Is there a MIDI in/out on that keyboard? If so you could bypass the mixer entirely. I'm still a little confused as to what your doing (seriously my brain is toast today) but I'm not seeing why the mixer is coming into play at all here. Even if the keyboard doesn't have MIDI but has a line outs you should be able to plug straight into the MIA, do your mixing in SOnar and then just do a straight export.

I may be missing something here and I'm more of a guitar guy so again if I'm screwing up my apologies. Cheers.

Oh and are you saying you write some components like the drums or whatever in Sonar without the keyboard or are you doing everything on the keyboard? Just curious.

earcandy


Basically here's what I do:

Write the tune using a combo of drum loops, virtual instruments, and midi from my XV-88.

Once the tune is complete, I mute any audio tracks and playback the rest thru the mixer to the MIA and record those midi tracks to audio.

Then I get rid of all tracks in the project except for the audio tracks.  I set my levels etc, do any processing, and then export to an mp3 or wav or both.

The end result never sounds clear and crisp as it does when I just play it back thru Sonar.

Don't know anything about your mixer, but for softsynths midi tracks you don't need to run them through anything to convert to audio, just bounce to track within Sonar or Freeze them - job done. I tend to freeze them with the fx bin bypassed, then unbypass the fx bin afterwards. That way I can tweak the fx without having to unfreeze the track, which will lose any clip automation.

When you expert the project wav - how are you doing ths - ie what settings ? Also, when you say it sounds different afterwards, do you mean played through same set-up or elsewhere, like in the car ?

^^^^
  Herb in using an apparently helpful post as shameless plug shocker lol !

earcandy


Basically here's what I do:

Write the tune using a combo of drum loops, virtual instruments, and midi from my XV-88.

Once the tune is complete, I mute any audio tracks and playback the rest thru the mixer to the MIA and record those midi tracks to audio.

Then I get rid of all tracks in the project except for the audio tracks.  I set my levels etc, do any processing, and then export to an mp3 or wav or both.

The end result never sounds clear and crisp as it does when I just play it back thru Sonar.

I basically do the same thing, but I record my hardware instruments one track at a time, instead of all at once, if I understood what you said. I also archive the midi cause I never know when I might need it again to layer another instrument, or even replace one if I find something that fits better.
 
VST's are handled similarly, but never leave the DAW.
 
After that, everything is processed and mixed. It sounds like you are saying that everything sounds fine even after you have converted the midi to audio, but doesn't sound the same after you export it? If that's the case, maybe tell us how you are doing the export.
 
Regards,
Dan
 
 

Wow.. What an amazing group!  Thank you ALL for the help.  I think Paulo hit the nail on the head - since I dont record any hardware instruments it sounds like my issue is actually not knowing that you can "bounce" midi to audio and same for the virtual instruments.

All this time I had absolutely no idea that could be done.  I have been recording my midi tracks to audio via the mixer.  Getting the mixer out of the mix - should improve my mix!

Going to read up on this bounce/freeze deal today and try it out tonight!

Happy Holidays to all of you and thank you so much!

The Freeze option is amazing and I could kick myself for not knowing about this for all this time!  Thank you all.

I am not able however to do this on midi tracks - only seems to work on my virtual instrument tracks.

On the midi tracks I have a freeze options button - but no option to freeze the track?

Am I wrong in thinking I could convert my midi tracks to audio just as I did with my virtual ins tracks? And if not why is the option greyed out?

I think I finally understand:

Note 2: A MIDI track can only be frozen if it is routed to a software instrument


So my only option to get my midi tracks from my Roland XV-88 to audio is to playback and record to audio - correct?

Jeff,

no, you can record the Roland just like an acoustic instrument - sans the microphone.  Route SONAR to play the midi in the Roland (or internally the roland).  Audio out from the Roland back to interface and record the audio.  It is just like freezing the tracks of a soft synth, tho you have to manually patch things.

@

Earcandy - there are 2 different types of freeze.

You can freeze a track, or you can freeze a synth.

I personally never freeze a track, as it's so much easier to freeze the synth.
This doesn't freeze your Fx, so you can mix as you go, add whatever processing you want, but if your system starts to suffer from dropouts or slowdows or you simply run out of CPU horsepower, you can help by freezing the synth to remove them from memory.

If you want to edit your Midi later at a later stage, simply unfreeze the synth, make your change & re-freeze, and you're back in Audio land.


BUT. If you have a reasonably modern machine you might find you never need to freeze anything and you can run your exports directly out of the project as a wave file