Does anyone else consider real-time MIDI recording critical?

Yes, the introspective buffer is really nice. In Cubase you don’t really know its there unless you intentionally paste its contents someplace (where you can of course edit it and such).

In Dorico’s case, I’d think it would be pertinent to have a special editor lane (I.E. a gridded piano roll editor) someplace (ideally in a floating window) where one can check and edit things before pasting it in.

One thing I notice that is pretty interesting, is that when importing a type 1 MIDI file into Dorico, it already does a pretty good job of quantizing the ‘notation’, but if you look at the play tab you can see that it also preserves and plays back the ‘real performance’. You can maintain a different notation position and value vs the actual performance events.

I think they are on the right track, and it is going to be really nice when they do start implementing real time recording of performance data :slight_smile:

I think the Dorico team has a solid and realistic ‘road map’ for development given their levels of personnel/funding/etc. Hang in there, it’s coming and it’s going to be really nice.

As an aside, since we don’t want this to get lost, can you give some details about the crashes you are experiencing? Is there any particular operation you are doing when the crash occurs?

I’m pretty sure adding stuff like CC, pitch bend, aftertouch, and velocity event lanes to the Play mode are in the development road-map. I’m also looking forward to the precise control of all the subtle expressive controllers. We will eventually get them in Dorico.

What direction it takes visually may surprise us all, with VST3 protocols they get way more options than we are used to seeing in our current DAWs. An example of a taste of how things can be different with VST3 ‘note expression’ is how in Cubase you can double click an individual note in the keyboard editor and a window pops up where you can apply traditional CC messages to ‘individual notes’…they are actually attached to the individual notes instead of being independent channel data. So…if you copy a note with a big fat curve for the CC1 controller and paste it elsewhere, all that expressive data gets copied along with it. If you happen to be using a plugin that supports note-expression (and HALion does…currently HSO isn’t set up for note-expression, but it can be in the future), you can even do things like having two notes on the same stave/channel pitch bending in opposite directions at the same time (this is not possible with MIDI/VST2 unless you use multiple channels/voices/layers/etc).

It’ll take some time, but truly great things are in store for us :slight_smile:

I love retrospective record in Cubase! I hope that we’ll have something similar in Dorico at some point, as I know how useful it can be.

We do also intend to have support for controller editing in the future.

Yes, I agree. Personally, I often improvise the core elements of a piece and then tweak it. I use Cubase for this, but I find it’s not possible to improvise when I’m tied so the metronome, so I often end up with something that doesn’t fit the Cubase grid. It is a right royal pain to fix this, even with all the various Cubase tools to help with this (I suppose I might be misusing them). None of them seem quite designed to the job I want. Feeding tap tempo with a midi track with selected notes on fails dismally if there are significant tempo changes. Playing into Sibelius often does not work either, because of changes of tempo and meter. For me, by far the best way of doing this would be to work with the score, and then tag the notes I want to be start of bar 1, start of bar 2 etc , Possibly even tagging individual beats in case of rapid tempo changes. This would be a complete godsend, either in Dorico or Cubase. I don’t know if anybody else would like this.

So many exciting suggestions/possibilities! And very happy to have a robust, 21st century program like this to play with, even without every feature yet added :slight_smile:…And re: those crashes - I’ll see if I can reproduce them and describe what caused them more specifically. I do know it was happening a lot after I tried importing previous stuff (including things with multiple instruments/staves, etc.) from Sib 7.5 vs. MusicXML but am not sure why…
Best!

  • D.D.

I don’t want to draw this thread way off topic (Talking Cubase here), but I think some practice with the “MIDI Logic Editor” in Cubase can improve your workflow. I.E. You can indeed select a variety of notes then call up your Logic Editor to instantly snap them to a given beat-tick, etc. You can bind your simple boolean Logic presets to Macros, which can in turn be bound to key combos, or even MIDI remote control. Over time I’ve built lots of them and mapped them out to MPC Pads…cool stuff.

The thing with CuBase is that it’s more designed to give you the tools to ‘build your own tools’, rather than trying to guess what people need in the workflow. If you need it (in terms of automated MIDI editing), chances are usually pretty good that you can build it.

Back to Dorico…import a MIDI Type 1 file then take a look at it in Dorico…particularly in Play Mode. We can see the ground work coming for amazing capabilities! Notice how you can already keep independent timing for the ‘real time performance’ vs the ‘displayed notation’. Cool stuff, and it’s done in a way where we don’t manually have to keep up with separate scoring (quantized) and performance tracks :slight_smile:

I would rather capture and clean up my MIDI performance in Cubase Pro (using the Score Editor) and then export it to Dorico as XML.

Wouldn’t adding these same MIDI capture and cleanup tools in Dorico just grow the size of the program? I’d rather not make a software application get any bigger than it has to. The larger the app, the harder and slower the files are to work with. That’s my two cents . . .

Richard, I don’t know Cubase well… but exactly what you’re asking works pretty well in Logic and Digital Performer. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t possible (easily) in Cubase?

copy and paste between both cubase and Dorico would help tremendously.

Paul has talked about being able to paste MIDI data directly from Cubase into Dorico. We hope to be able to implement this in future.

Daniel, could MIDI data become application neutral in this way?

As you probably know, you can copy/paste vector data directly between FontLab and Illustrator. I haven’t tested this with any other graphics editor, so I don’t know whether this functionality is application independent (with regard to the graphics editor) or not. Either way, is copy/paste between Dorico and other DAWs besides Cubase something that is out of the question from either a technical or competitive point of view?

It depends entirely on the application and the data format it uses. Pasting from Cubase for instance basically exports a small midi file.

Thanks, Paul!
That makes sense. So if other DAW’s function in exactly the same way as Cubase with regard to Copy/Paste of MIDI information, there’s no reason why they couldn’t interact with Dorico in this way once the functionality is in place?

For what it’s worth, for me real-time MIDI recording in a notation program is worthless. I couldn’t care less. So I would not call Dorico not having it a LACK.

In theory, yes. I think this is quite common. For instance if you are using EzDrummer you can drag percussion patterns from the plugin into Cubase. So when we implement this on Dorico you should be able to import it into Dorico in the same way.

I see. Thanks, Paul!

I know this is an old post, but I have been looking at various topics on the forum and this idea looks great - I would certainly like to have this feature in Dorico…or Cubase or Logic, unless it is now implemented and I do not know about it. I often improvise into the sequencer without a click track, and so being able to tag beats or bars to organize the music into some semblance of order would be very welcome. Maybe Dorico will do this at some point. I certainly don’t find realtime recording into Sibelius to be in the slightest bit useful and that is currently the software I most often use…As soon as all the performance map features are implemented and working nicely I will switch over to Dorico permanently.

I would definitely use a feature like that! Although I probably wouldn’t use it to literally play the piece, but to input individual lines in an orchestral or chamber work much faster.

I would love it for film scoring, but hope the notation section will get the most attention first. I feel that has a higher priority in a notation program.