Inspector with articulation management

[stephane]

Hi,

For several months, I have been working on a track inspector which can manage articulation list (if you know Expression Maps in Cubase, you should be interested in this inspector).

Basically, by clicking on buttons, keyswitches are sent to a vsti (Kontakt, Play, ...) and they can be added into the piano roll as program changes in the Bank/Program Select midi controller. Articulation list comes from .reabank file, the instrument definition (.reabank files are just an ascii text file, which can be created and edited with a notepad).

Because I wanted a tool to speed up my workflow, I also added a track list panel, where tracks with their envelopes can be shown and hidden on the fly.

There are also some other cool features, like:
- basic features to manage track name, color, height, arm, mute, solo, map input midi channel
- track scenes: to easily show/hide group of tracks
- piano roll scene: to easily select midi controllers in the piano roll view
- keyswitches filters by midi channel
- etc...

See below some screenshots and animated gif to have an idea on what it looks like.

For the moment it isn't available (still being tested). It will be released as soon as possible and I will let you know. Any feedback is welcome.

I'm sure you will have a lot of questions. I will try to answer the best I can.
Just be indulgent with my English :-)

Thanks

PS: Writing documentation is a painful task, all developers know that and that's why they do not like to do it (like myself )


==========
History
==========
24/11/2016

The script is now available here: http://sfer.online.free.fr/
This is a demo version.
Please read User Guide pdf file in documentation folder to know how to install and run the inspector
Some .reabank files are available in Reabank section on the site.
Unzip archive and copy .reabank files in reabank folder of the inspector directory.
Don't hesitate to share yours later.



==========

1) Track Inspector and Track List panel



2) Track Inspector (global view)



3) Track List (global view)



4) Track Inspector : main features



5) Right click on a button to add articulation into the piano roll in Bank/Program select midi controller



6) Track List : main features + scene management



7) Piano roll scene



8) Keyswitches filters by midi channels



10) Exemple with Kontakt



==========

[teniente powell]

Fantastic!!!

[X-Raym]

Woo that's quite advanced for a first script haha Good work man,
now need to read all the doc to the see what it does precisely :P

Nice GUI BTW !

EDIT: how will you share this script ?

[tack]

This is a solidly impressive looking effort, stephane.

Coincidentally, I've been hacking on something similar over the past couple of weeks, to provide a better UI for managing articulations. We seem to have taken similar approaches, although given the limitations of Reaper, IMO there really only is one sensible way to solve this problem.

I'm curious if/how you've managed to overcome these issues:

1. There's no way to refresh a .reabank file after making changes. It seems to be necessary to restart Reaper (or perhaps just reloading the project would work -- it's just as disruptive) for it to pick up changes. Have you found a way to beat Reaper into submission here?

2. Did you find a way to programmatically set the .reabank file for a MIDI item? As far as I could see this has to be done manually.

3. I'm guessing you need a JSFX inserted on the track to convert program change events to something the VSTi can handle (such as note-based keyswitches)? I don't see this as much of an issue, but it's the only solution I could find. I'm curious if you've implemented it a different way and managed to get the main Reascript intercepting/translating the program changes.

Thanks for giving us an early preview of your work!

[semiquaver]

subscribe!

[ijijn]

Nice work!

It's staggering how many of us are slogging away on our own virtual instrument plugins.

[stephane]

Thank you all for your comments. I really appreciate.

Originally Posted by X-Raym

Woo that's quite advanced for a first script haha

Indeed, it's my first script. I started to work and program it in July. I started to learn LUA (I didn't know this langage) and reaper API. Then I developped the graphical library and only after the inspector. A long way :-)

Originally Posted by X-Raym

now need to read all the doc to the see what it does precisely :P

It's on the way. French documentation first (easier for me). Almost finished. Then english translation I hope.

Originally Posted by X-Raym

EDIT: how will you share this script ?

Very soon I hope. It will be the best way to get feedback.
Still being testing on mac and windows to look for issues.

