How Long Does Other DAWs Take To Save 20,000 Midi Items?

[jancivil]

It occurred to me that I can batch edit the midi velocity of those 20,000 drum patterns, to make it sound like, for example, Ringo Starr. All I have to do is examine a Beatles midi drum track and find the average midi velocity for the snare. I could do that for the kick and hi-hats too. The whole kit if I wanted to. I could then use those averages and batch edit my 20,000 midi items in REAPER.

This is better than any comedy show I could find, at least for one absolutely screamingly funny joke.

Sure, and good luck with that. It's magical thinking; based in you don't have any interest in learning how drums, Ringo's or anything actually work and so you just come up with this. Average the f**king velocity and you're done. Do it for everything! Sure!

First of all if you ever change snare drums, you might find that drum behaving differently at your 100 or whatever average - I'm just cracking up, I need to take a breath - you come away with. But even if it's the same kit every_single_time, you have no interest in what the drums are supposed to have to do with the music! Even if there's only three things, soft, medium, loud, there is a reason in the song for that! Why am I explaining this! This is insane.

I mean once I saw this

You better spend your time learning how musical choices are done, and why.

I said to myself, yeah, like that's ever going to happen. And then you illustrated it so brilliantly.


I'm sorry, but really. What we have here is you have no interest in the musicality of your drums. You just have these tactics of avoidance of that, of any and all of that. Perfect avoidance, you devise strategies to completely kid yourself it's all just that mechanical, you never imagined anything about what drumming is like in reality. Just average something from a single model and it's all the same. The dullness of this ideation, it really is beyond the pale.

No, I really wanted to just write this off and not stick my nose in but the hilarity of it was compelling and I'm just in a... something like I heard in a movie once, a radically honest mode today. f**k the dumb shit and just say it.

You're a nice guy, babble, but really someone has to tell it to you straight some day. Maybe not but that seems crueler.

[JoseC.]

The boy is clearly unwell.

[whyterabbyt]

So you audition 200 per song? How long does that take?

Not quite - 2000 is 10%.

doh!

[harryupbabble]

1 sec per save is indeed a bit long. My COBOL compiler is even at least 10x faster. In Java you would use the BufferedStreamWriter for exactly this type of performance boosts.

I once got a PowerShell script to combine a folder full of txt files into one, and later split it up again. Boy was it slow... My colleague had used regular Powershell features for writing files, which closed the output file also for each of the input files. Once I avoided that by using lower-level file operations, it was lightning fast again.

Let them Reaper boys check this out. I suspect they have their act together, but you never know...

PS learning to make your own patterns could be worthwhile

This is one kind of input that I was looking for. It's telling me that there might be ways that could make REAPER more efficient and therefore reduce that 5.5 hours of waiting time. Thanks very much.

At the moment I've no interest in making my own drum patterns since I find that drum midi generators are giving me results that I am pleased with. Sure, I have to edit and tweak the results a bit, but overall the process is waaaaaaaaaaaay faster, except for the file saving part, that is.

[harryupbabble]

I'm still unclear on what your exact process is.

You say the items are in the Project Bay. Are they also on tracks as media items? Because when you say you export them, what actions are you specifically taking? Saving from the Project Bay, you can only save the Project Bay itself. Are you doing File > Export Project MIDI? What settings are you using?

Yes, as far as I know, batch midi export in REAPER could only be done from the Project Bay.
On my computer, I do that by clicking the "Media Items" tab in the Project Bay, then selecting all the midi items, then I press the Ctrl + Alt keys and drag and drop the midi items to the chosen folder.

I batch import the 20,000 midi files in to one track in REAPER. Batch importing them in to 20,000 tracks is much much much more harder on the CPU, and probably harder to edit.

The "File > Export project MIDI" function won't do because the 20,000 midi items gets saved as one midi file. I want the 20,000 midi items to be saved as 20,000 midi files so that later I can just drag and drop them one by one in to REAPER to audition them.

[generaldiomedes]

SSD? Ramdisk?

[harryupbabble]

Life is short. I don't have time to master the drums nor the bass nor the guitar. I only have time for seemingly long replies, hahaha. I do it little by little and in the end it seems long. Anyways, I could always hire people to play my simple songs if my songs ever become good enough. Sure I'll need lots of cash for that but where there's a will there's a a way?

But half of the time I'm preoccupied with speed scrabble and so yeah life is short. But it's not like I'm trying to make complex music. It's the opposite of that. So I guess there's room for imperfection and hurriedness. And I like the punk ways of doing things fast. It's less time consuming and can still be powerful?

I'm more interested in the lyrics and the melody of the lyrics. After all that's really all that's memorable in the end? Okay that, and maybe some riffs? Sure the bass and drums and everything else could affect the composing of the lyrics and the melody of the lyrics but in the end it's the melody and the lyrics that most buskers play? Some people are not interested in what buskers play but I am. It's amazing that some buskers still play Greensleeves after 4 centuries?

