ADOBE AUDITION: Is It Possible to Sync another DAW to run MIDI?

[tommyzai]

Is It Possible to Sync another DAW-like software to Adobe Audition to run MIDI?

I have a powerful MIDI sequencer or two, e.g., Numerology by Five12, but they do not have robust audio capabilities. I'm wondering if these sequencers could be synched to a "DAW" that only has audio . . . a pairing that would result in both audio and MIDI.

Any thoughts? I realize I can simply use a standard DAW to do both, but looking into outside-the-box recording/workflow options.

[fairlyclose]

You could have a look at Blue Cat Connector https://www.bluecataudio.com/Products/P ... Connector/
also doesn't Mac have an audio/midi connection thing included? or something like this https://audeonic.com/midifire/

[David W]

Whilst fairlyclose makes some interesting suggestions, any attempt to use Audition alongside a MIDI and/or VSTi setup seems to be signing yourself up for a world of pain. As you appear to know, Audition does not have MIDI and VSTi capabilities. More fundamentally for trying to slave an external setup to Audition, Audition does not support any sort of synchronisation protocol, such as Ableton Link, MTC or similar. Support for the now obsolescent ReWire protocol was dropped from Audition many years ago. The only form of synchronisation I can think is possible is using SMPTE timecode in an audio track in Audition, with a SMPTE to MTC converter driving the MIDI side of things.

Adobe clearly sees Audition as primarily an audio editing product, including audio editing for video projects that go beyond the capabilities of the audio features in Premiere Pro.


I would use another DAW for digital music projects. Cakewalk by BandLab is free and would do the job if you are a Windows user. Alternatives include Reaper (only US$60 if you meet the requirements for the discounted licence) or perhaps the lowest retail edition of something like Cubase. Indeed, it sounds like you may already own at least one DAW other than Audition, in which case I am curious why you want to use Audition for MIDI-based projects?

I have Audition on my computers purely because it integrates well with the rest of the Adobe Creative Cloud. My main DAW is Nuendo.

[tommyzai]

David, thank you for taking the time to provide a detailed response. Also, shout out to fairlyclose. I have several projects going . . . educational and personal and professional. In one of the projects, I'd really like to simplify it all and simply record audio . . . no MIDI. Yet, I am deep in on soft synths, and I think my girl and/or the school would frown upon me buying a hardware synth. I realize I could use one of the DAWs I have and simply ignore/not use the MIDI capabilities or set up busses to instantly transform MIDI to audio.

I was trying to force a limitation . . . simulate a pure audio recording enviro, which I still might do . . . I have an old MacBook that could be transformed into a synth . . . send audio out the headphone jack and into the other computer. The question is . . . is all of this worth it? I would love to have a self-imposed restriction, if possible . . . sometimes fascinating things happen that way. As far as Audition, it's also a question of how it's time-stretching and other features stack up against standard DAWs.

[fairlyclose]

David, thank you for taking the time to provide a detailed response. Also, shout out to fairlyclose. I have several projects going . . . educational and personal and professional. In one of the projects, I'd really like to simplify it all and simply record audio . . . no MIDI. Yet, I am deep in on soft synths, and I think my girl and/or the school would frown upon me buying a hardware synth. I realize I could use one of the DAWs I have and simply ignore/not use the MIDI capabilities or set up busses to instantly transform MIDI to audio.

I was trying to force a limitation . . . simulate a pure audio recording enviro, which I still might do . . . I have an old MacBook that could be transformed into a synth . . . send audio out the headphone jack and into the other computer. The question is . . . is all of this worth it? I would love to have a self-imposed restriction, if possible . . . sometimes fascinating things happen that way. As far as Audition, it's also a question of how it's time-stretching and other features stack up against standard DAWs.

I don't think you will get much better time stretching than zplane offer, and lots of DAWs use that one I think. Certainly Reaper does. I use DaVinci Resolve for video editing and it has excellent audio capabilities, including stretching. And is free for most of the functionality - probably the best free deal in audio and video I have ever seen.
I still use an audio editor tho - Izotope RX - but that is more for noise reduction and detailed error correction.
Something Reaper has that is nice is direct recording to disc of whatever is being played - maybe all the DAWs have that - but as a restriction, it is refreshing to not be assembling and composing but instead be recording live to disc - this includes things like looping audio and tweaking multiple fx live to disc. keep in mind that doing this lots of times gives you a bunch of audio tracks that are easy to sync and assemble into a finished track

[tommyzai]

Much appreciation for all comments and suggestions. For years, I've been trying to keep it simple, yet powerful, but alas . . . I spend countless hours researching, demoing, reviewing, posting, etc . . . and not much music. ;-0

[Shreyash123]

It has restrictions but can be done

[SamDi]

Sorry, sometimes it is hard to get the intention of such things. I mean - if your intention is just to make music - why not just get a proper mighty DAW instead of messing around with all these PITA solutions? Numerology, Five 12? Never heard, but when I go on their website and see, that they even don't get it managed to install a proper working https-website I can not imagine that this does not lead to a PITA solution. Ist it price? I guess not, because neither Numerology nor Audition is really low priced.

So if I were you, I would go with one of the mainstream solutions and if you want then apply a restriction / out-of the-box-approach to boost creativity you still have many options as:

-use only stock plugins
-use only one synth for the whole track (like One Synth Challenge)
-use only (own recorded) samples
-apply some generative/probability stuff
-limit to 8/16/.. tracks
-whatever

OK, sometimes it seems cool to noodle and mess around - but it's seldom really productive. I once bought a used mixer belonging to ProTools. I thought, getting ProTools would be cool, because it was industry standard and then was pretty disappointed, because MIDI capabilities were so bad compared to Cubase. Then I tried to build up a 2 computer solution, with the first holding Cubase, VST-plugins, the Creamware Pulsar card I had and this connected to external MIDI-HW. The second computer should hold ProTools with connected Mixer and all the Audio should go in via 16 channels there. It never was cool... (and I recorded no one single track and brought to end)

Long things short: I would not put crazyness on the infrastructure/tools but rather on the workflow then...

[tommyzai]

So if I were you, I would go with one of the mainstream solutions and if you want then apply a restriction / out-of the-box-approach to boost creativity . . . Long things short: I would not put crazyness on the infrastructure/tools but rather on the workflow then...

You make some valid points about workflow. I was hoping that there was a simply way to set this up, but it's getting overly complex, and that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. If Audition had sync to MIDI, it would be very doable. Alas, it does not!