Originally Posted by tack

1. There's no way to refresh a .reabank file after making changes. It seems to be necessary to restart Reaper (or perhaps just reloading the project would work -- it's just as disruptive) for it to pick up changes. Have you found a way to beat Reaper into submission here?

Indeed it was an issue that I solved by changing programmatically this entry in reaper.ini file. Looks weird but it works. Don't ask me why...

mididefbankprog=/Users/me/Library/Application Support/REAPER/Scripts/Inspector/reabank/Strings/Spitfire Chamber Strings/Spitfire Chamber Strings.reabank

Update mididefbankprog with the full path of the current .reabank used
Then if the piano roll is open, needs to be refresh. First, I run this commands to do the trick

reaper.Main_OnCommand( 40716, 0 )
reaper.Main_OnCommand( 40716, 1 )

But I found a better way with track chunk. Once again, just by only running these following commands, you can change on the fly the .reabank file loaded in a track.

local item = reaper.GetSelectedMediaItem(0,0)
if item == nil then return false end
local retval, chunk = reaper.GetItemStateChunk(item, "", 0)
reaper.SetItemStateChunk(item, chunk, 0)

This is the only way I found to see correct midi data in Bank/Program Select midi controller in the piano roll and to refresh a .reabank file after making changes.
Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by tack

2. Did you find a way to programmatically set the .reabank file for a MIDI item? As far as I could see this has to be done manually.

I wrote all .reabank manually with a notepad.

Originally Posted by tack

3. I'm guessing you need a JSFX inserted on the track to convert program change events to something the VSTi can handle (such as note-based keyswitches)? I don't see this as much of an issue, but it's the only solution I could find. I'm curious if you've implemented it a different way and managed to get the main Reascript intercepting/translating the program changes.

Absolutely. A jsfx is required (before Kontakt or Play in the fx chain) to send/route midi data to the correct midi channels. I wrote my own version to manage midi data sent by the inspector when buttons/keyswitches are pressed.
The difficulty was to manage 127 keyswitches/midi channel, 16 midi channels for each Kontakt/Play instance, all in the same jsfx. For the moment, it seems to work

[Lannister]

This looks awesome!

[hopi]

this looks to be a super useful tool.... great idea and great work!

[tack]

I wonder, stephane, how have you found Reaper's stability while injecting program change MIDI events? I generally have Reaper hang on me multiple times a day, as one of its threads goes into a busy loop.

I haven't reported this yet because I've not been able to find a reliable recipe to reproduce (and I've noticed that nontrivial bugs generally don't get fixed, let alone inconsistent nontrivial bugs).

Stack trace shows the problem is in reaper_midi.dll. I'm wondering if you've experienced this kind of instability yourself? If it's not just me, I might submit a bug report anyway. Maybe it'll even get fixed within the decade.

I think the problem is with either reaper.MIDI_InsertEvt() or reaper.StufMIDIMessage(), but I can't be sure.

ntdll.dll!memcpy+0x305
ntdll.dll!RtlReAllocateHeap+0xb5d
ntdll.dll!RtlReAllocateHeap+0x12f
ntdll.dll!RtlReAllocateHeap+0x31
reaper_midi.dll!ReaperPluginEntry+0x9bfef
reaper_midi.dll+0x8929b
reaper_midi.dll+0xdda48
reaper.exe+0x4638dc
reaper.exe+0x465ddb
reaper.exe+0x465cd9
reaper.exe+0x3eb43
reaper.exe+0x52575
reaper.exe+0x3ef14
reaper.exe+0x35b72
reaper.exe+0x3e4c4
reaper.exe+0x3dfdf
reaper.exe+0x35aa7
reaper.exe+0x565b88
reaper.exe+0x534c6d
reaper.exe+0x16e0c4
reaper.exe+0x16cb08
reaper.exe+0x33b84a
USER32.dll!IsChild+0x2e2
USER32.dll!CallMsgFilterW+0x1c6
USER32.dll!UnpackDDElParam+0x789
USER32.dll!CallWindowProcW+0x4f4
USER32.dll!DispatchMessageW+0x1bc
reaper.exe+0x335d3e
reaper.exe+0x728e21
KERNEL32.DLL!BaseThreadInitThunk+0x14
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x21

