posted 07 March 2003 12:53            

I know you are busy right now finishing the Project X release, but I would like to suggest for future releases a feature that would make a huge change in my use of Kyma and that hopefully others would want too.

The feature I miss the most today is a midi recording and playback object.

The analog sequencer is a great tool that I use all the time, but despite its huge versatility, it has some limitations. For instance, it is not able to (easily) handle chords or mixes of note lengths (like 4x16th, 2x8th ...).
Sure, by clever programming, it is possible to achieve both features but
it's quite cumbersome. The result is often a quite robotic type of
sequences. But in my view, the biggest limitation of the analog seq is its inability to record note data from a midi input.

The way I see the midi recorder/player object(s) is an equivalent to the
memory writer / sample objects, in the midi domain. The midi recorder could have rec/stop/reset/length/clock/save ... controls, the player could have play/pause/reset/clock/step/start/loop_start/loop_end/file_read ... controls with time quantize capability. Notes (incl. chords) and CC midi data should be recordeable.
Also, the capacity to handle and process separately midi note pitch, vel and duration would be a plus. A similar example would be the
detonate object in Max.

Having this type of real time midi record and playback capability in Kyma would open up a very vast array of live and jamming applications. We could imagine for example having one recorder recording live midi input and several players replaying the recorded patterns, each with a different tempo, transposition, note quantize, delay ... or having a midi player tied to a reverb whose time is controlled by note duration ...

I feel real time midi record/play is the last missing brick to make Kyma a fully self contained sound environment. I hope to see this type of features one day in Kyma (maybe release X.1 :-)

Thanks for your great product and wonderful dedication to your customers
support
Eric (from Paris)

posted 07 March 2003 21:03            

Actually, you can do real-time MIDI recording and playback already, though it doesn't look like you might expect.

The basic idea is to turn MIDI events into a normal -1 to 1 signal, then record the signal. As long as the encoding/decoding operations are exact opposites, it works fine.

I hope I'm not bothersome about mentioning this, but my Looper Construction Kit contains several such examples of live recording and playback of MIDI. The manual is available for free from www.greenteasoftware.com and shows several examples.

You don't need the LCK in order to do this "trick." But the LCK contains variable rate "MemoryRecorders" so you can record and playback at sampling rates much slower (or faster) than real-time. MIDI signals do not require the full audio bandwidth. By recording them much slower, you can make much more efficient use of memory. For example, by recording at a rate of 0.05 a "20 second" wavetable, i.e., one that holds 20 seconds of full bandwidth audio, can contain 400 seconds of MIDI data.

Since the MIDI data is recorded into a normal wavetable, you can save or restore the table to disk, and do all sorts of manipulations with it. You can also drop the MIDI recorder and playback Sounds into timelines, etc.

Of course, editing such recorded MIDI sequences is cumbersome, at best. I agree that a more traditional MIDI recorder/playback Sound would be handy. I'm just not sure how it would integrate into the normal Kyma suite. But perhaps with some clever designing...

Hope this gives you food for thought.

posted 14 March 2003 11:09            

Thanks for the answer. I read with great interest the LCK manual you wrote (very nicely done by the way) and specifically recording midi data as if it were audio samples. The trick is smart and I will give it a try for sure. But in my view this does not replace a dedicated midi module. I would like to have the option to quantize notes and manipulate note duration information. I don't see an easy way to do it (of course we can imagine detecting amplitude ... but it's really too far from the simple feature I look for)

The way to integrate it ... like analog sequencer on the replay side and midi-voice on record side.