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Re: MIDI Looping



On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Florian Anwander <fanwander@mnet-online.de> wrote:
By the way. I had a short email communication on the development of a simple MIDI-Looper with a guy who does several cool PIC based tools (Kaspar from www.frequencyresponse.ch). He is just busy at the moment doing his university degrees, but he is very interested in developing a MIDI-looper after that.

Not sure about "a simple MIDI looper" but I would definitely think a full featured MIDI Looper would be highly interesting. Either as a plug-in or as a standalone application that sends its MIDI out through a virtual MIDI pipe like Apples OS X or the MIDI Yoke hack of Windows. To me the AKAI EWI 4000s feels just as playable and expressive as an acoustic instrument when playing it as a MIDI controller. So being able to loop that MIDI would be awesome! Except of MIDI note data the EWI also uses Breath (CC#2), Sustain (CC#64), Portamento/Glide (CC#5) and Pitchbend.

A MIDI looper would need to record that stream of MIDI data just as it comes out when you play the instrument. Then the looper would need to assign a new MIDI channel for every new loop layer, because otherwise all the CC# data would interfere between the layers. This limitation gives that a MIDI looper can only record 16 layers into the loop.

There seems to be some delicate issues to solve for anyone that wants to develop a MIDI looper. I hope your friend makes a try! For me though, having changed all hardware gear into software on a laptop, I guess an audio looper will continue to be the best solutions - looping the audio output of MIDI driven electronic virtual instruments. The reason for this assumption is that I find it hard that a computer will be able to run as many virtual instruments at the same time for MIDI looping. I use some twenty to thirty instrument patches when performing with the EWI and with audio looping it doesn't tax the CPU much. Two or three patches used simultaneously in real-time is close to what an Intel Dual 2 Core 2.26 GHz can handle. Although it doesn't really seem realistic yet, MIDI looping is an interesting idea ;-)

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com