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No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

A Forum to Discuss NOTION

No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby parrondo@fis.ucm.es » Sat Feb 19, 2011 4:35 pm

Hi everybody

I've just bought Notion SLE for GPO. I am half happy, half frustrated.
Notion is a great program to make music and I'm having a lot of fun.

But this inability to record the sustain pedal is simply amazing. It took me back to 1998 when I bought my first virtual sampler. Really, I cannot believe such a limitation in a program that costs some money and tries to be an alternative to serious score software. And I'm even more surprised that, in the forum, some users think that this feature is not a priority. It makes notion completely useless for piano players or any composer who wants to add a piano line in a song.

Rewire with reaper is another source of frustration, but this is another story...

I hope Notion team will soon fix these issues. Notion is very nice but these details make it unusable in many situations and far from the pro software.

Juan
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby Charlscozz » Thu Mar 03, 2011 11:24 pm

I agree. I'm loving this program but no sustain? Has there been any coments from the Notion people in regards to this? I hope they are working on a fix.

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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby Admin » Fri Mar 04, 2011 10:20 am

parrondo@fis.ucm.es wrote:Hi everybody

I've just bought Notion SLE for GPO. I am half happy, half frustrated.
Notion is a great program to make music and I'm having a lot of fun.

But this inability to record the sustain pedal is simply amazing. It took me back to 1998 when I bought my first virtual sampler. Really, I cannot believe such a limitation in a program that costs some money and tries to be an alternative to serious score software. And I'm even more surprised that, in the forum, some users think that this feature is not a priority. It makes notion completely useless for piano players or any composer who wants to add a piano line in a song.

Rewire with reaper is another source of frustration, but this is another story...

I hope Notion team will soon fix these issues. Notion is very nice but these details make it unusable in many situations and far from the pro software.

Juan


Juan,

Sorry to hear about your frustration. This is something (pedal recording) that has been on "the dock" for a while now, and is certainly a high priority....it will be fixed but I just can't tell you exactly when.

As far as rewire and Reaper. This is a known issue and we've gone back and forth with the folks over at Reaper about the issue. From our standpoint the issue lies on their side. From their standpoint the issue lies on our side.....hopefully we'll come up with a fix soon :D
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby pcartwright » Fri Mar 04, 2011 11:36 am

Admin wrote:As far as rewire and Reaper. This is a known issue and we've gone back and forth with the folks over at Reaper about the issue. From our standpoint the issue lies on their side. From their standpoint the issue lies on our side.....hopefully we'll come up with a fix soon :D


That's interesting; I have experienced similar bugs with rewire when working in Sonar. I thought that the rewire bugs were somewhat universal; is this not the case?
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby Surfwhammy » Fri Mar 04, 2011 1:25 pm

pcartwright wrote:
Admin wrote:As far as rewire and Reaper. This is a known issue and we've gone back and forth with the folks over at Reaper about the issue. From our standpoint the issue lies on their side. From their standpoint the issue lies on our side.....hopefully we'll come up with a fix soon :D


That's interesting; I have experienced similar bugs with rewire when working in Sonar. I thought that the rewire bugs were somewhat universal; is this not the case?


I have no idea how Notion 3 handles ReWire in the Windows universe, but on the Mac it works nicely when Notion 3 is the ReWire slave and Digital Performer 7 is the ReWire host, albeit when certain very specific procedures are followed . . .

On the other hand, neither Notion 3 nor Digital Performer 7 work nicely when the very specific procedures are not followed, as is the case when one starts Reason 5 and then starts Notion 3 when the "Enable ReWire" option is selected for Notion 3, with this particular Reason 5 and Notion 3 behavior being troubling, because Reason 5 is not a ReWire host controller (in other words, Reason 5 only can act as a ReWire slave) . . .

It took me approximately 3 days to discover the specific procedures and rules required to use Notion 3 in ReWire slave mode with Digital Performer 7 as the host controller, but at least some of the 3 days was focused on learning how ReWire works, since I had never used ReWIre previously . . .

