Beginners advice on moving away from VST's

Anything about hardware musical instruments.
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Frantz wrote: On my old PC, the timing of the Steinberg Midex 8 was so bad, I switched to a hardware sequencer for years but it may have been an issue with my PC.
Before buying it, I read a lot of polarized stories on it; or it was terrible or it was really great. Most of those posts were from before the new Win7 x64 drivers were made, and on XP.
Only issue I have with it is locking up when doing large sysex transfers, so I use the Midisport for that.

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T-CM11 wrote:
Frantz wrote: On my old PC, the timing of the Steinberg Midex 8 was so bad, I switched to a hardware sequencer for years but it may have been an issue with my PC.
Before buying it, I read a lot of polarized stories on it; or it was terrible or it was really great. Most of those posts were from before the new Win7 x64 drivers were made, and on XP.
Only issue I have with it is locking up when doing large sysex transfers, so I use the Midisport for that.
I bought it because it was supposed to improve timing using a special trick of timestamping events and sending them from the PC to the Midex 8 ahead of time, bypassing the slow MIDI speed limit. For whatever reason, it was worse than a simple MPU-401 card that I used before that.

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Frantz wrote: I bought it because it was supposed to improve timing using a special trick of timestamping events and sending them from the PC to the Midex 8 ahead of time, bypassing the slow MIDI speed limit. For whatever reason, it was worse than a simple MPU-401 card that I used before that.
Shit happens, sometimes. Stories I read these days: people with no OTB experience complaining that their ancient digital synth doesn't work when using an editor (probably sending sysex) and connected with a 2$ Chinese usb midi cable. :dog:

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Frantz wrote: The cables are not the issue. It's the MIDI protocol which is very old and slow. The problem is MIDI jitter - timing issues that are audible especially with hard quantized material. One of the key reasons I moved ITB was the elimination of that sloppy timing. Note CV doesn't have timing issues.
That's not the only problem- a lot of it is with how fast a synth responds to note ons. The time between when a synth turns on the first and last note in a chord can be in the tens of milliseconds, and the MIDI data transfer rate isn't the real issue in that case- it's the microprocessor in the synth. And, exceeding the rated polyphony of the synth can really slow things down.

Mind you, it's not as big of a problem now as it was in the '80s and '90s due to the better technology, but it can still be an issue.

ew
A spectral heretic...

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Dammit I miss my old command station. However they weren't GM compatible.
Synapse Audio Dune 3 I'm in love

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Might be worth looking into the Novation Ultranova because of it's DAW integration.

Heres a good article

http://www.keyboardmag.com/article/the- ... dio/147899
:borg:

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Does modern gear and software still prioritise midi ch10, because that's what's meant to carry the drums, like the early midi sequencers did?

My experience with ITB midi timing is not good. It really did seem far better on the old Atari ST, but that was midi only.

With ITB audio + midi sequencing, maybe a hidden problem exists? The DAW measures time by sample clocks from the audio device. Incoming midi data is timestamped according to a PC system timer. So there are 2 time references that are not synchronised. Trouble?

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tapper mike wrote:Dammit I miss my old command station. However they weren't GM compatible.
GM, the ancestor of the mp3, and the birth of elevator/supermarket music. :D

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maudioradium wrote:I might look into either getting a separate PC and put either OSX or linux on it, then see how it performs with software vsts. Then use the keyboard I'm intending to purchase today as a midi keyboard. I might also try out osx86 hackintosh on my i5 laptop and see how it reliable it is, compared to my bad experiences with vst's on windows.

of course, this is alongside using the keyboard as it is and outputting my ableton live to it.
My neighbor--a true Mac fanboy if there ever was one--built a Hackintosh to use as a media server. I helped a bit, but only long enough to find out that he was going through all the trouble of using "PC" parts and a cracked Mac OS because he hated Windows that much. It's been six months now, and he's trying to sell it. I don't know if he had problems keeping it running with the limited software he could find that would run on a "Hackintosh", or what. But as a DAW, you might want to look into that.

Also, Linux looks interesting, but if you really look at your DAW and VST choices for it, many are still in the beta stage, and they don't do quite as much as their PC or OSX counterparts. I've built Linux machines to use as Windows replacements, and they're great for desktop office use. But as a DAW, you're going to be quite limited in your DAW, soundcard/MIDI driver and VST options.

Steve
Here's some of my stuff: https://soundcloud.com/shadowsoflife. If you hear something you like, I'm looking for collaborators.

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Well in that case, perhaps just a dedicated, (fanless i7) mini itx box, very large fan for PSU, ssd and perhaps just a few very reliable vst's. I need a cinema box computer anyway sometime.

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Tricky-Loops wrote:Since when do keyboards have a MIDI IN?
Are you kidding me? How else you would make music??? LOLZ
Reality is a Condition due to Lack of Weed!

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T-CM11 wrote:
tapper mike wrote:Dammit I miss my old command station. However they weren't GM compatible.
GM, the ancestor of the mp3, and the birth of elevator/supermarket music. :D
Um no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_MIDI
Synapse Audio Dune 3 I'm in love

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Lol...GM and MP3? Actually yes, they have correlation, lol, but i think i know what he meant.
Reality is a Condition due to Lack of Weed!

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BasariStudios wrote:
Tricky-Loops wrote:Since when do keyboards have a MIDI IN?
Are you kidding me? How else you would make music??? LOLZ
Obviously you aren't able to read the whole discussion but you just want to have a fast prey...


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This was my studio around ten years ago...

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These days, the only hardware synth that makes it into my music is the Virus TI, and that is because it acts like a VST plug-in. My musical productivity now is so much greater than when I had all of the hardware synths. Given the choice, I would never go back to a hardware based setup.

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