NOTION Music Forum

Hi,

just updated to the latest version (yeh, I've been a bit behind), and I used to add this to the afformentioned file:

Code: Select all

<instrument-technique force-valid='yes'>
      <link>midi</link><instrument-id>0</instrument-id><technique>norm</technique>
   </instrument-technique>

and many more like these, and they used to work, so I could access all my techniques from the midi special technique palette, but it doesn't anymore. Why? And is there another workaround?

EEEK! This was a very important and useful "flexibility feature" IMHO, and I'd bet that more than a few serious users will stay on an older version rather than lose that particularly powerful capability.

...unless maybe(?) the Notion folks might (note:I am making a TOTALLY WILD GUESS here) have something better up their sleeve which ostensibly might obviate the need for such workarounds?

Hey Lubo what's up with this? Did something (oops) get broken or (taadaa) get improved?
-DG

Yeah, I would, but how can you roll back?

Hi guys,

This is actually something that is not intended for use with your custom rules, and therefore might change without notice (hint: its not in the custom rules documentation )

I highly recommend using the Expression Entry to get to all of your instructions.

Lubo Astinov

And is there any way to roll back?
Dear Astinov, you know me, there were no custom rules instructions when I figured out how to use them, (and wouldn't have been interested in N3 if I couldn't do so) and I also incorporated this into my workflow. Why do you make it harder for us to use your software than how hard it already was? For most problems I'd found some workaround, and have been trying to help others with them, but do I always have to be afraid that in some patch, you'll take some functionality away that is crucial for me to make N3 work?

I mean ok, I understand you change things that are pretty much behind the scenes, like this one. But I'd expect you to make them better, not just take away a functionality and instead of improving it offer nothing in it's place. I had a lot of techniques there, custom ones as well, I had to make some strange names for some of them due to clashes with other names, and they were much easier to remember when they were in the palette. So for this one, I'd have expected this to be removed when we'd get a menu option to add items to the palette.

For now it's like, yeah, you could add a technique with a click, but from now on I highly recommend you remember their exact names and type it in, even if due to similarities you might have to type more than 10 characters. Doesn't make sense.

Hi Lubo,

I don't want to be disrecpectful of your work, but having an empty midi technique tabs is totally useless and unproductive... it simply doesn't make sense... right now using midi channel is the only way to use Notion in a productive manner and the only workaround I have found so far is keep a dummy vsti staff that I select when I want to add a technique in one of my midi staff, this imply a lot of clicking around which is frustrating....

I tried myself to make it work, but I guess I was already on the wrong build expalining why it didn't work...

Can somebody point out which build allow to set midi techniques? I would also like to downgrade...

The one before the last one did allow the above mentioned lines. I don't know about the last one, I skipped that.

O, and Lubo, I don't want to be disrespectful neither, I still think N3 is the best (let me emphasise this as the most important part of this post ), but it is missing a few crucial functions (like x64 today should be the most basic thing any audio app should tackle, especialy one that wants to work with sound libraries that are tens or hundreds of gigabytes in size, also having a pretty flexible rules engine is great, but not providing an easy to use interface that allows changing those rules easily on the fly is hardly understandable for me at least, etc.), and I feel in this case N3 moved back one step in usability.

Erufailon wrote:having a pretty flexible rules engine is great, but not providing an easy to use interface that allows changing those rules easily on the fly is hardly understandable for me

I agree.
Even not involved in managing rules, I think being able to work easily with the library/ies of choice is a great competitive advantage for notation software.
The library market is getting hot: other companies offers "custom rules" in the round of weeks from launch (eg. JABB2 or MarchingBand2 to name two) either for more aged ones (eg. Xsample).
If writing them is so easy, why there's no one available?
I hope they don't leave us a step behind.
Best regards

I also think Notion is awesome, however the ONLY reason it is to me is because of the rules so I really hope it is a priority on your end, here is a few things I believe is lacking currently:

1- We should be to customize staff techniques by adding or removing them base on a list of available techniques
2- We should be able to add custom techniques and have them available as condition
3- We should be able to set unique identifier on staff so we could have different set of keyswitching on instrument sharing the same midi channel or vsti midi channel
4- We should have a condition base on staff text entries so we could trigger keyswitching base on word to allow proper usage of choir or vocal libraries

As far as rules improvement in term of usability, it could be really nice to see by staff inside of notion what is happening in the XML, so you could choose from a drop down the type of condition(articulation or techniques) you would need and then set the keyswitch and velocity bump required.

labou wrote:3- We should be able to set unique identifier on staff so we could have different set of keyswitching on instrument sharing the same midi channel or vsti midi channel

I think it would be best to allow users to add their own staff templates (like we currently have for GPO, Miroslav, VSL, EWQLSO). It would be amazing to be able to create staff templates with unique instrument IDs for any VSTi and to be able to write rules specifically to that instrument ID. The user community could take on the task of creating and modifying rules for other users.

Labou, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this would achieve the idea given above and add a lot of flexibility to Notion.

I’ve said it before, but I’d love to be able to use Garritan’s JABB or the Chris Hein Guitars libraries with instrument specific custom rules within Notion.