David Baay

A quote from my "MIDI Comping Challenge" post back in 2013 on the old forum (from a super-secret members-only subforum [wink, wink, nod, nod]): "Ultimately, though, I think the answer is that you just can't (and don't need to) comp MIDI in the same way that you comp audio, and that the classic methods of editing MIDI - fixing bad pitches, velocities, start times and durations directly and selectively copy-pasting where needed - are likely to work better in most cases. But since the tool exists, and I'm a MIDI guy, I thought I should give it a go. Maybe over time it can become smart enough to work as seamlessly and intuitively as audio comping."

I do everything in sound-on-sound mode with manual lane-muting as needed. I also seldom use loop recording as it can also be unsuitable for MIDI recording because if you hit a note a hair early at the end of one take instead of the beginning of the next, it gets truncated. Another place where a little AI is needed.

I've answered this question in the past, but maybe not for you. The assumption when comp recording is that a new take is intended to replace some or all of the previous takes in that that were presumably inferior in that section, so it automatically makes splits in all the other clips and mutes them. If you subequently decide that one of the earlier takes is in fact superior in that section, one click promotes that other clip. If only one part of it is better than some previous clip, you can always swipe with the Comp tool to break up the section further and promote the appropriate clips for each. The automatic splits are just intended to facilitate the work of replacing not-so-good material with better material. A long time ago, not too long after comping and comp-recording was implemented, I posted a "Take the MIDI Comping Challenge" demo project that had a set of raw takes with no comping and a comped set in another track showing the goal. That goal was achievable only by an excrutiatingly complicated series of comping moves, but was easy to obtain by manually editing MIDI the old-fashioned way. One of the Devs chimed in confirming my conclusion that the Comping workflow was not intended for MIDI and was generally not suited to it in many cases. As for swiping (or Ctrl-clicking selected clips) with the Comp tool to heal the splits, my recollection was that this would work for MIDI if you had Non-Destructive MIDI Editing enabled so that the clips are abutting. If NDME wasn't enabled, the empty space between notes would be cropped away so the clip boundaries were no longer abutting and couldn't be healed. That said, I just checked this and it already wasn't workng in Platinum 17.10 so either it never worked and my memory is faulty, or it got broken way back. I wouldn't have noticed because I never try to Comp MIDI. 😜 EDIT: MIDI comp split healing worked in X3. IIRC, that's when comping was implemented.

Cool. Glad to help. FWIW Sonar now has a function to Backup/Restore Settings that basically includes all of Preferences.

Right-clicking, selecting Move or Copy and specifying a destination track is at least two clicks as well. This is potentially only marginally more efficient and not worth crowding the context menu with more options in my view.

Make sure you have 'Use ASIO Reported Latency' checked under Record Latency Adjustment in Preferences> Audio Sync and Caching. This corrects for Input Latency automatically and should generally be enabled all the time as it is by default. usually a small Manual Offset it also needed to get sample accurate compensation, but you're not likely to hear that small error easily. Even missing the ASIO Repoted latency adjustment would cause a lot less than half-second delay which makes me think some plugin delay is involved. EDIT: Your screenshot suggests you're using WDM driver mode or maybe even WASAPI, try switching to ASIO under Preferences > Audio > Playback and Recording.

Not seeing a problem with the demo VST3 I installed relatively recently - v 1.5.17 build 5324.

Or select the clip, use whateve shortcut you have bound to set Now=From (if you don't, bind one; it's indispensible), focus the target track and Ctrl+C, V or Ctrl+X, V as needed.

Are you using an outboard ASIO interface? These often have a physical Direct Monitor button but sometimes it can be in a mixer/console app included with the interface. If you're using onboard audio it would be in the settings if supported. If the delay is actually a full half-second, that suggests a PDC -inducing pluging might also be involved. I see in your screenshot that you have some aux tracks which may be involved. On re-reading, I'm a little unclear what this double-negative construction is saying, but I think I was right to interpret it as "Until I disable Input Echo"...?

Hmmm.... okay. A couple of things: I see now you're talking about Region Muting clips (a.k.a. Mute by Time) in the TV as opposed to muting notes individually in PRV mode of the TV or muting whole clips. But that doesn't really change things. The bottom line is that clip-muting (whether whole clips or regions) and note-muting are two different methods of muting MIDI and they are not mutually exlusive. If you mute a note(s) both ways, you have to unmute it both ways to have it become fully visible and audible. I think that explains your 'unexpected' cases (EDIT: other than the 'hard to see outline' issue which I agree needs to be addressed). You're expecting the two methods to use the same mechanism and to display the same, and they're not by design.

Comping and Comp-recording is really not suited to MIDI because you can't split overlapping MIDI clips and have the start of one note cross-fade into the end of another smoothly as they would with audio. The truncation is inevitable in the absence of some fancy AI to preserve note durations across split points and glue notes that are on the same pitch. With MIDI you really just need to record sound-on-sound and do the editing manually. Even with audio if you split a note in one lane that isn't in the other lane, you're going to get some truncation. Comp-split and punch points need to be chosen to avoid this. I should add that nothing is really being lost as Comping is all done by slip-editing. If you heal the splits or move them to reveal the MIDI that's been cropped out of existence, you'll find it's all still there.

Likely your interface has Direct Monitoring engaged so you're hearing both the direct signal and the slightly delayed input-monitored signal from CbB due to interface latency. You just need to disable one or the other. If you aren't monitoring with track FX, you might as well stick with the Direct Monitoring through the interface.

