MIDI Playback stops. Please help.

E

earthcub

This space is inhabited
I've recorded MIDI drum sequences into Sonar. Six tracks, each with different instruments. The problem seems to be that if I create duplicates of the tracks and rearrange the MIDI sequences to create more complex drum patterns and try to play them back, the playback stops right at the beginning of a measure, even if I have one continuous clip.

I'm new to MIDI so I don't know, is there some limit as too how many tracks the average system and synth can play back. I know that my synth has 128 voice polyphony, but I'm using maybe 6-8 patches total for the drums. My hardware is pIII, 356Mb RAM. The audio card is Delta44 and the MIDI card is SBLive. Both have the latest drivers and I have tried replacing them. Sonar has the latest 1.3.1 patch. I've also tried setting the synth to slave, and not. Doesn't make a difference. I'm alos not sure if there's a way to test whether its the synth or the program.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!
 
I'm in San Jose myself.

First, the SBLive has a single midi in and out, right?
If so, you have one output port and one input port.
Each port has 16 channels. So even if your synth has
128 voice poly (so does mine XV-5080) you will only
access it with 16 channels on midi.

Since you only have one port, if you make a copy of a midi
track and try to play both the original and the copy at the
same time the notes from each track might attempt to play
at the same time, which is not possible through one midi port.
I'm not sure if something in cakewalk will automatically skew
one of the notes off my a couple of milliseconds. You could
check by Viewing the Events List for each track and see if the
notes are trying to play at the same time. I doubt that is your
problem, but it's something to look at.

Furthermore, are you assigning the tracks to different midi
channels? With one input/output midi port there is a limit to
how many notes you can get to sounds at the "same time"...in reality one one note can sound at a time, but if the notes are only a couple of miliseconds apart you can't hear it. But if you try to play 5 notes at the same time, they will get spread out and you may be able to hear the difference between the first and last note, even though they are supposed to be played at the same time.

How many track until you see the problem?
How many measures does it play before it stops? 0, a couple...
If you then delete the last track does the problem go away?

Nemal
 
nemal,
I'm not at home so I can't check the event viewer until tonight but in answer to your other q's...:

I've had this experience with four tracks, each with a different instrument. They will play back usually only a measure, but sometimes I get lucky and they will playback for two. They're all assigned to Channel 10 because that is the only channel for transmitting drums. If I mute one of the tracks, I can sometimes get the playback to not stop.

I was going under the impression that there was one offending track but as you mentioned, there can't by notes played at the exact same time. So how do you find out how many notes can be transmitted at the same time and if I can't have that many, can I just set them 1ms or less off time and remedy the problem?

BTW - Thanks so much for responding.
 
In the track view...
Select all your tracks at the same time ( I think holding down the Control button while selecting each track) and then bring up the Events List. Midi is a SERIAL stream, so only one thing is transmitted at any one time. When you look in the Events list
(with all tracks selected you should see event data for all the tracks) you should see every note event happening at different times.
If any times are exactly the same you could have a problem. I don't know how Cakewalk will handle that, but it shouldn't let you do that in the first place. I don't think that is your problem, but it might me. Let me know what you see. I'm not sure how it handles copying midi clips. I'll run some of my own test when I have the time. But I have Sonar, it might do something slightly different.

Also, how are you selecting your midi port? What do you see when you go to Options > Midi Devices ? You should see one input port and one output port. Is that what you see?

What kind of synth do you have?

When you are sending data to the synth you should go to Options > Midi Devices and deselect the input, otherwise you may get a midi feedback loop...in other words -> your sending midi data to the synth and it is sending it back to the computer which is then sending it back to the synth and on and on. Get the picture?

I'll check back for an update later tonight. Good luck.

Nemal
 
I'm using Sonar also... In the Event View, there are a bunch of red and pink lines of text, mostly it seems, Sysx data (of which I know nothing about) and Filters???. I have set up a loop between 25 - 29th measures and when the loop returns, the playback stops at 25.

For MIDI IN and OUT, I have SBLive MIDI UART only. My synth is a Roland JX-305.

I haven't had a problem with the MIDI loop that you describe, but it would be hard to not listen to your tracks while doing other recording from the keyboard, but in either case, I still have the same problem whether its disabled or not.

Ya know, if you're not opposed to it, you can call me since we're in the same area. my number is: 445-2078. If not, that's cool.

-sean
 
I'm using Sonar also... In the Event View, there are a bunch of red and pink lines of text, mostly it seems, Sysx data (of which I know nothing about) and Filters???. I have set up a loop between 25 - 29th measures and when the loop returns, the playback stops at 25.

For MIDI IN and OUT, I have SBLive MIDI UART only. My synth is a Roland JX-305.

I haven't had a problem with the MIDI loop that you describe, but it would be hard to not listen to your tracks while doing other recording from the keyboard, but in either case, I still have the same problem whether its disabled or not.

Ya know, if you're not opposed to it, you can call me since we're in the same area. my number is: 445-2078. If not, that's cool.

-sean
 
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