Your fave MIDI fx, arp, mapper, mangler, generator, chorder, controller, utility. VST or MFX

[ThomasHelzle]

Try it out yourself, it may be totally different for you.
For me it was the little things, weird GUI choices and behaviours, certain elements that somehow didn't click with me...
But I started with the old Usine and then got the early Hollyhock versions and somehow it never really did things how I'd like them...
You probably know how very subjective this all is...

In a book by William Gibson there is this brilliant sentence: "Our boy/girl lego didn't click".
That.

In the end I found, that I actually like to have a versatile DAW like Bitwig with "normal" tracks and a clip launcher as a basis and in there I'm doing my stuff. It simple DID click with me.
In Hollyhock I found all the nodes all the time tedious at one point and the way surround works - although way more capable than Bitwig which is only stereo - somehow quite complicated.
So I built a 5.1 surround system in Bitwig with some clever routing and it felt much more fluid to me in the end.
I think I would look into it again if I had a specific project that needs certain aspects of it.
I neither have a touch display nor am I doing life shows, so YMMV.

Cheers,

Tom

[Kalamata Kid]

^^^
Thanks for you input.
Looks like you gave Usine/Hollyhock a real effort and it still did not click.

[ThomasHelzle]

Thought I should give Hollyhock 4 a try after we were talking about it (I last tried v3).

Within seconds I was back to the reasons why it somehow isn't for me:

I opened the demo, went to settings to scale the interface for my 4k monitor.
It's a slider, so I tried to drag it up.
Problem is, the change is immediate, so because the interface is getting bigger while you are dragging, the area of the slider is moving away from the mouse very quickly - so you only can change it a tiny amount that way...
Of course, I can double click the slider and enter a value manually, but why make it a slider in the first place if it simply doesn't work?
Or update the scale only AFTER the user releases the mouse?
Or virtualise the mouse and allow to continue to drag a slider even when the mouse is no longer inside it's boundaries.

At a scale of 1.5, all the GUI text became completely blurry - huh?

Then I tried to scan my plugins. it took a long time while the GUI was blocked and then Usine crashed...
I re-started it, it told me that it crashed on plugin scanning and if I want to continue with it.
I said yes, and then it was maybe scanning, maybe crashed again but wasn't showing any GUI for me to know either way...
So I terminated it after 20 minutes and tried again. This time it didn't ask me about scanning so I ran "rescan changes" manually and after about 10-20 minutes more, it was finished.
Overall scan time something like half an hour to an hour in which I couldn't use Usine...

The Program window neither saved it's position nor size from the last time.

I then opened the first demo project and right away a console opened and showed me thousands of errors about an address violation. While this console continued to spit out error messages constantly like there's no tomorrow, I was able to press the fiddly ugly GUI knobs and started the first demo preset. It played back a single audio loop and sounded pretty distorted, although all my audio settings looked correct - I went through all of the preferences first ...

I then closed Usine Hollyhock 4 with a big sigh of relieve, deleted the folder and will forget about it once more.

Bitwig simply never crashes because of a plugin - it scans in the background and very fast, you can start working right away.
If a plugin should crash while working, you can simply restart the individual plugin since plugins run sandboxed - Bitwig does not crash from that either and audio keeps running...
And even if the audio engine crashes, the GUI is still there and you can just re-start the audio engine...
Oh and if you have Bitwig running already and want to install a plugin, it will see that too and make it available after seconds
It has a good and clear user interface that is (for me) a pleasure to look at and makes sense.
Of course it saves the position and size of the main window from the last time...

I bought my first Usine license 11 years ago and at the time stuff like that was supposed to be normal.
But it feels just the same as back then to me now.
I'm sure it's amazing if it works for you, for me it's too much pain to be worth it.

Cheers,

Tom

[David]

^^^
Wow—Thanks for the detailed report, Tom; and for saving me any wasted time trying it out yet again myself!

Re: max4bitwig, if you've got both Live Suite and Bitwig, I'd definitely explore max4Live INTO Bitwig. Since Logic is MY main DAW, I've done exactly that, swapping Logic for Bitwig, and as far as I've gone with it (MIDI only, MUCH simpler than trying to add audio, too, but more on that below), it works great, for what I need.

Here's a very detailed recent YT on hooking up VCV rack and Bitwig, also a very provocative plan! I'm willing to bet that swapping Live Suite for VCV and otherwise following the video would work just as well—which I acknowledge is NOT good enough for many, since it's based on the Mac's IAC MIDI driver, which is not fast enough for various syncing-required setups. But it's definitely OK with me, since I'm always just sending MIDI out from Live when using IAC, not also running Live clips or tracks, so if that sounds OK to you, it's worth trying for sure. There's many comments and replies on the YT page for the video about PC options…

(Also I've read that most free or cheapish audio links between apps, on the Mac anyway, aren't really fast or stable enough for audio to CV patching, but there's a longish old thread in the Reaktor forums about very happily sending audio-rate modulations from R to B.)

