>>>>>> I don't
>>>>>>>>> want to use. Fast lane is not in the list. Not sure why.
>>>>>>>>> And, if I arm the track, with monitor enabled, it is in audio
>>>>>>>>> mode, not
>>>>>>>>> midi.
>>>>>>>>> Is this interface an inscrutible, nonintuitive pain in the ass or
>>>>>>>>> what.
>>>>>>>>> Help desperately needed.
>>>>>>>>> Suggestions welcome.
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Indigo" <33indigo at charter.net>
>>>>>>>>> To: "Reapers Without Peepers" <rwp at reaaccess.com>
>>>>>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, August 10, 2011 9:53 PM
>>>>>>>>> Subject: Re: [RWP] midi controller
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> I go to options/preferences/midi devices/ either input or output.
>>>>>>>>>> I tab down a little to output device, or whatever it's called,
>>>>>>>>>> which
>>>>>>>>>> always seems to say not selected until I arrow down and get the
>>>>>>>>>> device
>>>>>>>>>> to be spoken, then go through the usual enabling procedure.
>>>>>>>>>> In Winize the enabling procedure is a bit complex.
>>>>>>>>>> I find the device at the number pad, right click it, tab down to
>>>>>>>>>> configure, hit enter, then arrow down to enable, then I think
>>>>>>>>>> it's the
>>>>>>>>>> usual apply and okay buttons to hit enter on.
>>>>>>>>>> I'm just taking this off the top of my head, without having
>>>>>>>>>> Reaper on
>>>>>>>>>> this computer to look at, but that's the general idea of the
>>>>>>>>>> procedure.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> On 8/10/2011 9:51 PM, Kevin Brown wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>> OK,
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> I solved the folder problem I was having with reaper,...Now, I
>>>>>>>>>>> would
>>>>>>>>>>> like to know where I need to go to select the midi controller
>>>>>>>>>>> so I can
>>>>>>>>>>> record some midi tracks?...
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> In the previous version of reaper there was a dropdown menu
>>>>>>>>>>> that would
>>>>>>>>>>> let you select the "midi out controller", such as my "Motif
>>>>>>>>>>> Sx", but it
>>>>>>>>>>> seems that option is no longer availible?...
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>> I have all of the "midi ins", and "midi outs" enabled in
>>>>>>>>>>> preferences,...So just how do I go about selecting my motif as
>>>>>>>>>>> the midi
>>>>>>>>>>> controller so I can record midi??...
>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
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>>>>>>>>>> RWP at reaaccess.com
>>>>>>>>>> http://reaaccess.com/mailman/listinfo/rwp_reaaccess.com
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
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>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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>>>>>
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