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Exporting Notion Score into A DAW (Sonar)

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Exporting Notion Score into A DAW (Sonar)

Postby dranck » Sat Apr 13, 2013 6:41 pm

Hi all. I'm new to Notion and the forum. I just purchased Notion 4 last weekend, so I am far, far from proficient. I created my first composition using Notion and Miroslav, but I was at a loss as to how best to get the score into a DAW (Sonar X2) for final processing. After reading through this forum and others, I settled on the following process. Perhaps it will be helpful to someone else. Or perhaps one of the experts here can show me a better way! If you have any suggestions, I'd be very appreciative. :) Here's what I did:

The fun part:
    1. Create score in Notion using Miroslav templates including articulation and preliminary adjustments to volume, velocity, etc. [1]
    2. Create Sonar project from 16 track midi template and save
    3. Export midi from Notion and import into Sonar
    4. Add VSTi(s) using same combi templates as used in Notion [2]

Since each track imported from Notion will have all staves assigned to the VSTi in a single track, along with channel changes for each articulation, the tracks must be split by channel. For example, if you use the Strings 2 template for Miroslav you will have Viola on channels 1 to 6 (with differing articualtions on each channel), cello on 7 - 11, and double bass on 12 - 16. We need to get these into separate tracks in Sonar.

For each imported track:
    1. Add enough midi tracks (Insert - Mult tracks - MIDI
      Set Number of midi tracks 16, audio tracks to 0
      Select the correct VSTi as the port
      Set channel to none
    2. Run Cal - SplitChn.cal and point it at the first inserted track [3]
    4. Delete any extra tracks, create track folder if desired to group the instruments
    5. Check that the correct channels for the VSTi are assigned in each track (they should be already set up)
    6. Delete Source tracks (should be empty)

Now we've got the midi imported and ready to work with in Sonar! (It took me a while to get this far). After you are done tweaking the midi and have a preliminary mix its time to create the audio tracks.

For each instrument that you want in a separate audio track:
    1. Mute all midi tracks except for the one(s) you want in the audio track. In our example above we would mute everything but the viola tracks on channel 1 to 6 on the Strings 2 VSTi.
    2. Select the VSTi track (e.g. Strings 2).
    3. IMPORTANT: Now click in somehwere in the beginning of the VSTi track where there are no events. [4]
    4. On the track menu, select Bounce to Tracks
    5. Set source category to Tracks and make sure only your Strings 2 VSTi is selected in the Source list. Set Channel format as desired.
    6. Click OK. Sonar will process the audio and create a new audio track.

Once you have all of the audio tracks created, you can archive and/or freeze everything else.

Why did I do it this way?
My primary goal was to create independent audio tracks for each orchestra section so I could pan them, mix them and apply effects separately.

    [1] I think I was a little too aggressive with some velocity/volume tweaks in Notion. Some areas were far too soft in Sonar.
    [2] I saved each combi from Miroslav in Notion to My Documents. Then I copied each of the .ikmp files to the C:\Program Files (x86)\IK Multimedia\Miroslav Philharmonik\Presets\Notion folder. I created the Notion folder under presets so the presets show in the Miroslav GUI as a group to keep the templates organized.
    [3] The CAL script included in Sonar for splitting by channel did not work for me. I found a slightly different script here that works: https://www.box.com/shared/zchdp64seo
    [4] I lost several hours by not knowing this little trick. Sometimes the track bounce would not work. Sometimes it would and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why. I found the answer of clicking on open space in the instrument track in an old forum post for Sonar 8.x.

Hopefully this will be helpful to someone!

Dave
Music can change the world because it can change people.
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dranck
 
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