I do make edits to make "my" drum patterns to sound normal. For example, I want the open hi-hats to not ring out abnormally long. And I want my drum velocities to not be flat-lined (default velocity of the 20,000 midi drum patterns is 100). On the other hand, I don't want my drum patterns to sound "too normal". I want randomness.

Okay so maybe my method of creating music is basically "Does that sound good? Yes it does, keep that. No it doesn't, hide or delete that." I use my ears. There must be a billion ways to create music. It's all good? Just as long as something is created why does the creation method matter?

Music is subjective so whatever gets created could be interesting to someone else besides the creator? I'm still surprised that there are people that can't stand the Sex Pistols. Okay not really, I'm not that surprised. But I was happily surprised to find out much later that Jimmy Page thinks that the Sex Pistols music is "excellent". Didn't the Sex Pistols owe it's existence to the fact that most of the band members in the Sex Pistols can't stand "bloat rock" like Led Zeppelin and many other bands at the time were?

Anyways... no one has tested the file saving speed of DAWs yet? Bummer. What are bench-markers doing in terms of that? Warming the bench? Hahaha, I'm kidding.

Aaargghh, I gotta go, my allotted time has expired. Be back later gambinos, bambinos, albinos, and who nose. Okay bye.

[Unaspected]

It's telling me that there might be ways that could make REAPER more efficient and therefore reduce that 5.5 hours of waiting time.

Yes. There are. As whyterabbyt already pointed out: You are the reason this is taking 5.5 hours!

Life is short. I don't have time to master the drums nor the bass nor the guitar.

You could easily choose to master one of those instruments in a lifetime, if you wanted. But you don't have to master drums to learn how to program them to sound convincing - you just have to be able to imagine yourself playing to work out what is physically possible. Getting a little experience playing a real drum kit can help - plus, drumming is a lot of fun.

Aaargghh, I gotta go, my allotted time has expired. Be back later gambinos, bambinos, albinos, and who nose. Okay bye.

Allotted time?

Who is making you do these things? Are you being held against your will?

[thecontrolcentre]

Life is short. I don't have time to master the drums nor the bass nor the guitar. I only have time for seemingly long replies, hahaha.

Life is not short. You have all the time in the world. Its your choice what you actually do with it.

[baaz]

WOW...

[baaz]

why not just use a batch renamer to rename all of them from 1 to 20k(once only) then use some random number generator thingie to select a few(5?10?) in every project.

[JoseC.]

As I said above, the boy is not well, but besides that, it has always fascinated me what lengths go some people in order to avoid actually learning a little music skills. It is much easier learning to program drums than inventing a convoluted procedure that is expected to generate (almost randomly, no less!!) a rhythm that goes with a given melody. Why not try to also generate 20,000 random counterpoint lines, too?

[baaz]

As I said above, the boy is not well, but besides that, it has always fascinated me what lengths go some people in order to avoid actually learning a little music skills. It is much easier learning to program drums than inventing a convoluted procedure that is expected to generate (almost randomly, no less!!) a rhythm that goes with a given melody. Why not try to also generate 20,000 random counterpoint lines, too?

I guess they don't know what they're missing out, learning music skills is the most fun part of the music making process . throwing random MIDI files around doesn't sound like fun at all

[jancivil]

Life is short. I don't have time to master the drums nor the bass nor the guitar.

Stick with speed scrabble, which is great use of your time, apparently. I'm not kidding.

[jancivil]

As I said above, the boy is not well, but besides that, it has always fascinated me what lengths go some people in order to avoid actually learning a little music skills. It is much easier learning to program drums than inventing a convoluted procedure that is expected to generate (almost randomly, no less!!) a rhythm that goes with a given melody. Why not try to also generate 20,000 random counterpoint lines, too?

I guess they don't know what they're missing out, learning music skills is the most fun part of the music making process . throwing random MIDI files around doesn't sound like fun at all

THIS

Literally no one has demanded you 'master the drums'. Show a little bit of interest in music? I mean you just revealed you have NONE. Nah, just dick around and do bullshit. Wonder if it's this side of the other side of your brain that tells you have no interest, indefinitely. You created a problem to solve which appears to take up gobs of time, but now you're talking about no time for music. You never considered there were musical problems to solve but you kidded yourself it would be, snap!, like that by 'averaging' somebody else's MIDI of a Ringo Starr part.
(rather than, you know, studying their MIDI and seeing if there's something there; no, just average the thing and you're done.)
I have never seen a more clueless notion in my life. And you're just going to continue to double down that this seems like the thing to do, aren't you.

If someone will do the actual concrete work for you, such as your experiences at teh Cockos forum, you'll look at it. If someone challenges your ideas of things, you know better. It's kind of obnoxious after seeing this over, and over again.