I am having a problem using BIAB to record from a Yamaha Clavier digital piano. You can see the issue here - note the bottom red/green line.

BIAB_recording

It is as if a note is turned on, but the end note message gets lost.

This problem does not occur when I record with PowerTracks Pro, or with Pianoteq.

The problem occurs with BIAB whether I use a USB cable between piano and computer, or a Yamaha midi cable with midi/USB adapter.

Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this?

Thanks,

Ed

Hi

Yes indeed you are correct.
The first note should have finished at the same time as the two above to complete that chord for that duration. The blue /green ones are overlapping notes and should and would exist as red notes to complete those chords, problem is as you say the first note got a stuck midi note state.

No idea of what caused this but did you run out of polyphony ?
Unlikely I would say unless you were sending a lot more midi notes at that time that we cant see in pic

Mike

If Mike's suggestion is correct, there is a way to filter out MIDI input information that is either too short or too soft to matter. I had to do this recording my wind controller, which was sending a storm of MIDI info. The other part of Mike's idea involves the polyphonic limit of a MIDI hardware synth. Mine, for example, coughs at over 64. This doesn't mean 64 simultaneous notes, either; one note might send 4 or 6 or 1 signal toward that 64 limit. Having said all that, I doubt that is the problem here.

Ed,

Are the problem notes on the same channel as the other notes? You image shows that the 'Chan' is set to 'All'. Cycle through the 16 channel and see if information is contained on anything else other than channel 4 (the channel for Melody).

Also, do you have any idea what the blue coloured notes on your image indicate?

Regards,
Noel

Hi Mat

I’m sure you will find the blue notes are overlapping notes as I said in my post and were played after the first note got stuck.
As you can see they go with the notes above them of the same duration to complete the chord.
Yes polyphony rules for keyboards usually have a protocol of
If polyphony is exceeded the oldest held note gets shut of first followed by sustained notes but as you say probably a red herring here.
Mike

Mike,

I think Noel96 is thinking in the right direction, BiaB is not interpeting what the Yamaha is transmitting correctly.

I assume that the Yamaha is transmitting in omni mode (all channels). Try changing the settings on the Yamaha so that it transmits on just one channel at a time.

Also, look at your BiaB midi settings and either turn off midi thru or make sure midi thru is set for an unused channel like channel 15.

Thanks for the great ideas.

My piano was set to transmit on channel 1. I changed it to transmit on channel 4. Same problem.

WRT the question of what other midi info might be being trasmitting, I realized that the sustain pedal also transmits, so I tried recording with no pedal. Same problem.

Also, I tried playing the file back, viewing the pianoroll display with the channel set to various numbers. I don't see any data on the other channels.

Midi thru has been off in all cases.

No paydirt yet, but these were all good ideas, for which I thank you all.

One more piece of data: If I record a longer piece, more of those lines accumulate. After several minutes of recording, there may be 5 or 6 lines. I take this to be consistent with the idea that notes are getting turned on, then left on instead of turning off.

Any more thoughts?

Thanks again.

Ed

Hi
Yes ok it sounds by what you are now saying to be a midi overflow problem can you increase your midi buffer size in you driver midi settings

By the way if you just want to rescue this one song you have recorded simple go to piano roll view and delete the offending note just right click in the red area and delete event . This will leave the later correct overlapping notes in place.
Then manually draw that first bottom note in again for the correct duration which my
Guess is the same as the two immediately above it is the bottom note of that chord

Mike

Ed, what do you have running in the background? If anything like anti-stuff or anything that goes on the Internet to search for updates can cause this problem. If the nanosecond that background running program interrupts the CPU is at the same time the note is supposed to end then the DAW or BiaB will not get that message. Thus the note stays on. This is why I have my Ethernet card disabled even though my music computer is off-line 99.9% of the time.

You said that if you record a longer piece of music you get more stuck notes. Is it always the same note? Also this may indicated that something is not working properly in your keyboard. We had a similar problem when JonD's keyboard was dying.

Don't know if this will help, but on the MIDI options screen is an option for "Note Off". You might want to give it a try to see if it helps. This is from the user manual:

Disconnected ethernet cable, same problem.