[stephane]

@tack:
I didn't noticed any issues as you describe them.
To deal with midi I'm using these 3 functions and I didn't experience instabillity.
It was unstable when bad parameters were sent: my fault.
I was also especially careful about CPU usage. Open the Performance Meter (View menu) and see what is displayed. Graphical operations are very time consumming (displaying and refreshing buttons, sliders, etc... in your script if you developed our own graphical library for the UI). That could explain some bad results.

reaper.MIDI_InsertCC()
reaper.StuffMIDIMessage
reaper.UpdateItemInProject()

[tack]

You aren't using reaper.MIDI_InsertEvt()? I'd be curious to learn how you are adding the program change event if not with that function.

If I can rewrite to avoid that function I'll see if the instability goes away.

This isn't just about poor performance, rather it's about reaper hanging forever and it needs to be killed. Also the stack trace shows it's stuck in the midi dll which points away from gfx operations. I really haven't had any issues with gfx performance myself. I've been pretty careful to optimize that.

[sambosun]

Say is there a way to bind the articulation to midi notes? Meaning when moving midi notes the articulation (program change moves with it?)

Subscribed! Keep up the great work!

[pcartwright]

Originally Posted by stephane

5) Right click on a button to add articulation into the piano roll in Bank/Program select midi controller

This intrigues me most of all and will speed up my workflow considerably.

A few questions:

Will text also appear in the notation view when an articulation is inserted?

Furthermore, would it make sense for certain articulations to automatically trigger bank selection (i.e. spiccato mark would automatically place the bank value associated with 1:9, slur would add 1:0, etc.)? Or, conversely, right clicking the button would add the notation symbols to the impacted notes?

[LeBeginner]

Hi !

No, the text won't appear in the Notation editor since it doesn't display the midi lanes (and so the Bank/Program Select where the keyswitches are displayed).
But It wouldn't be very usefull since you can be lead to change your keyswitches every two or three notes (depending on your instruments).
For your second question, I'll let Stephane answers. He IS the jedi master, I'm juste the humble padawan !!!

[pcartwright]

Thanks for answering my questions.

It would be great if this had some connection to the notation view. Either taking notation items and converting them to bank changes or taking bank changes and converting to notation.

[LeBeginner]

Originally Posted by pcartwright

Thanks for answering my questions.

It would be great if this had some connection to the notation view. Either taking notation items and converting them to bank changes or taking bank changes and converting to notation.

Yes, but according to my experience in midi mockup. Even with an extensive description of the articulations in the notation sheets, you always need to go back to the midi lane to modify at least CC1 (Modwheel), CC7 (Volume), CC11 (Expression) and Velocities.
As I said, you can be lead to change your articulation every 2 or 3 notes on the same musical phrase, just to make it feel more human and avoid any machine gun effect. This can't be done on the notation editor.

But of course, only Stephane will tell you what will come in the future.
I'm just a beta-tester !

[ijijn]

That's interesting. From my experience, I feel that you can automate almost all of this process without sacrificing realism, and even produce more consistent and musical output as a result. Complex smooth curves for dynamics, vibrato and/or pitch bend, for example, are easily generated from a small amount of source material, as well as proper articulation selection within an appropriate subset for each situation, based on velocity, length, interval and overlap.

Another benefit is that your music is much more manageable, adaptable and portable, as there aren't keyswitches and CCs all over the place. And you can tie into notation for various contexts such as sul ponticello, pizzicato or con sordino.

[tyllmusic]

First and foremost thanks a lot for all the work you have done! I checked back about twice a day for the last week to see when this comes online ;-)

Now, apparently I am too stupid to get this running. From what I understand I have done everything as asked in the "installation" section of the manual, but I still do get an error (ReaScript Error) saying: tmp.lua:199: attempt to index a nil value (field '?').
Is this a known issue? Maybe someone else is experiencing this as well.

