Topic by chauncey

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  • chauncey
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Topic: Tagging Midi Archives - Idea.

I love the archive function -- I have it on all the time to capture my practicing and improvisation and it is much more freeing and inobtrusive than traditional recording in a DAW environment. However, I know I will never go through the millions of notes in the thousands of hours of files I have created. There are many times I capture a really nice passage or interpretation and I was thinking how nice it would be to have way to flag it, perhaps a unique midi signature I could simply add after a nice bit.  This marker would let me know there was something worthwhile in that midi capture to come back to develop further. I know I can immediately take the most recent midi file and export it, but that doesn't give me any location within that file and that process takes me out of the flow, export the file, name it, open my DAW, import it, name it.

My idea is that  I'd like to tag it so it appears in the file in a way that down the road  I can search the raw data the entire collection of my .mid files for ones that contain that unique sequence (i.e. 8 notes that would never appear in a piece). It seems pretty doable, but does anyone have a similar solution in place?

Last edited by chauncey (18-05-2019 07:56)

Reply by varpa

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Re: Tagging Midi Archives - Idea.

I find the current system works reasonably well.   If I want to save what I just played I load the "recently played" midi into Pianoteq and then save the midi file with some meaningful name and the date.    If the "recently played" midi has extra material I don't want to save I can trim the midi file within Pianoteq by right clicking on the midi file display and removing notes to the right or left of the play position.   All these steps can be done very quickly from within Pianoteq.

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion.  You want to save a unique series of notes within a midi file to flag it as interesting (?)  I'm not familiar with searching notes within midi files.   It seems much more straightforward to save to a file with some useful name.

Last edited by varpa (18-05-2019 14:39)

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Reply by Qexl

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Re: Tagging Midi Archives - Idea.

These kinds of improvement ideas spring up regularly for good reason. Once you've played standalone mode for enough years, you may end up with many thousands (not kidding) of "faceless" MIDI files, named by date etc.

No complaints - I want this feature to remain.. but relating to chaunchey's idea above..

Pianoteq is really kindly offering us a brilliant and dead simple MIDI tool onboard - but.. in doing that, it threatens to add more

(greedy greedy people we are!)

I actually can't remember for sure how much I've posted about my thoughts on this (or if it's one of the ideas I've typed out and not posted - life gets in the way), but I'd love to see a way to mouse click and drag to highlight a section to right-click to save to some setup shortcut folders.

Say I sit down, play an hour, and somewhere in that time, I happen to auto-record a good version of a trophy piece, a play-through I like but let's say it's not 'perfect' (what is?) - but I'd like to come back to it in a month or even more - just to re-listen or paste into a DAW for further perfection - whatever.

I don't want to trawl through a thousand old auto-generated MIDI files (no complaints - glad to have this!), however, I'd like to be better able to review some insta-curated snippets. I personally don't like 'tags' but prefer folders - but whatever the 'convention', if it's an improved way of organising our own personal auto-generated MIDI chaos, I certainly won't complain (I'm more used to tags in Linux software and more accustomed to folder/file structural drear in Win FWIW).

Anyway, I think I'm happy with how it is (just "save as" if you like something, of course) - but - the "friction-less" action of simply selecting a section in the MIDI (rather than 'delete begining' and 'delete end') and being able to right-click "send to" some custom folders (like "sad" "happy" "isthisanything" "rework" or "fini") would be amaze-balls.

Pianoteq Studio Bundle (Pro plus all instruments)  - Kawai MP11 digital piano - Yamaha HS8 monitors

Reply by sandalholme

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Re: Tagging Midi Archives - Idea.

I had occasion recently to search the archive for a recording - archive is always on - that was OK but not intended to be used. I wanted to compare it with the current midi file. This was for a whole piece, best part of 10 minutes. Found it eventually by starting to play all midis around the earlier version time that had the same number of notes, more or less. Found it eventually. Yes, I could save each "possible" recording but this then means the chore of deleting them if/when I finally discard them. A tag, rather like tagging photographs, would mean no extra files and the tag could be deleted when no longer required - or merged with another. A nice to have. I know with my many thousands of images finding, say b&w images, those tagged for printing etc etc is really only possible with tags.  Either that or a phenomenal memory which remembers the exact time and date the image was shot.

Reply by Qexl

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Re: Tagging Midi Archives - Idea.

Really good thoughts and experiences sandalholme.

I really don't mind what happens, liking the way it is.

Always loved the idea of tagging - but my experience of tagging (since it was new), is that I continually fail to tag anything (blaming self, just keep working, no time to stop and name things - or I go through phases - images, databases etc. get good tags for a month here and there but are blank or vacant for years in-between those periods of "must organise all the things"), so end up still with un-tagged folders, or dependencies of superstructures of "things" like programs and file types, across drives and years and projects and etc. partially yes, organised by memory (maybe it's a good thing to know where things are all of which I eventually need to revisit or, sort out later anyway.. that's made a little more horrible by the fact that with MIDI or audio, you can't quickly see a thumbnail, but must listen for at least a few seconds or often a lot longer for each file.. so multiplied by 4 thousand means it's my preference (not set in concrete though) for a kind of right-click "send to" system if poss.

But maybe both or more ways can still be accommodated in tandem, so all workflows are accounted for

What if right-click "send to folder X, Y or Z" also auto-adds a "tag" (folder name)? and those tags are searchable from inside Pianoteq.. so you can skip the old open folders routine

Pianoteq Studio Bundle (Pro plus all instruments)  - Kawai MP11 digital piano - Yamaha HS8 monitors

Reply by chauncey

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Re: Tagging Midi Archives - Idea.

varpa wrote:

I'm not sure I understand your suggestion.  You want to save a unique series of notes within a midi file to flag it as interesting (?)  I'm not familiar with searching notes within midi files.   It seems much more straightforward to save to a file with some useful name.

I also love the current system. To clarify, my idea is to similar to how they add visual and audio cues using a clapperboard during filming a movie for various takes and bloopers. Immediately after playing an interesting section, I could play something uniquely random on my keyboard controller like "A1 C#7 Eb3 D6 Ab2 F2" or 6 x F#2 and 5 x B6. In theory I could then use my PC file search function through all of the .mid files in the archive folder for occurrences of this exact string of notes, but one potential issue with this is that the velocity and timing of the notes is also captured, so the underlying data string stored in the file may not be uniquely identical enough for practical use in searching / identifying these.

A quick button in the Pianoteq interface would be awesome to tag the recently played midi file with some simple user customizable metadata i.e.  "Interesting composition idea" "stellar performance" or "great alternate voicing"  "noodly garbage suitable for deletion not worth the 1K hard drive space," the latter of which would get considerable use in my studio 

Last edited by chauncey (18-05-2019 19:42)