Hopefully Bitwig or some other dev will someday soon make all of this inter-app spaghetti-knitting dreaming an elegant and simple reality!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAxDrDPXtvA

[ThomasHelzle]

VCV comes with a bridge plugin, that allows to exchange Midi and Audio directly.
Isn't that more direct?

Cheers,

Tom

[killmaster]

VCV comes with a bridge plugin, that allows to exchange Midi and Audio directly.
Isn't that more direct?

Cheers,

Tom

I was using bridge recently and it still works but oddly I could find a downloadable version online anymore a couple months ago when I checked.

[WatchTheGuitar]

That video is annoying - it's a Mac only solution

[ThomasHelzle]

VCV comes with a bridge plugin, that allows to exchange Midi and Audio directly.
Isn't that more direct?

Cheers,

Tom

I was using bridge recently and it still works but oddly I could find a downloadable version online anymore a couple months ago when I checked.

I remember it being a bit fiddly and dependent on the order in which you started the apps, but on Windows, while Midi isn't a problem (I use LoopMidi), I do not know of a good audio routing tool like Blackhole on the Mac. ASIO in most cases is single-client.

But something else is important and missing from the video:
Bitwig also allows to work with CVs directly and output them as Audio (In and Out actually), so especially with modulation, that will be much smoother and faster than Midi.
Especially since all modulation in Bitwig is at audio rate anyway...

And there is the HW CV Instrument that outputs Pitch CV and Gate from Midi Clips (including auto-tune for hardware OSCs).

So yeah, on the mac it seems to be a dream-team.

Cheers,

Tom

[BluesMuse]

reMIDI 2 released. Free upgrade for v1 owners. PB has it for $19. Developer web site http://songwish.ca/index.html#/Support is very sparse, but there are Youtube demos.

[David]

reMIDI 2 released. Free upgrade for v1 owners. PB has it for $19. Developer web site http://songwish.ca/index.html#/Support is very sparse, but there are Youtube demos.

Cool! Thank you! reMIDI is one of my all-time fav, most fun, MIFI FX; can't wait to explore the new features.

[David]

RE VCV to Bitwig, I've been out of the loop for so long, and I'm not even yet set up to run any MIDI apps the way I was a year ago, so it's often hard for me to recall exact details and I can't easily check, but when I first got into VCV, I recall finding it very easy to send IAC MIDI out from it, or back into it from anywhere else, using a free utility device from VCV itself, which IIRC is also shown in that video. Is that the "bridge" you guys are referring to? It was plug'n'play, no video needed, but maybe just because Mac/IAC was already set up on my Mac.

But given all the alternate-solution replies to it, that video seems to prove at least one thing: Inter-app Audio and MIDI REALLY NEEDS A SIMPLE, ELEGANT UNIVERSAL SOLUTION!! Enough with the wet-spaghetti knitting!

[David]

And just to wrap up my posts about OpusModus, recently got this newsletter from them that I think gives a good idea about how it works and a glimpse of how detailed you can get with it. It's here:

https://opusmodus.com/sendy//w/h5gRgUfj ... 3c43892Uig

[ThomasHelzle]

No, the "VCV-Bridge" is/was a VST plugin from the VCV-devs you run in your DAW and it transports both Midi and Audio back and forth.
My version is from 11.24.2018, not sure when it was discontinued.
It's using the same VCV-devices as are shown in the Video, but instead of the IAC or Core Audio drivers (ASIO or Windows Midi on the PC) you select "Bridge" and a "Port" - up to 16 are available, 8 audio channels each and 16 Midi channels each.
Not too bad

But hopefully we will live to see VCV 2 come out which is supposed to be available as a VST.

And I fully agree, virtual audio and Midi transport is clumsy on any platform, best on the Mac probably, on Linux with Jack it can do a lot but audio on linux is it's own nightmare (at least for me) and on Windows, Midi is covered well but Audio somehow not really AFAIK.

Cheers,

Tom

[courtjestr]

Unfortunately for me, reMidi 2 hang every time I try to use it. reMidi 1 works fine. I have filed a bug report.

[WatchTheGuitar]

reMIDI 2 released. Free upgrade for v1 owners. PB has it for $19. Developer web site http://songwish.ca/index.html#/Support is very sparse, but there are Youtube demos.

This video that links ReMidi v 1, Scaler v 2 and Sonuscore The Orchestra Complete 2 is bonkers
https://youtu.be/5p0u2qVzuos