Spitfire wrote:

I've used BIAB for decades, but never really dug into it. The interface has always been very non-intuitive. But, I now have version 2017 and decided to commit to getting to know it better. To that end, I wanted to be able to record a MIDI keyboard input, but have found it difficult and after extensive looking and reading, cannot find if there is a better way.

Here's where I'm at now.

When not recording or playing back the song I can hear MIDI keyboard input. It appears to be using a the Microsoft CS Wavetable synth. In any case, it sounds cheesy and completely unusable latency (>100 ms).

If you are using MME (versus ASIO), then you are going to have latency, unless you are passing through to a hardware synth (such as a keyboard).

When playing back the song, whether or not I'm recording, I hear the synth assigned to the "thru" track. Latency is short and acceptable.

The Thru track is just that; it allows input from an external source (keyboard, MIDI guitar, etc.) to play either to an assigned VSTi or your default synth port, depending upon your settings. Playback of a song doesn't use the thru port. An additional feature of the thru port is that BIAB can capture that input and record it to either the Melody or Soloist track. And if you want the instrument playing on the thru track to play back with the same instrument on the Melody track, you need to manually select that same patch on the Melody track.

After recording, the MIDI is now either on the "melody" or "soloist" track, depending one which was selected when recording. Of course now, the patch is whatever is assigned to the "melody" or "soloist" tracks.

Yep, that's the way it works. You record something from the thru track (and the instrument you hear depends upon what you selected for that track). But what gets recorded to Melody or Soloist is just the note data, not the actual sounds. You have to set that yourself.

Is this really the best that can be done? Do I have to continually reset the "thru" track and "melody/soloist" tracks to match so that what I hear will be the same?

It works as described above. I would suggest putting in a wishlist item that says something to the effect of "if I record to the melody track from the thru track, then automatically apply the same settings to the melody track (or soloist track)".

It would seems to make a lot more sense to hear the sound as it would be on the track it is actually getting recorded to, like every DAW or sequencer I've ever used.

See previous comment

Also, the keyboard works as expected, with all other programs. I don't think this is a MIDI keyboard problem, but just a how BIAB works. And I'm hoping there is something I've overlooked to make this work a bit more smoothly.

Another odd thing, the keyboard is outputting on MIDI channel 1, yet the BIAB MIDI monitor shows the key activity as being on channel 5. This makes no sense to me.

As I understand it, the thru track accepts input from any of the 16 channels, but processes it on channel 5 internally once it receives the input, and then passes it along to the melody track to be converted to channel 4 (or soloist track on channel - anyway, I think it's channel 8).

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Hope this helps.

John

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