MIDI ONLY

Why don't Cakewalk make a MIDI only Sequencer?
A scale down version of P5 or Sonar with full blown midi features minus the audio bloat would be outstanding.

ORIGINAL: Oaf_Topik

I think it's called REASON.

I said Kinetic in his duplicate post on the P5 forum. Also, Cakewalk 4.0 for DOS if Kinetic is still too "bloated".

Also, OP. Speaking of that..... Do you really think Cakewalk can even handle another sequencer at the moment? I mean just look at the special care and attention they've given to Project5..... and Kinetic, for that matter.

Thanks for bring up REASON's which I have

So...you're all set then...hmmm

I Still use Cakewalk Pro Audio 9 for all my Midi as I can see every track at a glance without having to open up little boxes to see my ins, outs, Banks, patches etc etc etc (Could go on all day)

Sonar is not efficient as a Midi sequencer. I don't care about Pro Audio 9's Lame GUI IMHO Sonars isn't much better. I can do far more far faster in Pro Audio 9 than I can ever do in Sonar and I challenge anyone to do some basic editing and do it faster in Sonar than in a spreadsheet type layout like Pro Audio. Man if Pro-Audio could do Soft-Synths I'd never leave it alone.

ORIGINAL: jackn2mpu

ORIGINAL: Dolphono

Kinda of but I want a newer product from any one with just those features I'm tried of Motorboating.
Reason is just my ROMPER that I control via midi and not rewire.

Why do you want a MIDI only app? Are you just playing live and not doing any recording?

It could be that the op needs a solid sequencer to sync to tape and play sample libraries. I would like to have something like that.

I don't see a meaningful market for it. That's probably the answer, if there was a significant market, Cake would make it.

Hi Fog-

times have progressed.. although you can still do midi , the demand well is a lot less. Midi is great of it's time and I still use it, but well in many ways its a bit limiting.

I hear folks say this often, but I confess I still don't understand what this means. How is MIDI in any way "limiting"? Your implication is that it's kind of "old school", but I don't get that either.

You either record audio directly or you drive a softsynth via a MIDI track, right?

Thanks-

-Susan

hey Susan..

I'll give you an example... so back in the day you had midi xg etc.. BUT to compress/eq it etc.. you had to have a hardware unit or use the desk. now just bounce to audio and really twist the sound all inside the box. Don't get me wrong I still use XG , but compared to the sounds now they aren't as full. I haven't bought a solely midi unit in years, so work stations have improved I'm sure.

yep we still need / use midi to control our soft synths.. but by bouncing that midi to audio then we get more flexibility.

dunno if you ever suffered from poly issues where notes would drop or when there was way too much midi data going down the pipe and it was dropping CC's / sysex etc.

with the 64 note poly on my sw1000.. then when I got near the end of a tune.. esp. with strings.. I'd notice notes would drop, due to the sheer amount of data.. hopefully that makes it clear

ORIGINAL: Susan G

Hi pianodano-

Perhaps you've blocked me?

"Two minds with but a single thought?" -- I totally agree.

-Susan

Hello Susan,

Certainly I would never block you. Actually I did reply to Fog but I didn't quote him. Your posts are always delight to read. I was just adding my thoughts after your post.

Danny

ORIGINAL: pianodano

Would you please describe just what it is that you find limiting about midi ? Honestly, when midi was developed, I felt that as a musican I had been made free at last from agony of dealing with trying to get musicans in a studio to perfom exactly what I heard in my head. And with the fabulous libraries available today there are no limits at all to my knowledge EXCEPT for someway to accuarately utilize them.

I long for the days of the accurarcy of a Roland MC500 that could have the ability to deal with modern midi streams.

ORIGINAL: Susan G

Hi Fog-

times have progressed.. although you can still do midi , the demand well is a lot less. Midi is great of it's time and I still use it, but well in many ways its a bit limiting.

I hear folks say this often, but I confess I still don't understand what this means. How is MIDI in any way "limiting"? Your implication is that it's kind of "old school", but I don't get that either.

You either record audio directly or you drive a softsynth via a MIDI track, right?

pianodano-

"Two minds with but a single thought?" -- I totally agree.

