ReWire (again?)

[pcartwright]

Still can't get rewire to work with Reaper and Notion (Reaper as host). Notion only plays back occasionally; it usually just stalls or plays one or two notes before stopping.

[elerouxx]

Still can't get rewire to work with Reaper and Notion (Reaper as host). Notion only plays back occasionally; it usually just stalls or plays one or two notes before stopping.

May I ask, what is your equipment?

I am on Windows 7 x64, with an onboard sound card. Installed ASIO4ALL, which helps, but normal DirectSound
drivers work too. WaveOut doesn't always work.

Have you tried the different audio devices inside Reaper?

is your Notion score a simple one or is it heavy?

[ulrik]

In no way you are out of topic. I'd love to sort this out as far as possible and the more you help, better.
I just started messing around on Reaper yesterday so I guess there's a lot to be discovered.

I found this option called 'ReWire Slave settings' in Reaper, either in Project Settings, or in Preferences (which sets default Project Settings). Is this you are talking about?

No, I was talking about using reaper as the master, so the setting is in the"fx"settings on the recording track, when chosing Notion rewire you can chose "Allow slave to set tempo", I have tried this setting for every new reaper release and with every new update of Notion for a long time now but with no success I'm afraid. I am using a lot Ntempo changes in Notion and it would be so cool if I could sync it to another daw like reaper with the capabilities to follow the slave's tempo and at the same time record live audio.

[pcartwright]

May I ask, what is your equipment?

Win7 64bit. I've tried Reaper 64 and Reaper 32 with Presonus Firepod driver and ASIO4ALL

Have you tried the different audio devices inside Reaper?

Yes

is your Notion score a simple one or is it heavy?

I've tried both. Really, score size shouldn't matter as far as rewire is concerned. If Notion without rewire can play the score back, then Notion in rewire mode should also play the score back.

[pcartwright]

I have to hope that Notion corrects with Notion 4 (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1648&start=30#p9361).

[Surfwhammy]

is your Notion score a simple one or is it heavy?

I've tried both. Really, score size shouldn't matter as far as rewire is concerned. If Notion without rewire can play the score back, then Notion in rewire mode should also play the score back.

Everything matters, and this is one of the reasons that what might appear to be two identical systems have different ReWire experiences . . .

In this discussion, which is focused on ReWire behaviors in the Windows universe, elerouxx has one ReWire experience, but pcartwright has a different ReWire experience, even though there are similarities from a general perspective . . .

And in another ongoing discussion focused on the Mac, oddball1989 now is having a fantastic ReWire experience, but Surfwhammy is not having a lot of FUN, even though both are running Logic Pro 9 (Apple) and NOTION 3, where at present the most likely explanation is that oddball1989 is running Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard), but Surfwhammy is running Mac OS X 10.8.1 (Mountain Lion) . . .

[NOTE: For reference, I applied to be a ReWire developer approximately 18 months ago, and I was approved recently, which as best as I can determine was due primarily to the fine folks at Propellerhead Software wanting to expand the third-party developer community with respect to Rack Extensions, since I also was approved as a Rack Extensions developer. This maps to two key bits of information, (a) that I now have the ReWire Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows and the ReWire Software Development Kit (SDK) for Mac and (b) that I am limited by Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with respect to how much information I can provide regarding the way everything works, but my perspective is that when something is intuitively obvious by inspection, then it is appropriate to discuss so long as any information I provide is general rather than specific . . . ]

This is the diagram I created to provide an overview of a ReWire session before I was approved as a ReWire developer, so it meets the criteria for being intuitively obvious by inspection . . .



And for those folks like me who have been doing advanced Windows software engineering since early-1987, it does not require a lot of dot-connecting to understand what happens behind the scenes with respect to the way all this stuff interacts within the Windows event-driven transaction-processing environment, where one way to explain it involves using a naval analogy, metaphor, or simile . . .

Consider that there are two ships, where one ship is "The Reaper" and the other ship is "The NOTION 3", and both ships are at sea (Windows) . . .

"The Reaper" arrived in the area first, which makes it the ReWire host controller, and "The NOTION 3" arrived second, which makes it the ReWire slave, and in this scenario the two ships communicate via semiphore, since this was before the invention of radio and such things as lanterns or whatever, hence each ship has a signal officer who has two flags on wooden poles, which are used the send visual messages using an alphabet or code that is similar in some respects to Morse Code . . .