The problem occurs on various notes, not the same note.

Set extra note offs to yes, same problem.

Mike, can you tell me how to set the midi buffer size? I can't find any setting for it.

Thanks again, guys.

Ed

Hi

I may have given you a duff steer there.
The only control you have in BIAB is in the midi latency setting but that is more of a visual thing to keep the screen display in sync with the midi notes you hear.
But it does seem that you are sending more midi data than it can cope with and the problem seems to get worse the more you send .
I will do some test using my Yamaha Clavinova later and se what I can clean from that.
In the mean time you might like to visit my web site technical articles section where you will find many articles on midi and Yamaha keyboards .
Some thin there may be useful to you at some time link in my signature at bottom of post
Have fun
Mike

Unplugging the Ethernet cable is not the same as disabling the Ethernet card. If the Ethernet card is still enabled then the background programs will still try to connect. It's like when you try to go to a site but the site is down the devices think that the site is down and will try again later. If it is disabled then Windows tells all there is no connection so don't even bother trying. You can disable the Ethernet card via the Device manager. You can leave the cable plugged in.

Hi Ed

Well I have just done 4 recordings using my Clavinova as the input keyboard
On to the melody track / ch while using an all mid style. Just to make sure there was plenty of midi activity going on. I also set my midi output from the style to play though the Clav while recording my keys into BIAB no dreaded latency this way.
So I was using the Yamaha midi driver both for input and output and sending nothing to the BIAB dxi no tick in box use vst /dxi
All notes sent from the Clav including LH chords AND Melody notes were recorded cleanly no stuck notes

I also tried from my impulse 61 controller keyboard using a dxi to handle the midi data. This also worked flawlessly no stuck notes.

Not that this help you only to say the Yamaha driver and BIAB seem to agree
May well be that the pc is busy as others have said.
I will keep thinking on this one.

Hi again Ed

Ok after last nights test I think the only thing to try now would be to improve your pc performance while running BIAB.

You may like to check processor usage and page file usage in the windows task manager screens look for processor spikes at regular intervals in the performance monitor these are likely to coincide with wifi poling the router etc

While recording
It will help with load if you stop all unnecessary progs running in the background
Including internet access this will kill windows Auto updates and any other auto update eg Adobe reader AV definitions etc .

Stop wifi you don’t need it unless you are using a wireless printer which you wont be while recording.

Now you are off the internet you can safely stop your Antivirus prog

Stop screen savers

Also don’t forget to defrag your hard drive if it is badly fragmented it could be taking to long to find a space to write your midi data.
My windows is set to defrag every WED at 3 Am by default as installed so generally is ok .
But it cant defrag if it is not on so it does it next time switch on when it thinks the computer is not busy.

You may also benefit from running windows disk clean up from:
All programs / Accessories /system tools /disk cleanup.
Do this disk cleanup before you defrag the drive

Every little helps as they say.

I don’t now how much ram you have but I have 8G

Just some thoughts
Mike

Hi ED
Yet another thought

You might like to check your BIAB programs priority settings in windows
To do this open band in the box then cnt alt del to the windows task manager and proceed as in pic
Sorry if you knew this
Mike
dont miss my last two post on previous page

Today I recorded my Yamaha using Aria, a free midi recording program, with no stuck notes. Also, I again recorded with Pianoteq and PowerTracks Pro, doing something like a stress test – playing as many notes as I can with all ten fingers, as fast as I can; again, no stuck notes.

I also turned off styles on BIAB (can’t for the life of me remember how I did that), and recorded without accompaniment, thinking this reduces the CPU load. Stuck notes as usual.

I also monitored the CPU load while recording and playing back, and did not see any spikes or anomalies associated with stuck notes.

I got my ancient Casio LK220 keyboard out of storage - hasn’t seen the light of day in many years. Connected it to my computer via USB, and recorded with BIAB. No problems.

