Lost note offs from live midi piano CWBRN-31525

BUG
Midi piano sustaining - lost note offs from the live piano

route the output of a softsynth piano into a mixing board
setup a drum loop or metronome
arm the midi piano track
arm an audio track that records the output of the mixing board
record both tracks -  16 bars of piano changing chords + using the sus pedal
unarm both tracks
clone the midi track and the audio track
arm the new midi track and the new audio track, mute 1st audio track
go to bar 3, hit record, and try to play same piano part along with 1st piano
notice the longer you play the more you hear stuck notes sustaining
unarm and mute audio track + clone audio track
arm new audio track #3
playback 2 piano tracks and record the audio of both
compare the last  2 recordings for stuck notes

expected results
When playing live piano with recorded piano, there should be no lost note offs from the live piano

actual results
When playing live piano with recorded piano, there are lost note offs from the live piano, which create a sustaining roar. It seems the lost note offs are always in the lower register, like G0 (middle C=C3)

The problem really occurs when using autopunch, typically when a mistake occurs, you stop and set an autopunch, backup before the punchin and play along with the recorded material so when the autopunch happens, you'll be playing the same way. So in other words before the autopunch happens you hear 2 pianos playing - the recorded one and the live piano.I came up with this recipe only to show what happens when 2 pianos are playing together. No version of Sonar before X2 has worked like this.

When I record a reference piano part for a singer, I play the piano with a 2nd midi track triggering a bass guitar in the lower left hand. 2 midi tracks are being recorded simultaneously. I also have an audio track being recorded of the output of my mixing board. So 3 tracks are being recorded. Sometimes after the autopunch starts I can still hear lost midi note offs, sustaining in the background muddying up the audio recording, forcing me to redo the audio recording part. I'm including a BUN file, so you can listen to the Mix #2 and Mix #3 and hear the difference.


Download Piano sustain bug.bun
https://onedrive.live.com...d=C256E2DAE26B22A5!105

Cactus Music
First I'm not understanding why your recording the way you are? Most of us record input as midi. That's it? why are you bringing the soft synth out and back? 
You record a mid event, edit it and it will always trigger your soft synths which generate audio. No need to record the audio the way you are doing as it will always play via the soft synth. If you desire an audio version you can freeze the synth and this automatically generates an audio track. 
 
This is not a bug by the way. Your possibly getting stuck nots because your need to crank up you midi buffers to 1,000. The default is 250 which is not really enough. 
Or your editing has somehow cut off your sustain pedal OFF message. Look in the event view. 

If you notice in my long post (sorry), that I'm only recording this way to show what happens when you are using an external mixer with the piano's audio routed into the mixer. I'm recording midi and audio. The bug repeatedly happens when doing an autopunch, in which I'm not recording it's audio like I did in the example. Recording the audio was only for testing purposes to present the bug.
 
Noel fixed a similar bug in Platinum that I reported in X3 that had to do with the sustain pedal. This is clearly some lost note off messages. When I hear the problem if I stop I can hear only 1 note ringing out. If it were the sus pedal there would be more than one note ringing.
 
I had the same problem with X3 and had to stop using it, since we were at the end of the beta cycle when I bought it. I've been using Cakewalk products since the DOS days and none of them had this bug. I will try raising the buffers to 1000 to see if that makes a difference, they were at 500.
 
Thanks for your input and your suggestion.

Wookiee
Are you muting the original MIDI track recorded in the first take?

No, not muting the original MIDI track. This is a recipe to illustrate what's happening before the autopunch punches in.The reason I'm doing this is to let Cakewalk hear what's happening when using autopunch, before the recording starts.
 
Under normal circumstances, if I record a piano part and make a mistake. I back up a little and set up an autopunch. Then I back up a few bars, hit record, play along with the original recorded midi piano, and it punches me in at the autopunch spot. This has worked just fine for years.
 
Before the autopunch point there are essentially 2 pianos playing approx the same thing, one is the live midi piano and the other is the recorded midi track. Once the autopunch engages then you hear only 1 piano.
 
The problem with turning in a bug report for this problem is there's no way they can hear the live piano and the recorded midi piano together before the autopunch engages, since the recording doesn't happen until the punch in point.
 
