Billy,

What MIDI effects are you thinking of? Soft Synth? MIDI is basically a way of controlling "other things," isn't it? Otherwise, you'd just use audio plugins.

I'm not trying to be rhetorical, I just don't quite understand what you're trying to do. Any MIDI effects I've ever used have always effected the MIDI data -- which was controlling a sound source -- and not any waves directly.

Of course, I'm cerainly no expert. Maybe there IS a way for MIDI commands to effect waves...

Sorry, I guess I wasn't that clear.

Take Two:

Years ago, like maybe 8-10, I had a application or two, long forgot what they were called but they were similar to Vegas in that they worked on a track basis. You could bring a wav in on one track with MIDI sound effects generated by a software synthizer on other tracks. You were presented with a menu choice and you just picked horn1, horn 2 or regular organ, pipe organ, whatever you liked the sound of and it instantly changed the song to sound like what you picked. The cool thing was since it was track based you could add multiple musical instruements.

What I don't remember is if that was all part of the application or something that just tapped into Windows. Was probably back in Windows 95 days.

Anyhow what I'm trying to ask is how to you add say the synthized sound of a tuba or a horn altering the original wav then merging it out into a format like WAV or MP3 so I can bring it into Vegas afterwards?

Billyboy,
I've done this for everything from rehearsal tapes to performance tracks.

Best solution in the low price range is Cakewalk Home Studio. For $89, you get unlimitied MIDI and Audio tracks, mixing and effects capabilities, and beat mapping if you need it.

Software synth latency can be a b**ch unless you have a higher end audio solution, so I keep a Soundblaster in the machine because its hardware synth has realtime response.

hth,
Mark

Billy,

A company called PG Music makes a wav/MIDI sequencer called PowerTraks Pro that might be the most inexpensive solution. $49. I started with this software years ago before moving to Cakewalk.

http://www.pgmusic.com/powertracks.htm

Hey BB,
Either of the last 2 suggestions are good advice but do you realize before you can hear these patches (instruments) you'll have to enter in data via a MIDI keyboard or load a previously written MIDI file? I got a feeling you do but...
Randy

I believe there's a program called FruityLoops, about $80, which will let you use a keyboard to create MIDI sounds in a set rhythm. I think it's a Steinberg product. On the verge of buying it myself.

That would have been Cakewalk Home back then, and now, it would be Sonar Pro, or Cakewalk Studio

Cakewalk for sure if you ask me..
Take the .wav file, add midi in another track (you DO have to put the notes in BB, wav sounds don't convert to midi well) and then:

Play the midi and record it to wav. Then make a good mix and render as 1 wav file.

Good luck.. especially with recreating the parts in midi (hope you have good ears - or maybe you can read guitar tabs, that might help)

mark

If you are happy with the MIDI file as it is you can play it and at the same time (normally) record using the audio recorder and it will record the MIDI file into WAVE for free....
If you want any midi's I have hundreds, I have collected from newsgroups of the years give me a call...

My .02...

If you're gonna go Cakewalk (highly recommended...), Go Sonar. You'll pay more up front, but if you really want uninhibited MIDI/wave support & mixability, this is the app. Sonar is the only non-Sony app I use, and it is a superior multi-track that supports wave and MIDI. Not as intuitive as Sony apps, but definitely worth the time learning.

Which brings us to an interesting question -- why did SoFo/Sony decide to implement MIDI into Acid instead of Vegas?

Thanks for all the suggestons guys.

That is a little curious, how come MIDI isn't at least supported as an import into Vegas?

BillyBoy,
I think a big point has been missed here.
MIDI is a set of instructions to real or virtual instruments, sort of like digital sheet music. WAV files are sounds, dumb digital encodings of analogue waveforms.

So what you want to be able to do is plonk a wav file of say a piano on a T/L and add a MIDI track and tell that track it's a tuba. Now somehow the software has to work out where piano notes are in the wav file and what note is being played. Then that needs to be transpossed to the tuba track so the instructions to the tuba instrument can be added.

