Drumtracker is amazing

AdamWathan

AdamWathan

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Apr 12, 2002
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Such a timesaver when converting drums to midi, it's ridiculous how quick and painless it is! I finally got the tempo map from Reaper to sync with it as well so all my tempo changes are kept and I can maintain my original grid... Sooo stoked on it right now, by far the handiest drum replacement tool I've ever used. Drumtracker + SSD3.0 player = :worship:
 
Yeah I've been digging it lately, but man is it one buggy piece of software. It probably locks up more spontaneously than any other audio tool I have, and that was BEFORE the switch to Windows 7... now I can't even do multi-track drums in one session. It has to be one session per individual drum :lol:

I wish I could get the Cubase tempo map to sync with it. Seems the only way to do so is export an empty MIDI file!

Also, does it bother you that you can't audition all the drum tracks simultaneously? That sort of throws me off. I know it's not essential to software like this, but it certainly would've been a nice addition.
 
I've been doing one session per drum the whole time so I haven't really noticed... It DOES lock up on me occasionally though, like the playback stops working and gets all buggy but I can still save before I close so it isn't the end of the world. Worth it for the amount of time it saves me for sure! Sooo much more accurate than tab to transient in Reaper :/

Now I just need to figure out a way to generate midi in Drumtracker, then split the corresponding audio based on where the midi notes are so I can quantize that way instead of relying on Reaper's transient detection :S
 
How did you get the tempo map stuff working?

And Ermz, what do you mean about an empty midi?

Drumtracker seemed really useful but I couldn't get it to export a MIDI without putting in tempo info. Thus, it's pretty much useless to me if I have a song with tempo changes. Why isn't there just a "no tempo" option?
 
Sounds like a fair way to get around the drum editing hurdle. Though maintaining phase coherency may be difficult as I don't think many DAWs are designed to do that sort of thing. Working with trigger points in this software is so easy, I don't think it'd take too much to turn it into a full-fledged drum editing suite.

@Melodeath: You set up your DAW session and map out all the tempo changes. Then you create a MIDI file that's the length of the entire song, whether empty or is has one note or whatever. Then you use that .midi file as the tempo map in Drumtracker and your drums should come up okay. I also don't understand the 'no tempo' option, but I'm not a heavy MIDI guy. I was under the impression that MIDI was tempo-less information that just synched up to the tempo of the session based on the meters.
 
Melodeath said:
How did you get the tempo map stuff working?

And Ermz, what do you mean about an empty midi?

Drumtracker seemed really useful but I couldn't get it to export a MIDI without putting in tempo info. Thus, it's pretty much useless to me if I have a song with tempo changes. Why isn't there just a "no tempo" option?
Click to expand...

Create a midi file with like one note in it in the project that's the length of the song and go File>Export Project MIDI and make sure "include tempo map" or whatever is checked. Then use that file as the tempo map in Drumtracker and make sure "Enable Tempo Map" is checked off. Now when you import the Drumtracker MIDI to Reaper say no or cancel when it asks you to merge the project tempo or whatever. These might not all be necessary steps but it worked for me when I did it! :kickass:
 
Ermz said:
@Melodeath: You set up your DAW session and map out all the tempo changes. Then you create a MIDI file that's the length of the entire song, whether empty or is has one note or whatever. Then you use that .midi file as the tempo map in Drumtracker and your drums should come up okay. I also don't understand the 'no tempo' option, but I'm not a heavy MIDI guy. I was under the impression that MIDI was tempo-less information that just synched up to the tempo of the session based on the meters.
Click to expand...

Well, indeed, MIDI should match up with a DAW project tempo. The problem is, in Drumtracker, you have to either give it a tempo map or tell it what tempo you want. From my (limited) experience with Drumtracker, instead of just exporting a MIDI (which WOULD match up with your DAW tempo), Drumtracker creates a MIDI with tempo info in it, which seems to take precedance over DAW tempo.
 
Ermz said:
Yeah, I know. That's why you export the empty MIDI file in order to synchronize the tempo information between your Drumtracker MIDI exports and your DAW session.
Click to expand...

I just find it a bit strange. I import MIDIs all the time that match up with the tempo in my DAW, but MIDIs exported from Drumtracker seem to follow their own tempo. I haven't experimented with tempo map function. I just find it strange to have to do that, when MIDIs that people send me work fine.
 
The thing is man MIDI is based entirely on the placement of notes in measures/beats, not absolute time information. So Drumtracker needs you to give it a tempo so it can convert the time based information you create with it into a midi file based on measures and beats. There's nothing in a midi file saying play this note at 1:02, just play this note on beat 3 of bar 49. So without a tempo, drumtracker can't figure out where to place the notes. It's the midi format itself that doesn't function that way, drumtracker has to work around it by using an imported tempo map.
 
AdamWathan said:
The thing is man MIDI is based entirely on the placement of notes in measures/beats, not absolute time information. So Drumtracker needs you to give it a tempo so it can convert the time based information you create with it into a midi file based on measures and beats. There's nothing in a midi file saying play this note at 1:02, just play this note on beat 3 of bar 49. So without a tempo, drumtracker can't figure out where to place the notes. It's the midi format itself that doesn't function that way, drumtracker has to work around it by using an imported tempo map.
Click to expand...

This.

Yeah, it's really not a fault of DrumTracker at all. I don't see what the big f'ing deal is to begin with, it takes me all of 3 bloody seconds to make the MIDI track/event and export so I can have a "tempo map" for DrumTracker.
 
006 said:
This.

Yeah, it's really not a fault of DrumTracker at all. I don't see what the big f'ing deal is to begin with, it takes me all of 3 bloody seconds to make the MIDI track/event and export so I can have a "tempo map" for DrumTracker.
Click to expand...

Same deal. Drumtracker is the best software in the world, even better than Firefox and Firefox lets me look at porn.
 
I just find working visually with Drumtracker to set thresholds for all the hits to be sooooo painless compared to setting up parameters via trial and error and listening to the playback hoping it caught the notes properly... Plus I can have an infinite amount of threshold settings within one Drumtracker session so each part is captured properly with it's own settings, whereas natively I would have to split each section of the performance whenever the playing style changed and add a per item instance of KTDrumTrigger or the Reaper Drumtrigger for each one... Talk about slow and inefficient...
 
It can definitely be slow if you've not got very good track to work with. This time round though, I actually managed to record a drumkit and have it sound good right off the bat; so very little work was needed in terms of getting trigger data from the original recordings.
 
It's actually amazing how badly this program works in Windows 7. Definitely the most bug-prone software I have out of dozens of programs installed. Still very useful, but annoying having to exit using the task manager, and also being subject to it randomly panning/interchanging its demo sounds. Really quirky (happened even on XP for me)!
 
Guys - can I ask a dumb question? Is drumtracker a competitor to drumagog? Or is it an entirely different beast?
 
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