KVR Audio

fmr · Post by **fmr** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 11:39 am

whyterabbyt wrote:
harryupbabble wrote:I may never audition nor use 90 percent of them..
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.
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The hard to accept part is that REAPER is tying up my computer for over 5.5 hours whenever I make edits on the 20,000 midi items and have to batch export them.
what sort of dumbass makes 18,000 edits to MIDI items he'll never use, then complains about how long it takes to save them.

PEBKAC.

I hate to have to agree with whyterabbyt. But this time, I really have to

Like the reply you had regarding the painter and the colours example you even gave yourself, a musician have a palette of "basic colours" (in this case, the different instruments of the drum kit), and then create his/her own "colors".

How would choose between 20.000 patterns, and make them work together anyway? You would be there forever (or would simply accept any random choice an algorithm would make for you - but in that case, you would never know if the next pick would be better... and so on).

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

harryupbabble · Post by **harryupbabble** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 2:59 pm

Regarding this quote of mine "I may never audition nor use 90 percent of them."

This is only per song. The same 20,000 midi items could be used for other songs, over and over. And I could things like delete or hide previously used midi items.

Regarding the 20,000 colours analogy, sure a painter might only need 8-12 primary colours and the painter can combine those colours to get 20,000 colours or whatever the maximum combination is but if you take away one of the colours and only have 11 colours to work with then suddenly the painter don't have access to the maximum combinations anymore.

If you reduce that 12 colours to one colour, let's say black, the painter is reduced to making sketches? That may be okay to some people but I'd rather have access to the full spectrum. Sure, 20,000 midi drum patterns is nowhere near the full spectrum but I'd rather have that than say 400 midi drum patterns.

My current method is working for me. What else do I need? I'll abandon it when I get tired of the results. But so far, I am liking the results.

I guess no one might do the test and this thread might be futile, but hey I had to try. Sometimes someone actually has the answer. Be back in about 8 hours just in case someone is actually focused on finding out the file saving speed of DAWs. I hope that ShwnG is wrong about other DAWs possibly not having the capability to batch export 20,000 midi items. Okey dokey, bye for now.

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 3:30 pm

harryupbabble wrote:Regarding this quote of mine "I may never audition nor use 90 percent of them."

This is only per song. The same 20,000 midi items could be used for other songs, over and over.

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

Meanwhile for some godforsaken reason you still decide to batch-process all of them at once, instead of as you audition them? If it takes 5 and a half hours to process 20,000, they're taking a second each to process. What difference would an extra second matter per auditioning each one. Batching them all is just asinine.

And what the hell would you even be doing to them?

PEBKAC doubled down on.

dermichl · Post by **dermichl** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 4:04 pm

harryupbabble wrote:...whenever I make edits on the 20,000 midi items and have to batch export them.

I'm not even sure if i did 20.000 edits in total to all midi items i ever used until this very day!

Zexila · Post by **Zexila** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 4:24 pm

Unaspected · Post by **Unaspected** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 4:31 pm

This is incredible.

If not troll then gremlin.

Hink · Post by **Hink** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:01 pm

whyterabbyt wrote:
harryupbabble wrote:Regarding this quote of mine "I may never audition nor use 90 percent of them."

This is only per song. The same 20,000 midi items could be used for other songs, over and over.
So you audition 200 per song? How long does that take?

Meanwhile for some godforsaken reason you still decide to batch-process all of them at once, instead of as you audition them? If it takes 5 and a half hours to process 20,000, they're taking a second each to process. What difference would an extra second matter per auditioning each one. Batching them all is just asinine.

And what the hell would you even be doing to them?

PEBKAC doubled down on.

my guess, and I could be wrong, is that he imports entire drum midi flies of songs then slices them up by bars and saves them to audition later.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 5:07 pm

Reaper is the Chuck Norris of DAW's. It should batch export 2 billion MIDI items a second.

enroe · Post by **enroe** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 8:50 pm

chk071 wrote:Reaper is the Chuck Norris of DAW's. It should batch export 2 billion MIDI items a second.

... and also insert 20,000 tracks at once applying 20,000
plugins to each track!

fmr · Post by **fmr** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 9:40 pm

The silly season is officially open

jabe · Post by **jabe** » Mon Jul 30, 2018 11:41 pm

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

Not quite - 2000 is 10%.

harryupbabble · Post by **harryupbabble** » Tue Jul 31, 2018 12:54 am

Holey moley. I don't make edits on the 20,000 midi items every time I make a song!

As of now I'm done editing them. Here are the edits that I've done on them in the past:

1. Delete all the tom toms, also delete all the crash cymbals. Reaper was fast in terms of those batch editing. About two minutes if I recall correctly.

2. About a week after that, I noticed that some closed hi-hats were occupying the same beat as the opened hi-hats so I needed to delete those closed hi-hats... but it turned out someone at the REAPER forum was able to create a script that deals with that problem.

3. About another week after that, I noticed that some opened hi-hats were not being resolved by closed hi-hats, meaning that some opened hi-hats are ringing out abnormally long because there is no closed hi-hats to stop the ringing so I needed to insert closed hi-hats immediately following the opened hi-hats. I couldn't find a way to batch insert close hi-hats using REAPER so I used an ancient software named Midi Disassembler to do the job. But Midi Assembler has several problems, like it could only handle ONE midi file that is at maximum 10,000 bars or measures long. And it required knowledge of regular expressions and block-text-editing, which I had to learn had I not found another ancient software that specializes in batch "find and replace" operations that is more automatic compared to what typical text editors have.

so, as of now I'm done with the edits but only temporarily. 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.

When I am auditioning the drum patterns, I use a keyboard and mouse recorder to deal with the repetitiveness.

I don't know what other types of edits I will encounter in the future but if waiting 5.5 hours can be shrunk why not do that rather than just settling for inefficiency? But hey if there is no solution, I'm still super grateful to REAPER and I intend to buy it when version 6.0 arrives.

There is bench-marking for cars, for lawn-mowers, for computers, for washing machines, for a lot of things.
So there might be at least one for DAWs too and if there isn't, why isn't there? I was just curious.

And no Hink, I don't use midi drum patterns from existing songs... they are not random enough rhythm-wise. Plus, it's probably illegal. I do use several midi drum pattern generators. The ones I use are really just randomizers made specially for drums. And they are all freeware. Gradywerks has one for free.

Speaking of "free"... well, close to free at least, I'm off to continue installing tons of Native Instruments stuff. What a treasure trove. 30-minute demos. Quite usable. Okay then, adios amigos/gas. G'night.

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:06 am

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

Aloysius · Post by **Aloysius** » Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:14 am

If it takes more than a year, you've got a problem.

yellowmix · Post by **yellowmix** » Tue Jul 31, 2018 6:43 am

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?

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