I'm using Reaper v5.28 on a Mac (Sierra) and updated to the newest SWS version.

[stephane]

@tyllmusic:
1. Do you see the files inspector.ini and inspector.lua in the same folder ?
2. what is you unarchiver program to unzip the file ?

I'm supposing you're running Reaper v5.28 64 bits isn't it ?

EDIT: I did a test with a new fresh install of reaper 5.28 64bits + the lastest SWS/S&M (2.8.3) on windows (not mac yet. I will be abble to test on mac only tonight when I will be back at home) and it works like a charm.

EDIT2: you should see these files & folders in: $REAPER\Scripts\Inspector

[tyllmusic]

Thanks for the quick reply.
Yes it's 64bit and yes both files are in the same folder. I moved the whole folder (including the three files inspector.dat, inspector.ini and inspector.lua as well as the folders documentation, jsfx, libs, reabank and skins to Mackintosh HD/Users/tyll/Library/Application Support/REAPER/Scripts/Inspector. I also moved the JSFX to the MIDI effects folder as described in the manual. The JS also shows up in reaper.

Strangely enough the files are not zipped at all. At least Finder does not show them as compressed. I downloaded from your website. Do you have any alternative download that I should use?

[stephane]

@tyllmusic
I'm using keka as a free unarchiver on my mac
http://www.kekaosx.com/
Could you make a try with it please ?

The location where you moved all files and folders is the correct place

[tyllmusic]

It looks exactly like that. Do I have to move anything into the reabank folder? Or do anything else with the reabank? I have never handled any reabank files before or worked with anything like that.

[Samy12]

Reabank write for Hollywood strings first violins ! I try to get time for the others and when i finish, i share with you !

[jadedsean]

[QUOTE=stephane;1755363]Hi,
I'm sure you will have a lot of questions. I will try to answer the best I can.
Hi Stephane, thank you for this it looks amazing but i'm some difficulty and wondered if you could help? Anyway i have done the install as stated in the documentation and inspector is there but for some reason i'm missing the midi channel strip, all i have is the top half and bottom half and the rest is blank. Also when i open my piano roll from a midi item the Inspector is not there it opens up in a separate piano roll window. Lastly when i try to open the scenes in the drop down menu it won't open. What am doing wrong? I'm sure it's something silly i missed.

Cheers

Sean

[stephane]

[QUOTE=jadedsean;1764516]

Originally Posted by stephane

Hi,
I'm sure you will have a lot of questions. I will try to answer the best I can.
Hi Stephane, thank you for this it looks amazing but i'm some difficulty and wondered if you could help? Anyway i have done the install as stated in the documentation and inspector is there but for some reason i'm missing the midi channel strip, all i have is the top half and bottom half and the rest is blank. Also when i open my piano roll from a midi item the Inspector is not there it opens up in a separate piano roll window. Lastly when i try to open the scenes in the drop down menu it won't open. What am doing wrong? I'm sure it's something silly i missed.

Cheers

Sean

Hello Sean
Can you tell me what is your setup:
- windows or mac
- n° version of reaper, 32 or 64 bits
Could you take a screenshot of the inspector to see the problem
Thanks

[jadedsean]

Cheers for the quick reply Stephane, yeah i'm on a PC windows 10 64 bit, i'm on reaper 5.29 the latest version. trying to upload a screen shot but having problems uploading

[Vagalume]

This is simply awesome !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Hafer]

Good news, Inspector seems to be out of beta now.
Meaning: should be, since access is donation-blocked now ;-)

[G-Sun]

This is looking so good,
that I'll hope it will be ported to native.

[parr]

Hello,

Here a happy user of Inspector. Works great! Just a suggestion. I only use heavily two sizes for tracks, tiny and normal. Would it be possible an option to use just two and, more important, in that case avoid the menu and have just a toggle button? That is, you click once and all tracks become tiny, you click again and all tracks are normal. In fact, for all tracks, I would only need a single tiny button. This would be great for me.

Does anybody feel the same?

