I don’t know if nTrack can do this but …
I am recording two instances of Battery VSTi with DFH samples. One instance has the “close-miked” drum samples, the other has the “room-miked” samples.
I haven’t figured out how to hear both at the same time when recording or with LIVE input processing. If I record on two midi tracks simultaneously, and output each to a different instance of Battery then I can only hear the output from one or the other. When I do a playback or a mixdown it works fine – I hear the output of both versions of Battery.
But I would like to hear both versions when recording. Can anyone suggest a method that might work? I have a couple of virtual midi routers to try, but I don’t see how they could help in this particular case.
Thanks,
David
Hmm, I haven’t had this problem. When I use multiple VSTi’s at once, I put them on different MIDI channels, but I have had the problem that both respond to both channels despite what I select for “Record From” – that seems to affect what gets recorded but NOT what gets sent to the VSTi’s. (Argghh!) But I didn’t do enough careful testing to write a bug report or anything. Also, the results depended on whether the VSTi had channel selection or whether it was always in “omni mode”.
But both VSTi’s played – actually, that was the problem!
The only workaround for your problem that I can think of is to render one of them to WAV and monitor that when working on the other one.
Of course, you can try playing around with the MIDI channel filters/selection in your VSTi, if it has them. For example, NIB4 only hears the MIDI channels it’s programmed for. SFZ responds to any channel and I can’t control it to be selective. Maybe your VSTi has some controls to try experimenting with.
Thanks for the response, but after reading the FAQ (question 1.p) I realize that it is impossible.
If you set the midi echo mode to “manual”, you can only output to a single VSTi midi input. If you set the mode to “auto”, then the output setting of the most recently selected midi track will be used.
Either way, you can have only a single midi output destination during recording or LIVE mode.
Oh well …
Ah, I see – you’re playing both simultaneously on keyboard(s).
Shucks, n-Track should allow this, though it’s not clear how to fit it into the existing scheme. Probably the best bet would be an option to use a new “MIDI patch panel”, where you could manually assign MIDI channels to plugin channels.
There is a way that might (but probably won’t) work: put both instuments on the same instrument channel. Use one MIDI track, and set the Channel on that track to “None”. (Once upon a time, this would allow recording multiple MIDI channels onto a single track – maybe it still does.) This will only work if both plugins allow you to program what MIDI channel to play, and assumes they’ll “pass on” all MIDI data to the next plugin in the chain. Furthermore, it will be hard making sense out of the piano roll display. But there are programs, and just might be some way in N, to split a combined track into multiple tracks, one per MIDI channel. Ugh – probably not worth the hassle.
Your idea of “chaining” VST instruments is a great idea. In fact, in another thread I found that Marce had recommended Chainer which does that.
This program can act as a VSTi, but chain together multiple VSTis to allow you to layer several instruments. It is only $60 so I will give it a try.
Thanks.