PG Music Home Forums User-to-User Post your own Tips and Tricks here Use Virtual MIDI to Avoid BiaB Multiple Sample Reloading

I'm pretty sure that I've finally settled on Vir2's "Vi One" as my soft MIDI sample rack for BiaB. Vi One has some terrific sounds, and for the most part, of high enough quality to be very usable when it comes time to migrate my BiaB project over to my DAW. And with all the good reviews and being only $99 from Musicians Friend/Guitar Center, it was kind of a no-brainer.

However...

When using a VST/DXi instrument, BiaB has this annoying thing happening, where it repeatedly re-loads ALL your sample data when going in and out of the audio/midi settings dialog. It does it TWICE on exiting the dialog.

Well, for smaller sample sets, such as in a typically hosted plugin like ForteDXi or similar, this isn't so noticeable. However, once I get a Vi One rack going in BiaB, with a bunch of high-quality samples for each instrument, these sample reloads gets REALLY annoying REALLY fast, and interrupt my workflow immensely.

So, I thought, why not just make BiaB and Vi One emulate the way you would work with an external MIDI device? Vi One comes with a Kontakt 2 player (the latest updates give you Kontakt 4) to host the Vi One instruments, so I figured, I'll just run my Vi One rack within the Kontakt player as a separate app. I can tweak to my heart's content without any sort of reload issues, and I can save my racks as "multi" patches for easy recall.

Here's the trick though: out of the box, the two apps won't "talk" to each other. So, being familiar with virtual midi cables, such as Hubi's MIDI Loopback Device, I knew that there had to be something out there that would let me link the two, but maybe more up-to-date. I quickly found THIS little gem:

http://nerds.de/en/loopbe1.html

Once installed, this gave me the virtual MIDI connector that I needed, and I then set the MIDI output of BiaB to this "device", and the MIDI input of Vi One to the same. Oh, and of course I unchecked the "Use VST/DXi Synth" in BiaB.

Voila - Biab and Vi One rockin' together with no reloads when I want to alter the Vi One sounds.


The important thing to note is that this "virtual MIDI cable" trick should work to allow BiaB to talk to just about any soft synth/sampler software, not just Vi One.

Just downloaded and tried it. It works fine. I used it on a free download of Proteus and it sounds fine, no glitches or drop outs. Have you tried the "IPMIDI"?
Thanks Wyndham

I haven't tried ipMIDI, but it looks like a VERY interesting utility for more complex music-making environments. Cool stuff.

From the little I have read the midi over ethernet/lan has been a bit of a problem for some developers, not sure why. Musiclab has midi over lan but I see a lot of problems on their forums. I hope IPMIDI works as well as loopbe1.
Wyndham

MIDI over ethernet has been a problem? I have been reading about guys using that port for a multitrak soundcard. The thruput is reported to be pretty darn good when multitracking. Especially over large distances.

I think there are other softwares using this port for 'realtime' effects processing too. MIDI would seem an easy task. I am surprised to hear this.

It maybe Musiclabs software or the people trying to use it. I just saw more than a few complaints on their forum and thought this was more than expected problem posting for this software.Wyndham