The analogy, metaphor, or simile is all the more accurate when the distance between the two ships is sufficiently large that neither ship can see the other ship, so to make everything work smoothly there is a third signal officer in a rowboat located at the halfway point between the two ships, where the third signal officer in the rowboat can see both ships, hence is able to act as a relay to enable the two ships to communicate in real-time on the fly . . .

And I think it should be intuitively obvious that engaging productively in successful and timely communications in this scenario requires several different types of resources, all of which are highly time sensitive, which is a useful thing to ponder, where this is one of the virtual festival of clues:



Lots of FUN!

[elerouxx]

Congratulations for your approval on being a rewire developer! maybe you could help Notion with this.

I would start to redraw the flowchart with Notion and the different master (or slave) applications, and mark the part of the diagram that is failing. For instance, there doesn't seem to be any transmition from Notion to Ableton Live when Ableton is the DAW application. Not only the tempo, but you can't just click and play anywhere - the playback always starts where it stopped in Ableton. So with this DAW you only have transport control one way.

[Surfwhammy]

Congratulations for your approval on being a rewire developer! maybe you could help Notion with this.

I would start to redraw the flowchart with Notion and the different master (or slave) applications, and mark the part of the diagram that is failing. For instance, there doesn't seem to be any transmition from Notion to Ableton Live when Ableton is the DAW application. Not only the tempo, but you can't just click and play anywhere - the playback always starts where it stopped in Ableton. So with this DAW you only have transport control one way.

It took approximately 18 months to get approved, and as noted my best guess is that it was more a matter of Propellerhead Software being very aggressive in wanting to build its third-party developer community for the new Reason 6.5.1 Rack Extensions, which are quite fascinating and vastly useful . . .

And after examining the actual ReWire Software Development Kit for the Mac, I did a pretty good job of guessing how everything worked, but it is not such a trivial endeavor to implement ReWire . . .

At present, I cannot think of anything that makes sense for me to do with respect to adding ReWire to a product, in part because I do not have any products, but I am vastly intrigued by the idea of designing and programming a Rack Extension, so I think the ReWire stuff will be useful, and it provides some insights into what happens behind the scenes, which certainly can be useful if I decide to write a technical book about digital music production on the Mac at the dawn of the early-21st century, for sure . . .

For sure!

One of the most important things to understand about ReWire is that there is a virtual festival of specific scenarios, and each one of them involves four entities, specifically a stage (operating system), a production assistant (ReWire Infrastructure), and two actors or actresses:

(1) Operating System (Mac or Windows)

(2) ReWire Infrastructure (Propellerhead Software)

(3) ReWire Host Controller

(4) ReWire Slave

And there also are implementation levels, where for example unless the new version of GarageBand (Apple) behaves differently, it only plays the audio streamed from a ReWire slave, while Logic Pro 9 (Apple) plays and records . . .

Based on a series of experiments I did, it appears that Studio One 2 (Presonus) on the Mac does not play streaming ReWire from NOTION 3, but it will render it offline, which basically makes Studio One 2 of little practical use as a ReWire host controller on the Mac . . .

Digital Performer 7.24 (MOTU) does ReWire wonderfully, but there need to be four empty measures at the start of a NOTION 3 score, and you cannot start any earlier than the first beat of the fourth measure, although I usually start at the first beat of the fifth measure unless I need a "count in" or whatever, and when recording it is best to start recording and to continue recording for a few seconds, followed by stopping recording; rewinding to the first beat of the fifth measure'; and then doing the "keeper" recording, since this ensures that the various audio buffers are preloaded, which avoids a "jumpy" or "erratic" first few measures . . .

When I wrote that "Everything matters!", I was being very precise, because for example when I did experiments with Reaper on the Mac and NOTION 3 perhaps a year or so ago, there were problems with sound quality, but after learning more about Reaper I realized that Reaper was set to a higher audio quality than standard CD quality, so I set Reaper to do audio at standard CD quality (44.1-kHz, 16-bits), which is what NOTION 3 outputs, and then it worked with no problems . . .