In this example you can first hear an audio recording of me playing a live midi piano with the recorded midi piano, where you can clearly hear some stuck notes droning in the background. In the 2nd recording where I record both recorded midi pianos playing together, there are no stuck notes.
 
I tried setting the midi buffers at 1000, which has no effect. Since no version of Sonar has done this before X2, it's safe to assume this is a bug.  My only explanation that I can come up with is it's some lost note offs in the live midi piano, because this goes away once you play the 2 recorded midi pianos.
 
When I use autopunch, sometimes the stuck midi notes persist for about 1 min. Ivory has really long low notes some lasting more than a minute. Try to imagine playing a piano part and having a very low G note sustaining in the background the whole time - pretty distracting eh? Even if it's gone during playback, it's very distracting and what if a client is there and listening and wondering what's going on. I hope that Noel will be able to fix this one, like he did in December when he fixed the sus pedal bug I turned in for X3.

Wookiee
Go for a report here and when you get a CWBRN can you edit your first post with that in the title thank you.

The Internet is Broken

Well at least our little corner of it is.
 
Hey Wookiee. I was hoping maybe you had inside info about Cakewalk's internet and that it was safe to submit a bug report. Well I again tried to and for the 2nd time it failed with the above error message.
 
At the end of the submission I tried to upload a 26 meg bun. The next time I try this I'll hold off on the file upload in case that's part of this problem. I hope someone at Cakewalk can give me the green light so I can get a CWBRN
 
Bummer!

brundlefly

I can't reproduce a problem, but I am simplifying the set up because there are too many variables in the your original description that could cause problems - mainly in terms of what's echoing input at any given time, and whether more than one MIDI stream is driving the synth at the same time. Also, I think it would be best if you can reproduce it with a SONAR-bundled soft synth.

 

Let me know if this setup reproduces the issue (or won't because I'm misunderstanding something).

 

- Disable always Echo Current MIDI Track in preferences, and set Record mode to Sound on Sound.

- Insert Cakewalk TruePianos in the synth rack and, and let SONAR create MIDI and synth tracks.

- Route the output of the synth track to your loopback path, and set up an audio track to record and echo the return.

- Set record mode to Sound on Sound.

- Arm MIDI and Audio tracks, and record the first pass of piano with sustain use.

- (Optional) Set a punch region in the middle of the first pass.

- Mute the first MIDI clip.

- Record a second pass, while performing from bar one.

- Mute the MIDI track and disable Input Echo.

- Mute the first Audio clip, and play back the second clip, listening for improperly sustaining notes.

 

 

 

 

Thanks for giving it a try. I think maybe the only way you'll understand what i'm trying to show with this example is for you to load the bun file. Then listen to the last 2 audio tracks - mix #2 and mix #3.

Mix #2 is the audio of what it sounds like for 2 pianos to play the same part at the same time, one live and the other playing back the midi track. This recording is the one that has the lost midi note offs from the live piano.

Then play mix #3, the audio track that simply plays both recorded midi track at the same time. You'll notice there are no lost midi note offs sustaining in the background. I opened 8.5 and tried thsi example and there were no lost note offs, then I opened Platinum and immediately I heard the lost note offs.

When I first got Platinum and played the piano for 10 min, doing some punching in and it worked fine. Later I played a song I was recording the piano for and that's when I noticed this bug resurfacing. It's dependent on the type of piano playing, maybe it's overlapping notes that confuses Sonar, not sure. Back with X3 I got it to do it really bad playing a traditional country piano rhythm with the left hand following the bass, I didn't even touch the sustain pedal.

Sorry for the confusion with this post. For it to make sense you have to read the whole post. Thanks again for trying to shed light on it.

Sounds like you're hitting the voice limit of the softsynth piano.
Could it be that?
 

Had a chance to look at this some more over lunch. I copied the MIDI clips to a new project, and after finding only minimal weirdness with sustain when punching in the #2 part over the #1 part, I carefully check out all the parts, and here's what I found:
 
If you punch in/out exactly at the boundaries of the #2 clip with Mute Previous Takes enabled, you end up muting a pedal up from the previous take, causing a few notes to to sustain until the first pedal up occurs in the punch in. This is as expected. You just have to be careful not to punch in between down/up events.
 