And as explained in some of my posts, the fact of the matter is that it works, which for the most part is all that matters to me in a practical way . . .

Nevertheless, since I continue to do a bit of software development (primarily on the Mac and iPhone/iPod touch/iPad), I cannot help but be curious about ReWire . . .

During the 3 or so days it took me to make sense of the various aspects of ReWire, I got a few useful insights from one of the technical support folks at MOTU, which among other things was the suggestion to do some simple tests with different applications toward the goal of verifying that Digital Performer 7 was doing ReWire correctly . . .

One of the tests I did before talking with MOTU was to start GarageBand (Apple) and then to start Notion 3 with the "Enable ReWIre" option set, and there were no problems, which from a common sense perspective strongly suggests that when an application is programmed correctly for ReWire, then Notion 3 works correctly, since as a general rule Apple applications are what one calls "well behaved" . . .

However, the Reason 5 (Propellerhead Software) and Notion 3 behavior tends to suggest otherwise, if only because the folks at Propellerhead Software designed ReWire, hence one might expect that they should know how ReWire works . . .

And while Digital Performer 7 works correctly in the Reason 5 scenario, it nevertheless misbehaves in one of the Notion 3 scenarios, where to be specific Digital Performer 7 instantly crashes, which from a software engineering perspective is the direct result of not handling an error correctly or gracefully . . .

In other words, in the particular Notion 3 and Digital Performer 7 scenario, if Digital Performer 7 displayed a message stating that it was unable to engage in a productive ReWire interactions with Notion 3, this would be fine with me, but simply crashing is not indicative of great attention to detail . . .

Overall, this reminds me of the way controlling focus in early versions of Windows worked, where the correct way to do it involved using two API functions in a very specific way essentially to create a tiny virtual time machine for purposes of making events that were queued but not completely processed effectively vanish from the queue in a way that after the fact mapped to their never actually having been queued in the first place, which is one way to explain this particular behavior . . .

Attempting to alter the event queue any other way simply failed miserably and often catastrophically, so there was only one way to do it, and it was a bit strange but more in a metaphysical or philosophical way . . .

Explained another way, it is a bit like playing a note on an electric guitar when the guitar is connected to a digital echo effect unit and the echo delay time is set to 2 seconds but immediately after playing a note, you push a button on the digital echo unit that erases the digital echo unit's memory, hence even though you actually played the note on the guitar and the note was recorded in the digital echo unit's memory for subsequent repetition, pressing the "reset memory" button essentially "unplayed" the note for all practical purposes, at least for the digital echo unit . . .

So, one of my hypotheses is that there is a very subtle nuance to ReWire that requires applications to do certain things in very specific ways that might not be so well documented or easily understood . . .

From my perspective, the fact that GarageBand (Apple) works flawlessly in a ReWire environment essentially is the "gold standard" . . .

First starting Reason 5 and then starting Notion 3 with its "Enable ReWire" option previously set causing Notion 3 to crash is a clue . . .

Digital Performer 7 not being to handle being started in a way that causes it to be a ReWire slave, which results in Digital Performer 7 immediately crashing, is another clue, which is significant from my perspective because Digital Performer has been a Mac-only application for at least a decade, which strongly suggests that the folks at MOTU are highly skilled Mac programmers, hence there never should be anything that causes a MOTU product to crash on a Mac . . .

It is an interesting puzzle, and I think that there is a solution, but at present I have no idea what it might be, although I strongly suspect that it is a matter of the way the ReWIre interapplication communication protocol and overall application and operating system timing and synchronization aspects are handled in real-time on the fly, which for example might be resolved by resorting to doing something so simple as adding a few lines of code to increment an integer variable in a loop enough times to slow everything for enough time to allow already queued events to reify, which is one of the ways low-level C programmers control time in event, message, and transaction based operating systems where there are multiple levels and types of queues . . .