So it seems the problem is unique to the combination of this Yamaha piano and the BIAB software. I was wondering if there are some midi messages unique to the Yamaha that only the BIAB software responds to. Looking at the midi monitor window, I saw some pitch bend messages. On the piano, I disabled pitch bend messages, and on BIAB I set it to ignore pitch bend messages, and tested. Still had stuck notes.

At that point, I decided to bite the bullet and reinstall BIAB, thinking maybe the file was corrupted. Just to be sure, I reinstalled it twice, with a restart in between. Still had stuck notes.

I reset the priority of the process, per suggestion from Mike (thanks, I have done that years ago for some other problem, but I had forgotten about it). Still had stuck notes.

I have also tried many other things to clean up my computer, reduce loading, isolate the computer from the internet, isolate the cables, minimize loading, etc, with no luck.

I am now in the process of building a steel room, shielded with copper, and connected with thick cables to a ground rod sunk into my back yard, with all this supported by heavy duty steel springs and shock absorbers, to better isolate BIAB from the outside world, and eliminate uncontrollable variables. (Just kidding.)

Anyway, thanks for all the wonderful suggestions. I really appreciate the help.

Ed

Hi ED

Hmmm well that was a good report but not good news.
I do seem to remember having similar problems in the past with Yamaha keyboards both my DGX620 and my CVP405 but I was using Cubase and Sonar at the time.

It’s as if when the Yamaha starts to send midi data it sends a bunched up chunk at start of recording as it usually the first notes sent that seemed to stick.
One thing that can cause problems if both midi in and midi out are sent to the DAW.
is note echo and double notes if local is on at the keyboard as each note gets sent to the software via midi and the keyboard which then echo it back to the software.
One way to do this if using midi leads is to not connect them both that is only send nidi from the keyboard to the pc while recording
Or turn local off at the keyboards midi screen function / midi, /all parts / edit
When I tried this the moment I started to record in BIAB IT SWITCHED ON AGAIN
So I had to flip it of after the recording was running watch the Yamaha screen!!


Sona turns local of by default these days, but BIAB does not.

I usually leave at least one or two blank bars at the start of a recording to give time for all the initial track / channel instrument data to be written also you could try sending a single note first before, the what is often a large handful at the beginning of the track this is likely to be at least LH chord of three notes + RH notes that’s quite a bunch to write if it is still sending track data headers to the other tracks.

Pitch wheel and sus peddle mod wheel event should not cause a problem as the software will put them in an empty time tick between the notes , as all midi is sequential any way, only one thing can be written for any one time but with the sort of clock speeds we are talking about there should be plenty of room in one second for many events.
Good luck let us know how you get on
Mike

Another busy day chasing this problem – but finally had some success!

Following Mike’s suggestion, I found that by setting the piano to local off, and also setting BIAB to local off, there are no stuck notes in the recording, and the recording plays back OK. The fly in the ointment was that I was not able to hear the piano itself playing (because of local off), and for some reason was not able to get BIAB to output the piano sound in real time (either by MS Wavetable, Coyote, or Pianoteq). So the experiment succeeded (no stuck notes), but I had to play without real-time sound. Perhaps I goofed somehow in setting things up, I will go back and review this later. I don’t have a pressing need to resolve this question because a better solution popped up.

Since I had reinstalled BIAB yesterday, I had to go through the process of re-integrating it with Pianoteq. This involves using software called Jbridge, which smooths things out between the 32 bit BIAB and the 64 bit Pianoteq. I noticed when I got it working that when BIAB calls up the Pianoteq window, there is a small Jbridge icon on it, which I don’t remember seeing before. When I clicked on the icon, up came a window that had some choices. One of them said allow asynchronous operation. I chose that, and it seems to have solved my problem. With piano set to local (so I can hear it), I ran a good stress test – thousands of notes at high speed, no stuck notes.

Live and learn.

Again, thanks for the help.

Ed

Hi Ed

Great news

If you need to keep local on , as I said then remove mid out of BIABs midi out to the piano midi in lead,
If using a usb lead go to midi settings in BIAB and don’t send midi out to the piano (while recording)
That is set the piano on the midi input side but something else on the midi output side.

Looks like you are on a roll now
Have fun
Mike