- Similarly, the end of the punched region mutes a pedal down that is not replaced by the punched part, so the last part of the clips ends up losing some sustained notes.
 
- There's no final pedal up in the #1 part, so  the synth is going to continue sustaining indefinitely until another pedal up is received or SONAR Zeros Controllers on Stop (if enabled) or the synth gets reset along with the audio engine.
 
- Listening to (and looking at waveforms of) the audio recordings in your project, it seems that most of the weirdness is due to the MIDI being doubled. I can't really pick out anything that sounds clearly like a missing note offs or dropped pedal up.
 
I think the bottom line is that when trying to punch in MIDI parts with lots of overlapping notes and sustain pedal, it's hard to avoid losing/gaining sustaining notes. The way I typically avoid this is to re-record a somewhat longer section than needs to be replaced, and then carefully edit the clip boundaries manually (with Non-destructive MIDI Editing disabled) to replace entire notes and down/up sustain pairs in the problem area.
 
I would be really surprised if there's a DAW in existence that's smart enough to get this right with a simple punch in/out in all cases. I don't even think I could write an algorithm of the thought process I go through to make it happen.
 
Bottom line: I don't see any issues around this that are new to Platinum.
 
 
 
 

brundlefly
I tried opening the Bun, but got so many errors about missing elements, I didn't think it was going to be very helpful. Plus audio evidence of a problem doesn't tell me what settings and sequence of events caused the problem. That's why I want to be able to reproduce it.
 
A little earlier I tried several different combinations of punch, and comp recording, and could not reproduce a problem with lost note offs or sustain issues. But it could well be very dependent on the exact pattern of notes and sustains you're playing. I'll take another look at the bun, and maybe try using the particular MIDI clip you recorded to try to reproduce it. But I'd still like to have a simpler recipe that reproduces the realtime issue, and understand better what your normal workflow is without all the loopback recording and re-recording to capture and analyze the result.
 
One thing I'm wondering is whether possibly your controller sends All Notes Off when the last key is released, which can cause problems with some soft synths that don't handle it correctly. My old Roland RD-300s does this, and I have to block it with TenCrazy's "Sustain Fix" MIDI FX.

I'll try to create a better recipe, sorry this one isn't so good. What missing elements? Was it soft synths I forgot to delete?
 
"controller sends All Notes Off when the last key is released"  I think I know what you're talking about. When I first bought X3 last March I posted some posts about these issues and someone asked I think the same question about my controller. I told him I used a Yamaha P-200 and he said that one didn't have that problem. Here's the post about this same problem with X3
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Ivory-users-X3-strange-bug-m3037638.aspx
 
Thanks for all the time and effort you're putting into this. I'll try to come up with a better recipe and also take into account all of what you said in the other posts. It's possible some of those other elements and variables could be a factor in what has changed from 8.5 and X1 to the later versions.

brundlefly
Glad to help. While I've been looking for a procedural/routing problem that might account for this, I'm not ruling out that there's a bug in here somewhere. And if there is, I'd like to help find it now rather than having it bite me in the a$$ take me by surprise later. But it could be synth-specific, which is why I recommend trying to reproduce it with something bundled and not too complex like Cakewalk TruePianos or SI Electric Piano. The simpler the recipe, the easier it'll be for the Bakers to reproduce and fix.

 So true, I appreciate and agree with all the above. When I get some time I'll come up with a simpler recipe with TruePianos, because that's the only way it'll be fixed if they can reproduce it. All I know is something changed in either X2 or X3.
 
No doubt Noel fixed this sus pedal problem that was even worse. My new recipe will not involve a sus pedal so we can rule that out. I assume you don't have an external mixer, so please explain to me how I can set up the loopback thing you set up to record audio from the midi track.

Brundlefly, I found out that this lost note off problem only occurs with me using Ivory. Truepianos works fine. I have a better recipe that I'll put in a new post alerting Ivory users. The new recipe involves not using the sus pedal, but playing a simple pattern and then going up chromatically. This way it becomes very obvious when a lost note off occurs, In fact if you stop when it happens, you can clearly hear the note or notes than are sustaining. This problem is not present in 8.5 or X1, but is in X3 and Platinum. Thanks for all your attention on this issue.