Muse Knob Automation with Oscillator

[wenex]

Hallo!

I would like to use MusE but there are things I really need and do not find:

LMMS hat these controllers where I can easily link knobs to it and they turn the knob following a waveform. So I can have a sine wave, frequenz, amplitude, center values easy to edit.

In MusE I do have a Midi Controller which seems to do something like that, but maybe it does not work because it seems to not load lv2. Or maybe I just do not get how to link a knob to a midi controller (modulator or whatever they are called) because to me MusE is not very intuitive to understand.

I can record movements but that is not practicable, as I can not record me doing 16 sine or saw waves per minute or whatever. And when I just put the effect in a separate track, where I can draw movements in the pianoroll, it is again not that easy.

Long story short: I need the ability to have knobs controlled by a midi oscillator or modulator. But how?

I hope my english is understandable.

((The other thing would be a simple sampler where I can automate looping. I have the LSP Plugins which are very powerful. But in the sampler I can automate browsing through tabs in the GUI but not turn looping on/oft and its parameter. But I could live with that and just add additional samplers where the loops I want are programmed. But this is also so odd, that I do not know if I just do something wrong or these parameters are really not midi controllable.))

Thanks
Werner

[spamatica]

Hi there!

The tech you are looking for might not be something we support that good yet... As far as I know MusE does not currently support connecting a wave-form as an automation generator. I can see that being a very cool idea though! I think I will have to look at LMMS and see how they do it.

I suppose it would be possible to to use an external midi-utility that can generate a sine wave for a specific midi controller or whatever is needed, and you could record that into MusE.
I'm sure there must be such a utility but I'm not sure where. Sadly, not really my expertise...

As for your question of connecting automation. I realized this is poorly documented (and a bit convoluted) so I took a few screenshots (hopefully they enter the manual at some point).
You can bind an external midi controller to any parameter that is exposed by a softsynth.

The traditional example would be that you have an external synth with a parameter knob that you want to twiddle and control a parameter inside your softsynth.
In MusE this connection can be setup by right clicking on a softsynth track (on the Port column!) and the following menu will be displayed:

open_generic_gui.png (26.07 KiB) Viewed 2371 times

By selecting the Generic Synth GUI, you will get just a list of all the parameters that a synth has. In this case, with ZynAddSubFX, they are not very clear on what they do but some experimentation will hopefully bring some clarity.

The benefit of the Generic Synth GUI is that all the parameters can be right clicked to show an "Assign" option.

assign1.png (59.04 KiB) Viewed 2371 times

By clicking it the following dialog should appear

assign2.png (28.84 KiB) Viewed 2371 times

You can setup the connection two ways:

1. setup manually exactly which midi controller you want to use to affect this parameter.
2. Click the Learn button and make the controller produce some data and MusE should discover automatically which controller to connect.

When this is done you should be able to have the normal gui open and actually see that it works, the related knob should be turning.

So, there. Not exactly what you were looking for but this needed to be written down.

[Impostor]

Long story short: I need the ability to have knobs controlled by a midi oscillator or modulator. But how?

If you run the latest MusE, and compile qmidiarp from git (or get it another way), you get a midi oscillator which you can couple to automation parameters. In the screenshot you see a recording I made with qmidiarp's lfo driving the panning of a synth track:

[Impostor]

[ qmidiarp's lfo driving the panning of a synth track:

Synced to MusE, the maximum qmidiarp-lfo sine wavelength is only 32 beats, which may be way too short (that's only 8 bars in 4/4). In that case unsync the lfo, and set its internal tempo to a fraction of MusE's tempo. Then you just have to wait for the lfo to attain the right phase before you record it.

[wenex]

Thank you!

But first. I could not try any of this. MusE was never very stable on my system. Interestingly, I thougt it maybe gets better with more RAM so I doubled my RAM finally from just 4 to 8 GB. Since then, my saved projects do not load anymore. MusE crashes.
I also can not make a new one. It just crashes within seconds.

The Ram work in everything else. I can not explain whats going on.
I just switched to MusE because I was so stupid waiting for LMMS to get more Synth support and not realizing that it will never come, because it is a Groovebox with a complicated DAW like GUI. (I have to good ideas for a different GUI for LMMS, what would make it look like what it is and be really fun to work with)
Anyway. I gave up. MusE - again - was never very stable and I refuse to work with something I can not trust. Sorry.

So I tried QTractor again, and (I mean, MusE was nearly like I dreamed about my perfect DAW) except for not beeing able to store Automations-data in the midi clips, but on the timeline where I think, when I inserv stuff, all clips move to the right, except the automation-data. Thsi would mean I have to move every change by hand, one at a time. So I can only program automation as the very last step in my production. Thats sad.
Also the mixer is strange. I do not get it.
But, while MusE was overkill, QTractor does enough for me. And it does it very stable.

Again. I give MusE up. I switch to QTractor.
There I have the same problem. It is really hard to figure out how QMidiOsc goes where I want.

BUT AGAIN: THANK YOU VERY MUCH. (I close this thing) '(edit, I do not know how....)