Hi, I'm writing the music for a mobile game. I've tried lots of sequencers Cubase, Acid reason etc. but I've noticed all have very poor support for writing music with midi tones. They often produce very large midis or map the sounds incorrectly. If anyone has any experience could they tell me whats the best software for writing pure midi music? I'm using windows XP btw. Cheers, Ian

cakewalk? :D>.

You dont sound too confident?
I think you might be right...have u tried the other major ones?

I use Cubase and never had a problem making MIDI's. What is the issue with Cubase and MIDI? Maybe I can help.

Hi,
Using cubase sx 2.
To be honest I'm tired of it, more bugs that your average bed matress.
Main problem is exporting midi tracks.
The only was I can export a track with the correct sounds is to set midi type 1 and include sends!
I dont even have any midi sends in the project..but its the only way to get it to ,map the sounds. Plua it add loads of data to the file. I need to keep it extra tight.
If I dont include sends everything is just piano. If I export with sends everything sounds ok but the files are extremely large.
For example a file goes from about 10k to about 50k !
Cubase is doing all sorts of things like repeating the drum sounds in all the tracks.
My drum track is just set to GM drum map.

So any idea how I get it to export a midi file with all the drums and sounds correct and with no redundant data?

Cheers
Ian

Um, try MIDI Orchestrator Plus by Voyetra. I dunno if they even make it anymore; if they do, you can prolly pick it up cheap. If you're looking to use the General MIDI tones that come on any standard soundcard, Orchestrator is a very good program. It doesn't support plugins or anything fancy, but it doesn't sound like you need those anyway.

FLStudio has served me well for over a year now - I use it almost exclusively for MIDI.

[Edited by - zircon_st on January 21, 2005 12:23:34 PM]

Hi all
Yeah they all claim to support midi.
And they do in the sence you can record midi and use it to trigger devices.
However if you want to export midi. Just to play exclusivly on a midi device I have found the sequencers to be very poor.
I've tried Acid:
This adds extra data to the file
Cubase SX:
Exports large files, which often have redundant data or other problems. (see my last post, I doubt they fixed it in sx 3)
Reason 2.5
Doesnt have proper mapping export options. Basically everything you export gets set to 0, a piano sound!
Ableton Live 4:
Similar export options to reason.

I installed the cakewalk demo, abd the midi editing is fine but the demo wouldnt let me export a midi at all so I couldnt test it.

The poor support is because no-one rights pre midi music anymore using only GM sounds.

I'm doing it for a phone. Anyone in the same situation?
Whats the story with exporting GM drums?
Anyone got any ideas at the SX2 midi export options before I go buying a new sequencer?

Thanks for the tips I'll download some demos of other sequencers but demos usually disable midi export which is exactly the feature I need to test!

Cheers
Ian

Might stick with cubase SX for the moment. Apart from its export weirdness and multiple bugs it kind of working. So tired of people releasing 1/2 finished audio software...you'd be suprised how broken/buggy some of the major sequencers are.
The only one I've tried that really works great is Propellerheads reason. It doesnt map midi files correctly though.

I've finished the music in Cubase but the files its chucking out are way to big plus it only maps the sounds correclty if I export with sends (even though none of the tracks have sends) this seems to make them twice as big?

Quote:

Original post by joninty Reason 2.5 Doesnt have proper mapping export options. Basically everything you export gets set to 0, a piano sound! Ableton Live 4: Similar export options to reason.

Everyone is using virtual instruments and hardware instruments, the GM mapping is almost NEVER used. When exporting a MIDI file, it's usually for use in another project, with another instrument, which will have an entirely different mapping. It's more annoying to have to reset the mapping every time you import a MIDI (because the mapping is imported too) than just ignore all mapping in MIDI and import just the notes into the track, keeping the track's settings. It is the most user friendly way of handling project MIDI.

Now, if you want the _end result_ of your project to be MIDI, it's probably going to be pretty annoying to you, but how often does this happen?

Anyway, you can get an upgrade to Cubase SX3 from your SX2 for cheap, to solve a whole bunch of bugs and get a number of nice new features.