Even for a human that's a skill, certainly one beyond me being tone deaf.

I suspect what you had was a midi composing program, you could load say an existing midi file into it and then add a new instrument and tell it to play the same notes as the track below which was say a piano. But the difference here is that the track below is already as notes not sounds.

Hoped I cleared that up.

BTW I know nothing about music, my only skill in that area was as I child, after many lessons, I mastered chopsticks, a skill that now serves me well as my wife is Chinese.

BillyBoy, thanks for raising the Bar again on my own KB - Hah! You've been very helpful to me . . . thought I may return the favour and share with you what I've found - it's going into my favourites right now! - This did it for me,

Regards

Grazie

Thank GOD midi isn't in Vegas. I'm very, very happy it's not. This has been a source of discussion at Sony/SOFO since Vegas 1.0 came out. MIDI is a whole different tiger. You might as well ask why Excel isn't a word processor like Word is. Afterall, they are made by the same company and support some of the same protocols. Adding this function to Vegas would clunk up the tool, and take Vegas into a different realm than it already is. I'd have a very hard time supporting that sort of clunkiness. Having some attributes of ACID in Vegas might be nice, but that too, would allow for compromises. The more bells and whistles that go horizontal rather than vertical stand to really screw up the app. I'm not a fan of outward expansion away from the core of what Vegas is. That's simply too scary, IMO

If you don't know your way among the black and whites you can input music with your mouse or qwerty keyboard in most of those applications. No problem.
What can be a problem is to make the midi tracks sync with an audio track. Even if they can lock together, the midi does not know where the bars and beats are, and which beats are the number ones.
In the application I use (Voyetra's Digital Orchestrator Pro, which came bundled with my Turtle Beach Multisound card many whiles ago) I must tap midi notes in real time while listening to the audio track and then have all the midi line up with the tapped track.
Tor

Ah . .that'll be the Human Interface thing . . I remember that - just . . once upon a time . . . can't beat that tapping rhythm thang!!

. . . . 2 weeks and 2 days and counting > > > > > hah!

Grazie

Can't wait for the tapping to begin.
Tor

Me thinks the plot has been lost here a little.
Even if (heaven forbid) VV had MIDI it still wouldn't do what BB wants to achieve.
Has anyone grasped the real issue here or did it slip past me?
MIDI makes music, WAV may contain music.
So the whole issue of having MIDI in VV or not is totally irrelevant to what BB wanted to do. Unless iv'e missed something here the guy could spend a bucketload of cash on a MIDI composition program and still be no closer to what he wanted to do.

I got it Farss. Thanks, I had one of those duh moments after reading your explaination. I used to play the Hawaiian steel guitar, got pretty good for a kid, started when I was 5 or 6, was semi-serious about it into my mid teens, but around 12, I discovered bowling, baseball and girls. Not necessarily in that order so I let imy guitar playing slide.

Now I'm kind of sad I did. I can still play, but reading the music, at least more involved songs I have awful trouble with and need to fake it. I thought it was like riding a bike, you never forget. Well I at least forgot. My fault, was a stretch of at least 20 years I didn't play a single note. Thought I could just go back and pick up where I left off. Nope, not me anyway.

Seems to me that you could use Acid do the audio work and import the results back into Vegas and be done with it.

Midi can:
Read a wav file, extract notes from it, and manipulate those notes.
Send MIDI information to a soft synth, SF2 file, external synth, and generate a wav from it.
Trigger a wav sample at any point in time.
Any of the above in any combination. And more.
So, if Billyboy had existing or downloaded MIDI tracks, he can drop them into Sonar, Logic, Nuendo, ProTools, Vision, Voyetra, Cakewalk Home, Acid, and any number of other tools to generate a wav, and could drop the wav into any number of apps to extract note or timing information from the wav.

Thanks for the FAQ Grazie.