At present I am doing some experiments with Logic Pro 9, and after examining all the Logic Pro 9 defaults, I had to change a lot of them, where for example Logic Pro 9 defaults to 24-bit recording, so I changed it to do 16-bit recording, and the buffer sizes were mismatched, so I changed Logic Pro 9 to use a buffer size of 256 samples, which is the default buffer size for NOTION 3, and so forth and so on . . .

Some of this stuff is vastly important, but I suppose that other aspects make no difference, except that there are no specific instructions regarding what is important versus what does not matter, hence the rule here in the sound isolation studio that "Everything matters!" . . .

The naval analogy, metaphor, or simile was FUN, and there actually is a point to it, but after pondering it for a while, another analogy, metaphor, or simile appeared, which involves the way a streaming YouTube video is played on a computer when the Internet Service Provider (ISP) is broadband cable and there is a cable modem, as well as a router like an Airport Extreme Base Station, where YouTube is like NOTION 3; the ReWire infrastructure is like the broadband cable, cable modem, and router; and the computer and browser are like the DAW application . . .

In other words, if you watch the blinking lights on the cable modem, this provides a high-level clue to some of what happens behind the scenes in a ReWire session, where if everything is configured correctly, then it works very nicely, but if something which might appear to be inconsequential is set incorrectly, then it all stops working . . .

I do everything on the Mac, and based on my experiments, I have not found anything which specifically indicates that NOTION 3 has problems in its code for doing ReWire, although without being able to examine the code, all I can do is guess, but I discovered how to get NOTION 3 to do ReWire with Digital Performer, Studio One 2, GarageBand, a version of Ableton Live from last year, Reason 5 and Reason 6.5.1, and most recently Logic Pro 9, although I have a few more experiments to do with Logic Pro 9 before I will be happy, but it is looking very good, so far . . .

On the other hand, there are detailed instructions in the Reason 6.5.1 (Propellerhead Software) Operation Manual for controlling Reason 6.5.1 with a DAW application, where in this context NOTION 3 is a DAW application, and it just works, which also is the case with Logic Pro 9 acting as the ReWIre host controller for Reason 6.5.1, hence there might be a few subtleties with respect to implementing ReWire that the Propellerhead Software folks understand intimately, which makes sense when you know that ReWIre is a Propellerhead Software technology . . .

Explained another way, if I were on the witness stand in the role of an expert witness and were asked the question, "Does NOTION 3 implement ReWIre correctly on the Mac?", my answer based on what I know as the consequence of hundreds of hours of experiments is "Yes!" . . .

And while I have to add four empty measures to NOTION 3 scores to do ReWire successfully with Digital Performer 7.24, where I also need to remember to start no earlier than the first beat of the fourth measure and to do a short bit of recording to preload the various buffers, the fact of the matter is that if I start a NOTION 3 score on the first beat of the first measure in a ReWire session with Digital Performer 7.24 acting as the ReWire host controller and then press the "Play" button on the Digital Performer 7.24 transport, Digital Performer 7.24 crashes, and the rule in the Mac universe is that applications are not supposed to crash, hence since NOTION 3 does not crash, I place the fault with Digital Performer 7.24 not with NOTION 3, although in this particular scenario NOTION 3 just continues playing without apparently having any idea that Digital Performer 7.24 crashed, which makes a bit of sense when you consider that Digital Performer 7.24 instructed NOTION 3 to play before it crashed, and NOTION 3 is simply following the last valid ReWire command it received from its ReWire host controller . . .

If I decide to start developing Reason 6.5.1+ Rack Extensions, then I will need to get a Windows machine, but at present I do everything on the Mac, so while I cannot state based on experiments much of anything about Windows, intuitively I cannot think of any particular aspect of Windows which would prevent ReWire from working, and I have considerably more experience doing software engineering in the Windows universe than in the Mac universe, and the last time I checked, both Mac and Windows had the completely and totally annoying things called "foundation classes" in which stuff happens automagically, where in the Windows universe my favorite project option for Visual C++ was "Not using MFC", and to at least some extent I can do the same thing with Xcode (Mac), but whether this continues to be the case in the Windows universe is another matter . . .

In other words, so long as the ReWire host controller implements everything in the Windows universe, getting ReWire to work correctly mostly is a matter (a) of configuring everything correctly and perhaps (b) of doing some patently strange experiments to discover "workarounds" for the occasional odd behaviors . . .

Lots of FUN!