Hello,

I own a Yamaha MODX and it is connected via USB to my Windows 10 PC.
As DAW I use Studio One 5.4 (added everything into my signature).

I haven't recorded so much audio yet, because I have a lot of virtual instruments.
However, I always have wondered what is more meaningful when doing a MIDI to Audio recording:

1) Prepare all tracks with MIDI information and make a whole Audio record
- all tracks contain the full MIDI information (e.g. 100 measures)
- when doing a recording (e.g. also with timer script), everything will be recorded with 1 click.

2) Just prepare several MIDI blocks (e.g. 4 measures for MAIN A, 4 measures for chorus etc.)
- only the actual differences as MIDI are prepared.
- you record like 16 measures in total and after that you duplicate events, cut etc.

1) Sounds like less work, but has in my opinion some disadvantages:
- there would be a lot of useless recording and a lot of silence if you just let it record
- perhaps it can happen that latency varies and not all notes will be exactly as they should
- I faced it one time where a kick drum came some ms too early - it sounded bad

2) Sounds like more work, but wouldn't have the disadvantages of 1)

I think this is can be seen as a general MIDI to Audio recording question

Thanks for any help and best regards!

 

When I record hardware synths/samplers I just record blocks of MIDI>audio and then arrange them. So 2). 1) would be a waste of space on HD as you said.

The biggest problem with recording hardware into DAW is latency. I don't know how Studio One handles it but you can set a driver reported latency offset in Reaper's preferences. ReaInsert can tell you how much that offset is. You can also just record a square wave and see how much samples the recorded audio lags with an editor or just zoom in all the way and count the samples. it shouldn't be too hard. My [negative] offset is 48 samples for compressors. It is a bit more for samplers and synths since they have additional AD/DA stage and converters introduce additional latency.

Cheers!

 

I would still go with #2 almost entirely using your setup as it is. If your production is using loops especially. If one part in the track has a lot of non-repetitive events like automation (or musical note events); I'd consider recording a stem for that one part. But do the rest in smaller audio segments, you will save space.

 

Good thinking - yes one should do 2) if you have automation going on, of course.