-Susan

You guys are totally on the same page as I am -- I totally agree.
With today's music technological advancements and the computer hardware available for portability, I can't understand, why such an option is not available?

Honestly, does Cakewalk really need all of the following products?

* SONAR 8 Studio
* SONAR Home Studio Version 7 XL
* SONAR Home Studio Version 7
* SONAR LE
* Project5 Version 2.5
* Guitar Tracks Pro Version 3
* Kinetic 2
Talk about over saturating the market, fundamentally they are all the same product.
Kinetic should be the name of Cakewalk's flagship MIDI only App, Winner of CM, SOS,EQ and KEYBOARD magazine's 2010 BEST MIDI SEQUENCER award.

ORIGINAL: Dolphono

Honestly, does Cakewalk really need all of the following products?

* SONAR 8 Studio
* SONAR Home Studio Version 7 XL
* SONAR Home Studio Version 7
* SONAR LE
* Project5 Version 2.5
* Guitar Tracks Pro Version 3
* Kinetic 2
Talk about over saturating the market, fundamentally they are all the same product.
Kinetic should be the name of Cakewalk's flagship MIDI only App, Winner of CM, SOS,EQ and KEYBOARD magazine's 2010 BEST MIDI SEQUENCER award.

Nope, all they should have is Sonar 8 Producer..... dump the rest of that stuff.

Dolphono, regarding your earlier post..

you wanna take up a shed load of space on outboard gear? yet are fussed about the size of the computer sequencing it? just sounds funny.

look at how much equipment now is midi outboard gear now also.. give me £900 , would I go out and buy a shed load of synths or one hardware one.. not a tricky one.. I got komplete

if something was working as you wanted it to before.. why upgrade? I mean if it's a stand alone daw and not used on the net etc.

ORIGINAL: CJaysMusic

They should have an audio only program. I'm representing the audio peeps...Word to your muda
Cj

she said on the phone.. and I quote.. "CJ who?" hehe

but you have that midi unit you got a few months back, so you couldn't midi sequence then ? (maybe it has an internal sequencer)

are you sure.. is that your final answer?

ORIGINAL: Fog

Dolphono, regarding your earlier post..

you wanna take up a shed load of space on outboard gear? yet are fussed about the size of the computer sequencing it? just sounds funny.

look at how much equipment now is midi outboard gear now also.. give me £900 , would I go out and buy a shed load of synths or one hardware one.. not a tricky one.. I got komplete

if something was working as you wanted it to before.. why upgrade? I mean if it's a stand alone daw and not used on the net etc.

I'm not fussing over the size of the computer, I'm fussing over the size of the bloated ware on the computer.
You are correct something is working very clumsily I must say, but working none the less.
Hey! We all have different approaches, remember there is no WRONG way.
You play soft. I play hard. but we're both komplete

The following quote is an issue that I believe a MIDI only app would solve this chap's problem.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=1579770

ORIGINAL: mobamoba

I'm using 7.02PE and am totally fed up with Sonar's awful memory management. Sonar markets itself as being capable of having "unlimited midi tracks" - but that is only true as long as there is nothing in them. As midi tracks fill up - and as Sonar's file size increases into the double-digit MB range - Sonar begins to go completely insane. This is not file-specific, i.e. it has happened with everything single file I create that has a lot of midi data (for example, creating a full 100-piece midi orchestra). Bouncing tracks to audio and archiving the midi does NOT solve the problem - nor does disconnecting all the synths and unloading all the samples. And, no, it's not a hardware or WinXP issue either - I have a current system that's a dedicated DAW with plenty of RAM, a fast hard drive, quad-core processor, etc.

Examples of Sonar's insanity with lots of midi data:

Constant crashes - triggered by things like opening the Help file!! But really, endless endless crashes.
Sonar randomly turns only "Input Echo" for every single midi and audio track in the project and refuses to stay off (when I turn it off, it mysteriously comes back on again for no reason).
The dreaded motorboating when playing audio - yep, somehow those archived midi tracks screw up audio playback.
When I open one of these big midi data file, Sonar insists on showing me audiosnap transient markers. I then, of course, turn them off, close file and, and, poof, they're back upon reopening.

