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Is there a straightforward way of exporting a MIDI melody harmony (only) track? Idea is to produce various harmony tracks, using the same melody line, to see what works best when mixing using DAW.

At present, dragging MIDI melody track with harmony into drop-box results in just the melody track being exported. Likewise when BIAB is used as VST and track is imported into DAW.

One method that does work is ‘Save Special / Save song as MIDI file’, which saves harmony as separate MIDI track, but also saves all the other tracks in the song. Not difficult, of course, to delete these from the resultant MIDI file, but wonder if there is a better way of doing it. Any thoughts please?

I should add that I’ve MIDI File Preferences Options ‘Write harmony to MIDI file’ and ‘MIDI file harmony on separate tracks’ boxes ticked.

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Hi Alan,

If you solo your Melody track and then use "Save Special", do all tracks still get exported? It would also be worth trying to mute all other tracks except the Melody.

While "Drag n Drop" options (right click on Dropbox to access) can be set so that when the Master is dragged, individual MIDI and Audio files are transferred, there does not seem to be a way to drag just the Melody and Harmony individually. I'll pass this on to the development team. (From memory, and I may be wrong, the harmony is written on MIDI channels 11-14. Because of this, I imagine that they won't be considered "Melody" when dragged.)

In BIAB 2021, I have a feeling that it might be possible to transfer the Harmony's MIDI channels to individual Utility Tracks and then drag those tracks individually to you DAW. To try this, have a look a "Edit | Copy Special | Copy Move Tracks". When I get a chance, I'll test this out.

Regards,
Noel


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Noel,

Many thanks for this.

Your suggestion about soloing the melody track before ‘Save Special’ is a very definite improvement as only the melody and harmony are then saved (onto single MIDI track) and it is a simple task to delete the melody track. This is a perfectly acceptable arrangement should it not prove possible to export harmony on its own.

Concerning transferring melody track onto a utility one, program shows source track with potentially available channels (from 1 to 16) that can be copied. For the track in question channels 1 and 4 are not greyed out. Channel 1 has 557 events (melody and harmony notes) and channel 4 has 3 events – not quite sure what they are though. The copy onto utility track produces the same mixture of melody and harmony.

I think all the straightforward possibilities have now been tried and very acceptable solution arrived at as mentioned above.

Thanks again.

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Hi,

It depends a bit on the harmony. You want the harmony voices on different channels than the Melody. Go to Harmony | Melody Harmony to open the Select Melody Harmony dialog. Choose a harmony, for example #2 Nashville Saxes, then click Edit.



Here you can see that the melody harmony can use two additional channels. The original melody part is on channel "A" (which is channel 4 by default), and the two additional voices can either be assigned to the same channel if they don't need to use a different instrument, or they can be assigned to B (default=channel 11) or C (default=channel 12).

With Nashville Saxes there's nothing you need to do here, since the harmony voices are on channels B and C, so you can exit the Harmony Maker and just select the harmony. If on the other hand you found that voice 2 was on channel A, you could just change it to channel B. Note: prior to making changes, I suggest that you make a copy of the file "default.har", which you'll find in the \bb\data folder, and that way you can restore the defaults later (there isn't a separate user file for harmony definitions)

Choose Harmony | Convert Harmony to Melody Track, to have it write the harmony parts to the Melody track instead of just playing them 'on the fly'.

Once you've done that, there are a number of options - you could just save as a MIDI file now that you have them on separate channels. Or you could Edit | Copy Special | Copy/Move Tracks to a Utility track... etc.


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Thanks for the information, Andrew. Appreciate it.


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Thank you - very useful.

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