Need Help with Mac midi out

Goofparade
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2014 7:01 pm

Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Goofparade » Thu Aug 14, 2014 9:38 pm

Hi,

Tried Midi out today, watched the helpful video, followed the steps with Audio midi setup, made sure IAC device was online.
Updated Aerodrums to the latest version, booted it and selected "midi only".
Booted my DAW, DP8 by MOTU and could not find the similar setting that you used in your video demo, using Reaper.
Skipped that bit, added a VI, "Studio Drums" for Kontakt and added a midi track. Right away I could tell that Aerodrums was sending midi data
to the plug-in. Yay!

Set up a clik, hit record and tried simple drumming... this is where it got a bit wonky. All the notes were tied together in legato mode in my midi display, multiple hits were registered even when I tried the simplest quarter note snare pattern and these "ghost notes" (they were greyed out) in the midi window also registered. All in all it didn't sound much like what I played. They were also behind the beat by maybe 150 ticks. (no I wasn't off that much :)

Not sure what I need to do to make it work, I'm sure there is a simple solution, some setting I missed. Any help would be appreciated, I do love this system and can't wait to use it for actual recording in my Daw.

Have it working perfectly when i just use the Aerodrums samples.

Graphics kept asking to lower the setting even though its quite a fast card. (see below)

Thanks,

Marc

Set up: Mac (hackingtosh) i7 3930 OC to 3.8Ghz, 32 gigs of DDr3 1600Mhz ram. OSX 10.8.5 - NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2048 MB

Richard
Posts: 1014
Joined: Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:45 am

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Richard » Thu Aug 14, 2014 11:07 pm

Hi Marc, I'm pretty sure the step you skipped is the one that is accounting for the high latency.

In DP8, can you try choose Setup -> Configure Audio System -> Configure Hardware Driver and change the buffer size to be as low as possible. Try 128 for starters and see if that works. The lower you can set this the less latency there will be. But at some value the audio will start sounding choppy so you'll need to search for the optimal value.

There is some more info about this here:
http://www.motu.com/techsupport/technot ... er-size-do
and in the "Digital Performer Setup" section of this article:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep05/a ... ertech.htm

As for the ghost notes...

These "spurious" notes will occur if the stick rebounds following your hit. With practice and the right technique you can prevent this from happening to a large degree but generally they are not an issue anyway because they are so quiet. These ghost notes are also being triggered when you use the built-in Aerodrums samples but you probably don't notice them because they should be close to inaudible. The problem is that with some drum samplers the quietest ghost notes you can trigger are still relatively loud. For best results you may need to do some tweaking in Kontakt/Studio Drummer to set up velocity response curves to fix these issues. Personally, we haven't found this to be necessary though.

In fact, if you watch the DAW tutorial videos we made closely, you can see in Reaper's piano roll view that there are far more notes showing than were actually played. By looking at the velocity data at the bottom of the view you will see that many notes have very low velocity and therefore you can't hear them in the playback.

If you still consider this to be a problem and you want to record a clean drum track from Aerodrums into your DAW without having to clean it up by hand, I would suggest going to the Latency screen in Aerodrums and changing the "Drum hit detection sensitivity" setting to "Beginner". This will use more aggressive thresholds to try to filter out those unintentional ghost notes.

Finally, you mentioned notes being "tied together" in the DP8 MIDI display. When MIDI support was first added to Aerodrums we were not sending MIDI note-off events and so the recorded MIDI notes would appear with very long durations which sounds like what you're describing. However, we corrected this issue a while back and you did say you updated Aerodrums to the latest version. So I'm not sure what the issue here is. Feel free to grab a screenshot and post it here if it will describe the problem better.

Hope that helps.

Richard
Posts: 1014
Joined: Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:45 am

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Richard » Fri Aug 15, 2014 12:24 am

Two small things I forgot to mention:

In DP8 it's probably quite easy to select a bunch of MIDI notes and delete the ones whose velocity is below a threshold. So getting rid of those unwanted ghost notes might not be much work.

Also, related to the "Drum hit detection sensitivity" setting I mentioned, in the "Adjust drums" menu, while in MIDI mode, can you set another "Unwanted notes filtering" threshold per drum/cymbal. This is probably the better way to set up the velocity filtering rather than changing the hit detection sensitivity. This is a described in more detail in the manual: http://www.aerodrums.com/manual/#midi

Goofparade
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2014 7:01 pm

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Goofparade » Fri Aug 15, 2014 2:08 am

Hey Richard thanks for the quick reply.