It's most probable you've added some plugin that has a big look-ahead buffer requiring Pluding Delay Compensation. If it isn't on the track you're recording or on a bus in its path the output, you can enable the PDC [Override] button in the Mix module to temporarily override delay compensation on Input Monitored tracks. Otherwise, if it is in the path of that track, you'll have to disable or remove the plugin. BTW Sonar has a feature not available in CbB that allows you to hover over active plugins to see how much delay they're adding, if any - very handy.

@Scott C. Stahl Yesterday, I tried loading the project I had resaved from CbB wth a couple changes (including unlocking screenset 1 so I could save layout changes) into Sonar. It was still hanging on "Loading tracks and clips..." , but I walked away without killing it, got busy with other things, and discovered this morning that it had finished loading successfully at some point. I have no idea how long it took but, as Sasor's post suggests, it does seem to be more of a load-time issue than an actual load-failure. With that understanding, I saved a version with all the audio clips deleted, and found that it loaded promptly. Interestingly, just Archiving tracks was not sufficient. It sounds like msmcleod has this on the run already, but I might experiment with more selectively deleting clips in certain tracks or bouncing/freezing their edits (especially Melodyne) to see if I narrow down the specific source of the trouble. Of course this is all happening with 'dummy' flatline audio replacing the actual audio files, but that doesn't seem to have any bearing.

Pretty sure I have many projects in that state, and have not noticed any issue with CbB/Sonar persistieng the lane-solo state. Possibly this is related to whether you're configured to have new takes on top, as I am...? As for Staff View, given all its limitations and odditiies, I would never have thought to try getting it to deal with multiple lanes though I suppose it should. I usually create dedicated "for Notation" tracks (with left- an right-hand piano parts separated for the Grand Staff since a single split point doesn't usually cut it) that I hard-quantize with manually 'filled' durations so I'm less dependent on Sonar's display options to get the notation to appear half-way correct.

There's no evidence this issue is related to yours or that there's a global issue with opening old projects in Sonar. As you know, I have hundreds of projects going back to Cakewalk for DOS 2.0, and I've had trouble with only one that had empty Prochannels, similar, but not identical, to the one that first gave you trouble. And that particular issue was fixed before the first full public release. If you're having trouble with more projects, they likely all have some particular thing in common that needs to be specifically investigated. After so many years on the forum, and helping other resolve problems, you should know better than to say "this is exactly what is happening to me" on the basis of superficially similar symptoms (crash on load), when the root cause isn't yet known in either case.

That's interesting. Suggests it might be some sort of race condition that has a different outcome on different systems. I'll give it a whirl on my main DAW that's closer to your spec: i7 6700k with Win10 vs. my laptop that runs an 11800H CPU with Win11.

@sjoens I suggest we keep the discussion about the mechanics and appearance muting clips and notes in the dedicated thread you started rather than complicating this one that's more about how to audibly mute/solo whole drum parts by note number and control what gets bounced/exported than how muted clips and notes are displayed.

That's because clip muting and note muting are two different mechanisms. Clearly since clips are not accessible from the PRV, they cannot be unmuted from the PRV, but notes are accessible from the TV. I suspect this has to do with the various possible combinations of muting, selection, PRV visibility and PRV focus. You'll need to give a very specific example that specifies all these elements to demonstrate whether there's an actual issue or it just isn't working as you would expect/prefer. A demo project with specific config settings and steps to reproduce a problematic would be helpful. I'm not saying there isn't room for improvement of the design logic and presentation, but so far I haven't seen anything described that is clearly not working as designed other than the poor visibility of muted notes and possibly the conditions under which you can and can't use Alt+right-click to mute notes. EDIT: I should add that there isn't much point in dicussing these behaviors with reference to CbB as its development is largely frozen. But to the extent that Sonar works and looks the same, I'm happy to help figure out whether there's something that actually needs to be fixed.

In both CbB and Sonar with the Mercury [Classic] theme, they turn medium gray in both views when selected and white when de-selected. It's true, the outlines of de-selected, muted notes in the PRV are nearly invisible in Sonar. They were just slightly bolder/darker in CbB and more visible. And I seem to recall, they were clearer in earlier versions, but that may just have been due to my younger eyes seeing better or lower monitor resolution using fatter pixels. This must be theme--dependent. In Mercury [Classic] notes are darker when selected.

No. Actually, I created the project from another experimental one that had all the notes of a short piano piece in separate tracks by pitch. I dragged those clips to lanes of a track one by one, starting with the track that already had the lowest notes in T1. I think it defaults to drawing in T2 because that clip has the starting note at 1:01:000 and all the other clips start later.

Glad to help. Do you still have CbB installed? The project hangs Sonar, but opened successfully in CbB for me. I closed the Console view, minimized all the Old Jim Bass tracks that had oddly maximized heights and re-saved it, but Sonar still hangs. I can play around with it some more tomorrow and see if I get it to behave, but if you have CbB, you might be able to resolve it yourself. I would start by stripping out anything you're not actually using in the current project (like all those bass tracks with output set to None). Whatever the cause, I hope the Bakers will take a look at it and determine why Sonar is having a problem with it that CbB doesn't.

I don't see how that works once you have all the lanes populated and want to add more notes to some lane. For example, I have a test project with 10 populated lanes that always puts new notes into T2 when you draw in the PRV. But I found my own workaround: Lock Data on the clips in all the lanes, leaving only one unlocked, and that's where new data will go.

Share the project? If it'll open for me or someone else, we might be able to save a copy that works on your system. If it doesn't open for anyone that'll confirm a fix is needed from the Bakers.

Apply an appropriate Drum Map to the output of the MIDI track and you will be able to mute/solo individual kit pieces as well as having them named in the PRV's drum pane.