Q80 to Sonar = bad midi transfer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lostinspice
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Lostinspice

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Long time lurker, first post (and it's a weird one).

I have a bunch of songs programmed into an old Kawai Q80 hardware sequencer. I wanted to transfer the midi songs into Sonar, so I set Sonar as the slave and armed its midi tracks to record. I set the tempos the same in each machine. I pressed the Sonar record button, then play on the Q80. The midi info got dumped into Sonar, but as I monitored (through the VSC DXi) I could hear it was not only slower, but in a different key! After stopping and playing Sonar back, the midi info was indeed lower and at a slower tempo (not the tempo shown onscreen).

I can play the VSC in Sonar with the Q80 just fine. It only acts up when I try to record. By the way, the Q80 transmits MMC. Although the Q80 has a floppy drive, I can't transfer to the computer this way because it uses a format Sonar won't recognize (not Standard Midi File).

Anybody have a suggestion? You guys seem to know Sonar inside out. Thanks in advance for any ideas.
 
Lostinspice,

Changing the tempo and pitch of a MIDI project in Sonar is very easy to accomplish.

You can click on the tempo window and change the tempo of the whole project.

Similarly for changing the pitch, open the Piano Roll View, select the particular track whose pitch you wabt to change, and Transpose by an appropriate amount.

See if that works. :)

--
BluesMeister
 
Hey BluesMeister. Thanks for the reply. I guess I could manually transpose and change the tempo, but it would be laborious, as I'd have to figure out what the BPM IS before adjusting, and the tempo shown would never be the actual playback tempo. (The key would be simple to figure out.) I'd also have to really work to get any sampled loops to sync up.

You'd think this would work without all that mucking around. Anyone have an idea WHY it does this?
 
Lostinspice,

My best guess is different sampling rates.

You could try setting Sonar to the same sampling rate and bit-depth as your Kawai Q80 (if the documentation tells you precisely what they are).

Don't forget to run wave profiler in Sonar then re-start the program.

Re-import the MIDI and see if that solves the problem.

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BluesMesiter
 
Found the answer. You can't use a soft synth to monitor, 'cause that means listening to "audio." It somehow throws everything out of whack when in Sonar as slave mode. I sent all the tracks in blindly (without monitoring) then inserted a soft synth to test the now recorded tracks. No more timing/key issues.
 
Great news Lostinspice,

I don't pretend to know what using Sonar in slave mode means. :) However, you got it to work and that's what really counts.

I tried Googling for the Kawai Q80, but it was so interminably slow loading one particular page that I gave up...

So far as I'm aware, MIDI data is simply note-on, note-off, duration & pitch. I can't understand why routing the MIDI data through Sonar and VSC DXi would have any effect on the pitch or timing.

When listening through your Kawai, I presume you are listening to an on-board synthesiser chip. The VSC DXi takes the place of the synthesiser chip in soundcards that are not equipped with such chips.

There are some really neat-sounding SoundFonts that make the VSC sound like a low-budget sound card. However, you will need a decent SoundFont player to take advantage of those SFs.

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BluesMeister
 
Lostinspice said:
Found the answer. You can't use a soft synth to monitor, 'cause that means listening to "audio."
Click to expand...
Hmmm... doesen't this sound like a latency issue? It sure does to me. ;)

I would check what latency I had, and then try to set it a tad lower. Under 5 ms is great! :)


Blues, Sonar is slaved to a MIDI device means that Sonar is not the playback master. Sonar doesen't generate Timecode, it just respond to it. :)
 
moskus said:
Hmmm... doesen't this sound like a latency issue? It sure does to me.
Click to expand...
Firstly, welcome back from holiday Moskus.

Well personally I don't think it's a latency problem. I'm fairly certain that wouldn't cause a shift in tempo & pitch. However, as always I am willing to bow to your superior knowledge of such issues...

Blues, Sonar is slaved to a MIDI device means that Sonar is not the playback master. Sonar doesen't generate Timecode, it just respond to it.
Click to expand...
Oh well thanks for clearing that up :)

I presume you mean something like loading a DXi in Sonar and then using an external device such as a MIDI keyboard to trigger the DXi? Yes/No?

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BluesMeister
 
Fact of antiquity: the Q80 is a hardware sequencer first produced by Kawai in the late 80's. No onboard sounds at all, but it does have 32 tracks of midi and is pretty solid in timing. It's just that it's so labor intensive on the editing side (as the "screen" is a teeny and cryptic two-line LCD).

To clear up my "found answer," the soft synth affected things only in Sonar slave mode. (I just stumbled into it by deleting the DSC DXi before slave recording.) I can hear sounds just fine while recording midi with a controller and a soft synth in place on an audio track.

Thanks for all the help.
 
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