Explained yet another way, it is like doing what I call "playing into" the delayed echoes of an echo unit, which is a lot of FUN for lead guitar but is a bit strange until you discover the rules . . .

Initially, you have to prime the echo unit's queue, which takes a second or so, but once the echoes are working nicely you switch to what effectively is playing ahead of what the echoes will be sometime in the near future, which makes sense if you have discovered how to do it but probably makes no sense otherwise . . .

Or, consider that you are conducting a very unusual orchestra, where each section (strings, brass, woodwinds, and so forth) is in a different location somewhere in the world and each section has a pair of microphones that record what the section is doing, followed by everything being digitized and then transmitted to your location via the web . . .

And your goal as conductor is to get all the various sections synchronized in such a way that the audience simply hears a finely tuned and very precisely synchronized orchestra . . .

In this scenario, the fact of the matter is that the virtual orchestra cannot play any faster than the slowest section, and in fact has to play just a tiny bit slower due to the processing required to buffer and sequence all the various sections, and so forth and so on . . .

Stated another way, it is a matter of controlling and manipulating spacetime for the betterment and enlightenment of others, and on the Mac when one follows the required procedures and rules Notion 3 is a consistently accurate and reliable "good citizen" when it is operating in ReWire slave mode and Digital Performer 7 is the ReWire host, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous! :)

P. S. It probably is the same in the Windows universe, since like Mac OS X it is an event, message, and transaction based operating system, as is Linux, and the same basic rules apply, although the API stuff has different names, design patterns, and so forth and so on, but who cares, because at the dawn of the early-21st century it all runs on Intel or Intel-compatible hardware . . .
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby pcartwright » Mon Mar 07, 2011 9:28 pm

pcartwright wrote:
Admin wrote:As far as rewire and Reaper. This is a known issue and we've gone back and forth with the folks over at Reaper about the issue. From our standpoint the issue lies on their side. From their standpoint the issue lies on our side.....hopefully we'll come up with a fix soon :D


That's interesting; I have experienced similar bugs with rewire when working in Sonar. I thought that the rewire bugs were somewhat universal; is this not the case?


Looks like I was very wrong on this matter. I almost exclusively use Reaper as a DAW, and I must have forgotten some of my Sonar chops... regardless, I did some tweaking with Sonar's audio settings, and sure enough, Notion works pretty darn well with Sonar. My apologies to the Notion team for thinking the rewire issue was global. I hope that whatever issues exists between Reaper and Notion is corrected at some point, though.
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby BrundleFly » Sun Dec 09, 2012 3:57 pm

Admin wrote:This is something (pedal recording) that has been on "the dock" for a while now, and is certainly a high priority....it will be fixed but I just can't tell you exactly when.


Recording sustain controllers was a high priority 20 months ago, and didn't make it into Notion 4? This really needs to get done in my view. At the very least, Notion should be able to process sustain controllers present in an imported MIDI file.

Incidentally, it seems the placement resolution for pedal markings is limited to an eighth note; do I have that right? To get the proper playback result in some instances, I need to be able to position pedal markings at a finer resolution.
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby Jake Johnson » Wed Dec 12, 2012 11:04 pm

(Just deleted my earlier post after making a discovery.)

Actually, Notion DOES record pedal, now, but you have to be in the Midi-Score scoring interface instead of the standard score view. Not sure what happens if one converts it to a regular score. One work-around, in any case, would be to use Save as to save the file with another name before using Convert to Notation.
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby Surfwhammy » Thu Dec 13, 2012 12:49 am

Jake Johnson wrote:(Just deleted my earlier post after making a discovery.)

Actually, Notion DOES record pedal, now, but you have to be in the Midi-Score scoring interface instead of the standard score view. Not sure what happens if one converts it to a regular score. One work-around, in any case, would be to use Save as to save the file with another name before using Convert to Notation.