I looked at your suggestions, the buffer in DP 8 is set at 128 (second lowest) To narrow it down, I tried to eliminate my playing style as being an issue.

I tried a simple test, using NO foot markers and holding 1 stick in my hand. I played ONE short snare hit on beat 1 of each bar and remained perfectly still untill the next bar.

I heard 2 hits on playback, and in the screenshot you can see that the note is held until the next note. You see the actual hit as a grey "mini note" on each downbeat followed by the long legato note.

I have a feeling that if we can clear this up, the rest will follow?


This mac is quite fast overall with an I7 3930 chip and lots of fast ram, which makes me think it's something other than lag causing an issue.

Thanks again for your input.Will stay tuned.

Marc
Attachments
Screen Shot 2014-08-14 at 8.33.34 PM.jpg
Screen Shot 2014-08-14 at 8.33.34 PM.jpg (148.3 KiB) Viewed 28577 times

Richard
Posts: 1014
Joined: Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:45 am

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Richard » Fri Aug 15, 2014 9:05 am

That does seem strange. When you get a chance could you try it without Kontakt loaded in DP8 to see if it records the same legato notes? I'm just wondering if you might have Kontakt set to output MIDI back to DP8. The only other thing I can think of is that DP8 has some feature that automatically converts notes into legato notes if they occur too close together in time. If you can't get to the bottom of this we'll download the DP8 demo and try to reproduce the issue.

Goofparade
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2014 7:01 pm

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Goofparade » Sat Aug 16, 2014 7:16 pm

Hi Richard,

Yes, same problem running Kontakt or Addictive Drums, East west too. I tried a hat /snare only beat using Aerodrums sounds (no midi) the wav playback was right on timing wise. Tried the same with Kontakt (or any other) and I get a definite delay on playback. Not human error in this case. ( see Attach)

Also,graphics keep displaying red warning message even when moving a single stick once per bar. I have a very fast 2 gig graphics card for gaming.

I will call MOTU on monday and pick their brain a bit.

Thanks again for your help, if anyone out there is running DP 8 with Aerodrums please let me know how its goes with midi out.

DP version is:8.05
Aerodrums version: 1.0.11


Marc
Attachments
hat snare way off time.jpg
hat snare way off time.jpg (154.99 KiB) Viewed 28554 times

Richard
Posts: 1014
Joined: Wed Feb 26, 2014 1:45 am

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Richard » Mon Aug 18, 2014 1:04 am

Thanks for trying that. The appearance of the red warning message while playing Aerodrums suggests there is a performance issue that should first be addressed. There a few factors that might affect the performance...

I would suggest trying it where the Aerodrums window has the primary focus while drumming and when DP8 has the focus. And also try it with Aerodrums running in full-screen mode and in windowed mode (the toggle button is in the lower left corner). Finally, try press Control+g from the Aerodrums drumming screen to cycle between various lower quality/higher performance graphics modes. If you can find a way to ensure the Aerodrums frame rate indicator in the top left corner stays green while drumming in MIDI mode then I expect your experience will be a lot better.

Goofparade
Posts: 17
Joined: Mon Feb 17, 2014 7:01 pm

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Goofparade » Thu Aug 28, 2014 8:33 pm

Hi Richard,

The midi out generated by Aerodrums coming in to DP8 is still not working right and it's not related to the speed of the processor or the performance of the graphic card. These, I assure you are each much faster than any laptop you've ever used.

The midi notes are constantly very late: single notes using 1 stick only, wearing no foot markers, it doesn't matter, none will keep time to the click, not even close.

Also, as you can see by the previous attachment, the notes are still tied, full legato.

At this point I'm not sure what else to try. I purchased this for the ability to use it on composing jobs but at this point, I cannot see that happening unless someone can help me and possibly other MOTU DP8 users with getting Aerodrum midi to work right.

If you would be so kind as try the DP 8 demo for yourself, perhaps you could discover the cause of this malfunction.

thanks,

Marc in Toronto

Sipaliwini
Posts: 436
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2014 12:40 pm

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Sipaliwini » Fri Aug 29, 2014 12:12 am

Dear Mark, thank you for the update and sorry about the frustration. We are investigating the issue with DP8, we will post here as soon as we make progress.

Sipaliwini
Posts: 436
Joined: Thu Jan 16, 2014 12:40 pm

Re: Need Help with Mac midi out

Post by Sipaliwini » Fri Aug 29, 2014 3:27 pm

Sorry this isn't really progress yet but we have setup DP8 and are getting the same issues you describe. We are carrying out some tests to pinpoint the problem. We've also gotten in touch with MOTU about it.

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