41–50 of 93 posts
Nice idea, but not useful unless each DAW manufacturer supports the format. And there are a lot of DAWs.
It would be nice if Bitwig would support existing plug-ins formats like AU.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't need to convert to frequency, you can use fractional MIDI pitch values. E.g. 60.5 would be a quarter tone above middle C. In fact, the VST2 and VST3 SDKs support microtonal offsets per note event (measured in cent). Unfortunately, only few plugins and hosts support it.
I mean, you could, but that would get really gross when implementing certain scales that are nowhere similar to the MIDI tuning (like working out the fractions for a 13-note scale)
This doesn't need to be a trivially human-readable format, but I think maybe it would be nice to allow for multiple pitch representations: floating point frequency, floating point fractions of a semitone in any arbitrary EDO, fractional frequency as used in just intonation, etc..
You could also allow for annotations, like maybe a note pitch is represented as "63.86" in 12-EDO, but it's not just some weird in-between note, it's actually the E that's 5/4 above C, so the file could have an annotation that says that's what the note actually means in this context.
One thing I'd like to see is native support for some notion of pitch other than 12-tone equal temperament. Looking at their example, I see this: ...which looks like it's basically just a representation of the underlying midi. One way they could represent other pitches is for "key" to allow a floating point value rather than an integer. So, for instance, 65.5 would be a quarter-tone (50 cents) above note 65. According…
This is built into MIDI 2, fwiw
I think for most use cases, MPE is actually simpler. (Also it's probably supported by more instruments and synths at this point.)
All the more reason to include microtuning as a supported feature in this new format.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this layer of note information, fact is the data will be either sent to a MIDI device or a plugin as a MIDI event, so you might as well keep it in the native format and not convert to a frequency.
I feel like we're only months/years away from software and file formats being obsolete for this for this sort of thing, and instead songs are composed by humming a tune to ChatGPT and have it add all the other instruments, some nice vocals, and output the MP3. If you want to make changes, you give ChatGPT the MP3 file and say "switch out the trumpet for a piano and make the singer a guy".
It would be nice if Bitwig would support existing plug-ins formats like AU.
Why would they want to support AU? The only reason to use AU is Logic. Everything else (Protools excepted) supports VST, and all the plugin devs release in VST and AU, so it would be a waste of time. Bitwig is putting their time into CLAP, and for good reason. It's cross-platform, much easier to develop against, and much more advanced that all the alternatives. Even Avid has shown interest in CLAP. So has Image Line.…
One thing I'd like to see is native support for some notion of pitch other than 12-tone equal temperament. Looking at their example, I see this: ...which looks like it's basically just a representation of the underlying midi. One way they could represent other pitches is for "key" to allow a floating point value rather than an integer. So, for instance, 65.5 would be a quarter-tone (50 cents) above note 65. According…
I've played around with trying to generate a schema file from a project file with mixed results.
I very much wish Ableton would support this format or at least publish their schema somewhere so translation could be done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is built into MIDI 2, fwiw
Yeah, MIDI 2.0 has per-note pitch bend. They kept with 7 bits for note numbers, though, which is kind of inconvenient. If you have an instrument with more than 128 keys, you have to do a kind of dynamic allocation thing where you find the nearest unused key and bend it to pitch. I think for most use cases, MPE is actually simpler. (Also it's probably supported by more instruments and synths at this point.) All the mo…
MPE is a super limited hack, I doubt anyone is going to use it once MIDI 2 becomes available in synths (it's a future technology, fwiw - it will be a year or two before you can buy any controller that uses it)