Excellent! :)

[NOTE: For reference, the quote from "Admin" actually was from March 2011, nearly two years ago . . . ]

NOTION 4 actually has a lot of new stuff, and it includes corrections for a lot of stuff that needed correcting, and there is more MIDI stuff, as well as ReWire 2 (64-bits), where there was enough MIDI stuff to do External MIDI to control and to play instruments in Reason (Propellerhead Software) with NOTION 3, but it is easier with NOTION 4, and I did a video demonstrating it on the Mac last week or thereabout, where ReWire 2 is a key part of the overall infrastructure . . .

The most elaborate experiment involved having Digital Performer 8 (MOTU) as the ReWIre 2 host controller and NOTION 4 and Reason 6.5 as ReWire 2 slaves, but additionally NOTION 4 was playing two of the Reason 6.5 instruments via the music notation on two External MIDI staves in the NOTION 4 score, while NOTION 4 also was controlling and playing two MachFive 3 (MOTU) VSTI virtual instruments via music notation in the NOTION 4 score, where the audio generated by the two MachFive 3 synthesizers was sent from NOTION 4 to Digital Performer 8 via ReWire 2 but the audio generated by the two Reason 6.5 instruments controlled and played from the NOTION 4 score was sent to Digital Performer 8 by Reason 6.5 via ReWire 2, which is a bit mind-boggling, really . . .

Really! :ugeek:

But from my perspective, the most important thing is that NOTION 4 is the foundation in the sense that everything derives from the NOTION 4 scores and corresponding music notation, which becomes the source for the music other than the real instruments and singing, of course . . .

There are several options with respect to the specific instruments that actually play the notes specified in the NOTION 4 score, where one option is that the instruments are VSTi virtual instruments; another option is that the instruments are NOTION 4 Bundled instruments; another option is that the instruments are Reason 6.5 instruments; and the fourth option is that the instruments are real synthesizers like the KORG Triton Music Workstation (88-keys) or Alesis ION Analog Modeling Synthesizer (49-keys) here in the sound isolation studio, where the latter two playing strategies use External MIDI staves with the Reason 6.5 strategy using virtual MIDI cables, since it is application-to-application on the same computer, but the KORG Triton and Alesis ION strategy uses real MIDI cables, since the KORG Triton and Alesis ION are real external synthesizers which support MIDI . . .

When you add real instruments like electric guitars and real singing through microphones where the real stuff interfaces with the digital computer via an external digital audio interface like the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid, then I think this covers just about everything that is possible, especially when you add some scripting via Kontakt 5 (Native Instruments) and MachFive 3 (MOTU), where "scripting" refers to the ability to write small high-level programs in a scripting language for doing various types of musical stuff, which can be triggered or played via certain types of MIDI commands, instructions, change commands, or whatever, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous! :D

P. S. Some of this stuff worked fine in NOTION 3, but at the time I did not know enough about the various technologies to make sense of how to do it. However, I think that the improvements and enhancements to MIDI in NOTION 4 combined with improvements and enhancements due to using ReWIre 2 make some of the activities easier. Also, I have been watching MIDI tutorials to get a better understanding of what MIDI is and how it works, but regardless, it was not so difficult to do once I keyed on the "virtual MIDI cable" concept and found an example that showed step-by-step exactly how to do it, which then made all the External MIDI stuff start working . . .
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Re: No sustain pedal? I can't believe it

Postby BrundleFly » Fri Dec 14, 2012 1:37 pm

Jake Johnson wrote:(Just deleted my earlier post after making a discovery.)

Actually, Notion DOES record pedal, now, but you have to be in the Midi-Score scoring interface instead of the standard score view. Not sure what happens if one converts it to a regular score. One work-around, in any case, would be to use Save as to save the file with another name before using Convert to Notation.


Thanks, Jake; that's good to know. But after experimenting with it, I see that it doesn't help get me to my ultimate goal of getting CC64 events converted to Pedal markings because Notion does not convert them automatically, and doesn't display them in the sequencer staff to facilitate entering them manually. But thanks for the heads up.

Incidentally, I filed a bug report about pedal markings when I discovered that a Pedal Up stops a tied note. :(
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