Old 02-13-2009, 11:45 AM   #1
kingmetal
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Default Record arm on signal

Short Summary: I want to make Reaper automatically record when an audio signal is passed to it, and to take itself out of record arm when no audio signal is present.

Long, probably boring story: Earlier this year I freaked out and bought an ADAT 'black face' and have been happily tracking to 8 track "tape" ever since. My ADAT has been acting funny lately, and last night it finally stopped working reliably. I'm trying to emulate my ADAT experience as best I can in Reaper. Signal flow is as follows:

Mixing Console (Yamaha 01V96)[OPTICAL] --> MDM (ADAT 'Black face')[OPTICAL] --> Audio Interface (MOTU 828MKII)[OPTICAL] --> Mixing Console [Optical]

Reaper is just acting like a tape machine, essentially. The ADAT can choose to pass signal to the DAW based on whether the track is record armed or set to monitor - and what I'd like to do ultimately is just use the record arm buttons on the ADAT to sort of approximate the record arm buttons in my DAW. I'd like Reaper to intelligently record arm tracks when the ADAT passes it signal, basically so I don't have to click things on my computer. It's easy to just leave all my tracks record-armed in Reaper and just let the DAW just record silence on tracks that aren't armed on the ADAT, but for obvious reasons that's not an optimal situation.

I know this is needlessly complicated, but at this point I think it would be interesting if only as a proof of concept. Someone on the TapeOp forums suggested using Reagate to send a midi signal to toggle record arm when it opens up. I'm going to try this when I have time this weekend. I guess the main limitation of that scenario (assuming it works at all) is that I won't be able to record silence (unless I can make it sensitive enough where the inherent noise in my pre-amps can trigger the gate... hmm!).

Anyone ever tried anything like this? I need fellow mad-scientists to help me embark in a completely weird journey!
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Old 02-16-2009, 04:50 AM   #2
darjama
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any luck with this?
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Old 02-16-2009, 08:07 AM   #3
surfsup
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My usb drive "sleeps" if its not being constantly used. There's a 5 second delay or so when it fires up so not sure how effective this is, but it sounds like a neat setup... I hope you're not going to spy on your neighbors or roommate!
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Old 02-18-2009, 01:24 AM   #4
kingmetal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by darjama View Post
any luck with this?
None so far. I'm having trouble mapping the midi "note" to anything useful.
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Old 02-18-2009, 04:44 AM   #5
darjama
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I took a slightly deeper look at this. You'll need to route the midi output of the track to a MidiYoke output (or something similar) for it to be used as controller information.

But there are another couple problems. Reaper only recognizes the note on information for these types of controls. So it doesn't recognize when the gate closes. You could probably use a midi tool to turn the note offs onto a second note on, but then the problem is the command is only a toggle. So it doesn't really know the difference between a note on and a note off. I could see that getting problematic.
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Old 02-27-2009, 07:19 AM   #6
darjama
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it looks like this is now possible with ReaConsole in the updated SWS extension, see his post here:

http://forum.cockos.com/showpost.php...3&postcount=50

So to get this working, you'll need
-A virtual midi port driver (Maple or MidiOX, both free)
-A midi plugin that can remap just the note offs (Piz VST midi plugin pack, also free))
-The latest SWS extension.

I can go into more detail if you like, but I saw over on TapeOp that you were probably taking the ADAT out of the chain, so I'm not sure this makes sense for you anymore.
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