J

[stephane]

Originally Posted by parr

Hello,
Would it be possible an option to use just two ... tiny and normal

Edit inspector.ini file (in your $REAPER/Scripts/Inspector directory) and remove unwanted values in [track_height] section by deleting unnecessary lines

[track_height]
1=Tiny|1
2=Small|0
3=Normal|62
4=Medium|82
5=Large|150

[track_height]
1=Tiny|1
2=Normal|62

[sproost]

Hi,
there is probably a good deal ignorance in this question seeing that I"m a little out of my depth with how this script really works, but I was wondering if this works while having different Midi ports.

Seeing that I (and probably many others) use Vienna Ensemble Pro to host many libraries, they're all set up spawning over a multitude of midi ports. I would, for example, have a Flute library and all articulations going on Midi Port 2 - Channel 1 until 8. Would the track inspector articulation chooser still work?

Important to note here is that Vienna's VST3 plug does not support Program Change messages

[Tod]

Hi stephane, This all sounds very interesting, but I have a question.

All the instruments I use keyswitchs on, are in Kontakt.

Many of these instruments use stacked keyswitchs that are in the same time/grid position. There are 2, 3, and 4 switchs, all in one position that control 2, 3, or 4 notes and their CC controllers.

In order for them to work, they need to be offset from each other slightly, with the corresponding notes being offset the same. The picture below shows how it might be setup.

The image on the left is zoomed out and the one on the right zoomed in to give you a better idea of how they might be stacked. Also notice their separation, if they were positioned much closer, they might not work, because it requires a little time between them for the keyswitch to be effective.

So my question is, will I be able to achieve this with your script?

[stephane]

Hi Tod

Sorry, but the script can't manage stacked keyswitches.
I understand very well what you are trying to achieve, but I have to confess that it's not currently possible

[Tod]

Originally Posted by stephane

Hi Tod

Sorry, but the script can't manage stacked keyswitches.
I understand very well what you are trying to achieve, but I have to confess that it's not currently possible

Okay, thanks stephane, I kind of figured that.

[Kylo]

Originally Posted by stephane

Hi,

For several months, I have been working on a track inspector which can manage articulation list (if you know Expression Maps in Cubase, you should be interested in this inspector).

Basically, by clicking on buttons, keyswitches are sent to a vsti (Kontakt, Play, ...) and they can be added into the piano roll as program changes in the Bank/Program Select midi controller. Articulation list comes from .reabank file, the instrument definition (.reabank files are just an ascii text file, which can be created and edited with a notepad).

Because I wanted a tool to speed up my workflow, I also added a track list panel, where tracks with their envelopes can be shown and hidden on the fly.

There are also some other cool features, like:
- basic features to manage track name, color, height, arm, mute, solo, map input midi channel
- track scenes: to easily show/hide group of tracks
- piano roll scene: to easily select midi controllers in the piano roll view
- keyswitches filters by midi channel
- etc...

See below some screenshots and animated gif to have an idea on what it looks like.

For the moment it isn't available (still being tested). It will be released as soon as possible and I will let you know. Any feedback is welcome.

I'm sure you will have a lot of questions. I will try to answer the best I can.
Just be indulgent with my English :-)

Thanks

PS: Writing documentation is a painful task, all developers know that and that's why they do not like to do it (like myself )


==========
History
==========
24/11/2016

The script is now available here: http://sfer.online.free.fr/
This is a demo version.
Please read User Guide pdf file in documentation folder to know how to install and run the inspector
Some .reabank files are available in Reabank section on the site.
Unzip archive and copy .reabank files in reabank folder of the inspector directory.
Don't hesitate to share yours later.



==========

1) Track Inspector and Track List panel



2) Track Inspector (global view)



3) Track List (global view)



4) Track Inspector : main features



5) Right click on a button to add articulation into the piano roll in Bank/Program select midi controller



6) Track List : main features + scene management



7) Piano roll scene



8) Keyswitches filters by midi channels



10) Exemple with Kontakt



==========

I can only assume we would use the same concept of creating custom rebank file methods as reaticulate?