Quicktime Music Synthesizer?

[lesag002]

Has anyone used the QT synthesizer for midi tracks? I'm new to midi and computer recording and, to save money, was planning on just using the QT instruments with Metro SE to start. I think they sound ok, but all of them have a hall reverb setting on them. How do I turn that off? Do I need to purchase QT pro to do that?

[Jerm]

Mark,

No you do not need Quicktime pro. There is a controller that you can send to the Quicktime synth to set the level of reverb on a given MIDI channel. I believe it is either 91 or 93.

Alternatively, you should think about these options depending on the OS you are using:

OS X -- search this forum for Soundfont. The DLS Apple Music device is a plug-in included with the OS that plays back sound fonts and the quality is much better than Quicktime musical instruments.

OS 9 -- There are many excellent sample players that kick QT's butt. For example, Sampletank is awesome and there is a free version called sampletank free. I think the site is www.sampletank.com

Each OS also has other options for using your computer as a sampler without the need for external MIDI hardware. Bitheadz unity is another example. http://www.bitheadz.com/

[Scoot]

To assist you further on removing your reverb......this is how you can control volume, pan and other controllers like reverb.

- Open Metro

- Goto the SETUP menu and select FAVOURITE CONTROLLERS

- Clicking on items in this list will activate them when they are bold to be used later on. Trust me.

- Click through the list and turn them all off for now except for 7:Volume, 10:Pan and 91:Reverb (double click to rename to reverb if necessary).

- Click OK

- Open the graphic editor window (Command J) and select a midi track and set PORT as internal for the QT instruments. You can now use the pencil tool and paint a few notes in the graphic editor.

- Go back and Play them.

- Now where it says Notes (left of PORT) go and change that to Controller:

- Now you can select the volume, pan and reverb of the midi sounds.

- Choose pan and draw a sin wave with the pencil covering the distance of the notes you just drew. (You can also use the curve tools to either draw a curve (duh!) or a straight line. The pencil will draw a horizontal straight with the option key held down).

- In headphones or stereo speakers when you hit play, you should hear the notes going left to right or back again. Pan is centred at 64.
The volume and reverb levels work from 0 and go up to 128.
If your last pen mark in the volume controller was say 32, it will stay at that level until it is changed again.....maybe later in the tune.

HOT TIP - Above the track name is a + symbol. You can hit it a few times to create more tracks. You can also VIEW different settings of the same track. You could look at the notes, volume, pan, program changes and pitch bends all at once. It's so simple its great.

If you record volume and pan changes in the instruments window, these changes can also be seen in the graphic editor by choosing those controllers.

OK I'm finished now!
If you already knew all this forget I mentioned it.

Good luck in your metro'ing.

Now go back and add more controllers to your favourites and see what they do.

[Scoot]

It just an opinion but I had a friends copy of Unity DS-1 while he was on holiday (yes I was keen to buy it) but when I tried to remove it, it kept on hanging my Mac on startup. So I removed the sounds and just left the extensions on at startup. Most annoying. Now I have a clean OS9 and will never install such a silly thing again.

It was version 2 and seemed like a whole lot of things just thrown together and didn't feel like one package. At pro tools demos the gurus behind the mac used to oohhh and ahhh over it but maybe that was because it had so many settings. Then again I've been to a few demo shows and the audio they produce is really awful.

I do have sampletank free. It seems to get really bad reviews but seems to work ok and do what it's supposed to. Maybe it just doesn't have enough bits to fiddle with for the tweekers out there in review land or they reviewed an early version. The LE version is well priced if you don't want to fork out for a real synth. Battery from Native Ins. is a goodie for drum sounds. I'm sure there are others out there if you want to go looking.
Of course it all boils down to the kind of sounds you are looking for!

[Jerm]

One minor correction to scooterman's post. Controllers actually range from 0-127.

As for DS-Unity I have not tried any recent versions but I know they just released a new version and I am supposed to receive a copy soon for evaluation.

As for Sampletank, I have the middle version SampleTank L. It is great. The sounds are tremendous and so is the reliability. I just wish it were OS X compatible. Like many VST plug-ins, there is a bug where it leaks 64k of memory when it is unloaded.

[Scoot]

>One minor correction to scooterman's post. Controllers actually range from 0-127.

Actually I did know that but Metro doesn't.

0 at the bottom
64 in the middle
128 at the top.

The line draws to 127 but it does show 128 on screen and I thought it might avoid confusion when looking in the graphic editor.

[buserror]

It is possible to disable completely the internal reverb of the AUMusicDevice programaticaly; it is is fact a good idea if you want to use the other AUMatrixReverb or another one next in the chain.

It migth be worth a new checkbox somewhere?

[Jerm]

Buserror, yes!

The Apple reverb uses a ton of processing power. Currently it is possible to disable the apple reverb but it is a bit inconvenient and counter-intuitive.

To disable the reverb:
1. assign the DLS music device on an aux buss. This is mandatory.
2. In the effects window, select off for stereo output 0. This step tells metro to disable the reverb and output a dry signal on stereo output 1.
3. Route output 1 to some appropriate aux buss. e.g. itself or a higher numbered aux buss.

(I am using computer numbering in the above instructions regarding stereo outputs. 0 = 1, 1 = 2, etc.)

I was hoping is that Apple would add a checkbox to the plug-in so I do not have any special cases but as time goes on this seems unlikely. I would like to hear suggestions for where the appropriate place a 'disable reverb' checkbox option should go.

Alternatively, if you edit the music device by clicking the edit button in the effects window, you can set the reverb volume to its lowest setting. I am not sure if this results in the same amount of savings as completely disabling it.

[jonrandall]

[REMOVED BY AUTHOR]

[buserror]

I'd be so grateful if someone who knows wanders by this way, and can state, with clarity and certainty, the relationship of this "Apple:DLSMusicDevice" plug-in to the "Quicktime Music Synthesizer" that appears in the Quicktime pane in System Preferences in OS X. (Anyone with maunderings and guesses, please submit them via snail-mail addressed to: General Delivery, Atlantis. Thank you.)

On OS9, Quicktime Musical Instruments (or QT Musical Architecture: QTMA) has it's own (limited) GM + (bits of GS) synthetizer to play a set of samples licenced from Roland.

On OSX, QTMA uses the CoreAudio "DLS Apple Music device" to play it's music, it no longer uses it's old built-in synthetizer.

On OSX, you can change the default SoundFont that QuickTime loads into the "DLS Apple Music device" by going to the System preferences/QuickTime and selecting a new Bank. banks (SoundFonts) go to the directory ~/Library/Audio/Banks.

There ?

[Scoot]

jonrandall

in your above message are you trying to say that the soundfonts should be playable within the quicktime synth?

[stringplucka]

for those tips Scooterman . please keep them coming.