reaktor midi out

i've been wondering if i could get reaktor midi out going into sonar to work, but it appears that i can't. every time it looks like i have sonar and reaktor wired together correctly midi-wise, reaktor crashes (i've been using r3 standalone for my experiments, assuming the same problems will apply a fortiori to the dx and vst plugins). the reason i want to do this is to take advantage of some of reaktors event modulation power to control other dxi's and vsti's - or eventually any envelope-controllable parameter, once cakewalk makes this possible.

obviously it would be even better to have sonar accept reaktor event data for control without dithering down to crappy midi resolution (how about just a standard for overlaying control data on an audio track? reaktor could easily work with this kind of thing), but for now this is just a pipe dream... so i have to say - all these different audio formats, and still we are stuck with 7 bits of midi as a control format. reaktor at least supports osc, though it seems like no other windows program does.

one snag in my project is that sonar merges all incoming midi data from all in ports. in other words, you cannot differentiate between one midi input and another when mapping an instrument (though you can map different channels easily enough). if you have two keyboards going into two different midi ports on your midi interface, you can't differentiate between them, except by setting them to different channels. this has always seemed like a bad oversight on cakewalk's part to me.

so anyway, i'm wondering whether anyone has managed to get reaktor midi out to work with their sequencing program. even as simple as playing notes into reaktor and recording them into your sequencer.

thanks

- brandon

 

i think vst would work better,here's what i experience:

i can get it working as vst in cubase (seems that in general vst/asio
is better, quicker and more stable than microsoft directx, wdm, or
whatever other "technologies" they offer--on both my p3 and p4)

in cubase (i guess translate to sonar langauge, but...):
method 1:
1) choose multi out from a midi track and "add out"
2) the first out will be the reaktor ens with the reaktor midi
coming into cubase
3) the second out will be the instrument being triggered.
note: change channel to "any" on both reaktor out and additional out
so that you can control the midi channel from the instrument in reaktor, and the triggered instrument in vst/dxi

method 2: less stable, but more flexible (maybe in cubase sx it's bugfree)
1) select "multi record"
2) *) if you use channel split the midi is split according to channel
(i.e. choose which channel you want going in, out)
*)if you choose input split than the input, not the channel (i.e. port) is used
*) if you merge than it takes all midi and directs to channel
of target instrument-- but "any" makes it just like method 1 (i.e.
control the out channel from reaktor, in channel from triggered instrument)
*) layer-- hmmm, i could pontificate like Pontificus "The Great"
about this one, but i don't really know

even with cubase (who invented the vst thing-- i think) there are
some problems, but generally it's smooth, i heard logic has
a midi flow diagram that you can directly draw the flow of all midi-- that sounds pretty cool

good luck with sonar, is it really low latency? the asio drivers
for cubase and reaktor are very low (with delta 66 card)-- i'm able to
use my pc as an fx unit for my guitar with these drivers, and it can replace most of my stomp boxes (once i get a cheap pc that doesn't break when you spill beer on it, reaktor will be the only thing between me and my amp)

peace,

elon

 

interesting that you are able to get this to work in cubase. i've never used cubase, so i don't completely understand your explanation of how you set it up. can you do things like controlling filter sweeps on other vsti's from reaktor? when i use reaktor as a dxi in sonar, there doesn't appear to be any midi out (midi settings are grayed out, midi output is not recorded). i'll try it with a vst/dx wrapper in sonar and as a vsti in acid pro and see what happens.

but as i talked about in another thread, i really hope that companies start to move beyond midi in the near future. in the past few days i've begun to think that encoding control data in digital audio makes a lot of sense, and i've started to work on that in reaktor.

logic does have a midi flow diagram (the environment). it's very powerful, from what i understand, but i have never gotten comfortable with logic's ui, so i don't use it often. maybe i'll try to parse it for the purpose of trying out experimenting with midi, but as a pc user i'm not very motivated to invest much more time trying to figure out logic's rather (imo) non-intuitive interface.

sonar works fine with low latency sound cards. cakewalk harps on using wdm drivers, but with rme mme drivers i can get 3ms latency without glitches. i do the same thing you do - monitoring guitar input with effects, and that works fine. i use a pod either as a front end or as an effect on a buss, but i'd love to replace it with a plugin. unfortunately the ones i've tried (revalver and amplitube) just cannot compare to the pod's tone.

- brandon