The sole solution to this problem is to save a copy of my file and delete all the midi data. BTW, this is mouse-entered midi data, not recorded midi data so there's no funny SYSX stuff there or anything. All my problems disappear when I'm using a file with little or no midi data; in fact, I never ran into this problem until I started creating large orchestral sections with multiple players. I also ran into it where I did a live album recording and did the whole album in one file. I did audio for the drummer and midi for the keyboardist. The file was around 45megs and was impossible to work with until I pulled the midi data from the audio file and worked with them separately - which, of course, utterly defeated the purpose of why I'd recorded the session in that way. AARGH.

If a product advertises itself as being able to handle unlimited midi tracks, then it should do so flawlessly; the reality is that Sonar can handle 10ish midi tracks or only enough midi tracks to keep the file size under 5megs, at which point it slowly starts to spiral out of control.

Anyone else having this problem? It's totally infuriating to me and I loathe that I have to split my work into two separate files in order to get anything done - that's totally unacceptable for a pro audio project.

ORIGINAL: mobamoba

Well, first I'm neither and idiot nor a novice and have been using Cakewalk since back in the DOS days. I don't really care about your judgment of the quality of mouse-entered midi - why would you even bother judging? Who cares how I enter my midi data or how many midi tracks I use? My point was that Sonar should be able to handle 100 tracks of "fresh" midi without a hiccup and it can't.

Nor is the file size due to some problem with either the system or me as someone else implied. Go try it yourself.
Enter 4 quarter notes on a midi track. Copy & paste with 54 reps so you now have a 55 measure midi track.
Clone the track then transpose the cloned track down a tone or two. shift-click the cloned track up to the original and blend them.
You now have a 55 measure song with 8 notes per measure. Clone the track 99 times. You now have a 100 midi track file.

Go look at the size of it - it's pushing 8 megs. And this is without any synths or samples loaded. Now imagine it with many more notes and many different types of controller data. As the file size increases, Sonar has a harder and harder time juggling resources.

Pushing the negative judgments aside, Sonar advertises itself as a program that has the capability to work with unlimited midi tracks, and it isn't able to. Presumably, people haven't pushed midi data as hard as I recently did; as I mentioned in my initial post, I had never worked with this much midi before so hadn't noticed the problem until I decided to record a full album's-worth of keyboard and, later, create an all-midi orchestra to mimic the number of players in a real symphony. Sonar claims to be able to work with this level of data and it can't.

As for contacting tech support, I emailed them about another issue about 7 weeks ago and have heard zilch from them. Their tech support is a black hole so I thought I'd reach out to this forum instead.

System specs:
Dedicated DAW
WinXP SP3
All software, hardware, etc. fully updated
Intel Quad-Core Q6600
3GB RAM
Two SATA II hard drives, one just for Windows
Nvidia Geforce 7300, dual monitors
Tascam FireOne

Dolphono, the thing about mobamoba's midi thread.. I'm sure a lot more besides me want to see the final outcome of it.. It's a bit like watching an episode of columbo.hehe. so I'll wait to see what happens with that. I don't want to comment either way about that thread in the sense of wait and see. I guess you must have a LOT of outboard midi gear? few people I know now do who used unless they have vintage synths or say a module for a few sounds. They only have their akai 950 solely for the filters on it.

Susan, ok.. no audio, ya do realise no vst-i's ?.. ya can't have it both ways . The bottle neck thing was really if you used hardware gear. Things now have more poly.. 128 etc. but still, it is a limit.

look at it this way though.. how much stuff is midi sound modules now? if you look it's far less than say hhm 8 years ago.. e.g. sound canvas etc.

have a look here,that would have gone on for pages 5+ years ago. for example..

http://www.dv247.com/icat/Sound+Modules/3020/

notice the prices , and well there aren't so many now, people have sold a lot of their outboard gear and turned to vst-i's / fx. My friend bought a fantom a few months ago only because he plays live gigs. so yep, standalone things have their use as they are dedicated.