Does Metro SE save to disk as it records?

[MichaelCrawford]

I have a very basic need these days: what I want to do is make MIDI recordings of me improvising at my keyboard. I like to compose by improvising, and if I'm recording the MIDI, then I can get the sequence of notes back to eventually use to create a score. I use Lilypond for scoring.

I'm able to do what I need with Luna Free, which is freeware, but I'm considering purchasing Metro SE instead, because Luna Free doesn't actually save the recording until I explicitly select "Save" or "Save As" from its file menu.

I'm a computer programmer, so I know all the things that can go wrong with software. Even if Luna Free is free of bugs, Mac OS X isn't!

When I really get into improvising, I can just play for as long as an hour. I would be dismayed if I came up with something good, but it got lost because of a crash.

So my question is, if I record MIDI with Metro SE, does it save to hard disk as it records, or only when I ask it to? It's OK to have to ask for a MIDI file, if Metro SE saves to its native format while recording.

I'll be looking for some higher-end audio software after I have four or five new songs worked out, and at that point would consider buying one of the more featureful versions of Metro. But for now, because I'm on a budget, I just want to record the MIDI of my improvisation sessions.

Thanks for your help.

[w]

I'll be looking for some higher-end audio software

...and what's wrong with METRO ?

[Jerm]

Metro records MIDI to RAM. You need to explicitly save to disk. Audio on the other hand is rendered directly to disk but the header is not saved until stop is pressed so while it would be theoretically possible to recover the audio data if the computer crashed it would be non-trivial.

[MichaelCrawford]

...and what's wrong with METRO ?

What I meant was that I'd be ordering the SE version for now for MIDI recording, and buying the full version of Metro when I get ready to record audio and master my CD.

[Stephanie]

Auto-save while recording sounds like a nice feature for a future version of Metro. Perhaps configurable so it only saves every few seconds/minutes/notes? Perhaps record to a file which can then be recovered and merged into the main piece after a crash?