Chainer

Chainer is going to single-handedly keep me from losing my mind. It was just what I was looking for. Making music up until now has been just way too hard.

I'm using Chainer to play VSTis from Harmony Assistant (scoring program) so I can hear what I'm doing in the instruments I intend to use. I'm happy to report the waves record out flawlessly from Chainer through Sonic Foundry's Virtual Midi Router. I can do precisely what I want to do: Get dry audio waves out of HA without having to export to midi, revise the midi files to fix what didn't export perfectly, jump through hoops to try to sync everything, have all these files littering up my system, and yadayadayada. Of course, if I want to, Chainer will allow me to add effects as well at this stage.

The only thing is I have to close Chainer before Cool Edit will recognize the wave file; probably an ASIO conflict thing. Also, and this is specific to HA, I cannot mix digital and midi-out instruments and play them in real time; I have to shape and render out HA's Goldbase instruments first, then relate all the instruments to the midi out for Chainer to render the non-HA instruments. This is no biggie compared to what I was having to do before.

I've crashed Chainer once when I was just loading everything but the kitchen sink and changing a ton of settings while playing it. I haven't yet figured out how to get the panning controllers from HA to be read by Chainer, and it's only routing out to the left channel of one of my Mia virtual outs; not sure but this may be a limitation of the demo. I certainly plan to buy this excellent program. CPU usage is barebones minimal, and all my VSTis load VERY quickly...even SampleTank! Chainer is an awesome piece of work!

An addendum: When you load a VSTi into a slot, you need to set the proper transmission value (from the pulldown arrow to the left of the VSTi name). It defaults to Channel 1, which could lead to your thinking it doesn't work right.Read Review