Midi Out from Reason Achieved via Reaper: M4L Possible?

[tomoe97]

Over on the Reaper forum, a contributor named Zenmonkey has developed special scripts for Reaper that convert the CV note, gate, and curve signals transmitted from Reason into Midi note, gate, and CC/PB data, which can then be sent to Rewire-capable DAW's such as Live, VSTs/AUs, and external synths. In short, on the basis of Zenmonkey's achievement, it is finally possible to connect Reason's Matrix and RPG-8 devices to Ableton Live devices! I've tested it on a Mac and it works beautifully. See all the details here: http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php? ... post569590

Has anyone achieved anything similar using M4L to process Reason's CV signals instead of Reaper?

[penningt]

But with Live as a master you're facing a new limitation; Live itself is limited with midi support. If you have Live as rewire master, Reason as rewire slave there is no way to get midi signals back from Reason because Live seems to block those.. But if you could bypass that through reajs, who knows..

You can't get midi into Live from Reason but you can convert Note CV to audio using Thor and send this to Live. With the help of the Reaper plug-ins created by zenmonkey the audio can be converted back to midi in Live. I can now playing my NI synths from midi in Reason's sequencer - its fantastic and means I can use Reason 5 Blocks!

[penningt]

No need to be sceptical - this is most definitely working - its running on my machine right now and I don't even have Reaper installed. Like I said, I am playing my NI stuff from Reason sequencer. Let me know if you want details of my set up.

[#1thelark]

I still need to install Reason 4 but this should also work with Reason 4 demo, I guess.
I always get "no JS effects" found from ReaJS... how do you set this up?
I copied the content from the zipfile to the Effectsfolder, that is automatically created, but still I get no JS effects.

[#1thelark]

Damn it.... I just can't get it working on my laptop w/ vista
On my other machine w/ win7 x64 it worked fine... I dunno where to put the files on vista... Reajs doesn't find any of the effects...

*** FIXED. Needed to add the path manually in the reajs.ini

EDIT: Some crashes occured with Reason 4 and Live 8.15 when I was trying to send some midinotes from my LP to the Reason RPG-8.

Also I noticed that midinotes from Matrix arrive a bit early but I couldn't find out how to fix that negative delay...

[zenmonkey]

No need to be sceptical - this is most definitely working - its running on my machine right now and I don't even have Reaper installed. Like I said, I am playing my NI stuff from Reason sequencer. Let me know if you want details of my set up.

What rewire master are you using ?
Because in its native form this will not work on Live.
Simply because reajs is an audio effect. Thus all it can receive or send out is audio data. The javascript loaded into reajs may try to send midi data out, but Live won't be able to process it further.
EDIT: I think I'm overlooking something here
As usual when I had a few beers I write before trying. I can pull midi data from the track on which I dumped reajs which might work.
But if you care to elaborate; please do.

Hi everyone, I'm the same zenmonkey that wrote the Jesusonic (not Javascript) program on the Reaper forums. I just wanted to stop by and clear up a few things.

1. This isn't really very tightly integrated with Reaper. I used Jesusonic to develop these scripts because it's the audio programming language I'm most comfortable with. I don't have Max/MSP and I don't know how to program it. The scripts themselves just do a per-sample examiniation of the audio-in feed and generate any midi messages as necessary. The JS scripts by default route this midi data into the same FX chain as all the other devices but it can just as easily be routed out a real or virtual midi bus. I've had confirmation from two other people that both these buses are possible.

2. As ShelLuser correctly stated I am taking an audio stream and converting it into MIDI data. Jesusonic is nice because the language lets all plugins receive and send MIDI and Audio making my conversion process even easier. With that said it shouldn't be difficult for a Max/MSP programmer to convert the same Audio signal from Reason into MIDI data.

3. The Jesusonic scripts are flat text files. You can open them up in your favorite editor to see exactly how I decoded the audio signal for note, gate, and curve. I'd be more than happy to help a competent Max/MSP programmer on the fiddly details of the algorithms. Just send me a PM or email me at the address found at the top of the JS scripts. The files themselves are surprisingly short, each around 20-40 lines of code. This is mostly because the JS environment makes a lot of things very easy. I have no idea how Max/MSP deal with similar event triggers and data streams.

4. As others have discovered, if you use the ReaJS plugin you don't even need Reaper at all.

5. One last thing I'd like to stress. This midi solution is not polyphonic. The Reason Gate and Note CV signals weren't designed for polyphony and it's a limitation I cannot work around using this method. I've had other ideas regarding hijacking the BCF2000 fader CC messages though...

[#1thelark]

Thanks zenmonkey for your great script! This is really exciting!
Maybe you could check on the problems I described in my last post?
I used the RPG-8 instead of Matrix and sent some midinotes from my Launchpad to the RPG-8... within a few seconds both Reason and Live 8.15 crash. I don't know if there is some kind of midi-loop or so that occurs when I run your script?

Thanks for your efforts, keep up the good work!

Cheers

[zenmonkey]

Thanks zenmonkey for your great script! This is really exciting!
Maybe you could check on the problems I described in my last post?

I have no crashes with RPG-8 and Reaper. I don't own Live (only have Live Lite) and I don't have a Launchpad. I wish you luck in figuring out why it crashes.

[zenmonkey]

Ah, that's where you're hiding
At first I wasn't too sure you were the same person (yes, I know you wrote as much above, but at first I kinda glimpsed it).
Congrats on a marvelous idea, and of course thanks for sharing the scripts you made. Wonderful stuff indeed.
I really like the hack of tunneling one signal over another. And I'm quite anxious to experiment further with this stuff using Max to see how far this can be taken
Thanks again!

Yep, it's really me and not some imposter. I used Live when I first started in this hobby and then discovered Reaper's Jesusonic scripting environment, something Live didn't get until M4L much later. Since I really just use an external DAW for midi mangling and the occasional VST I haven't come back to Live and that's why you haven't seen me much around these parts. I had to dig up my old account here to get back on to help y'all decode my script algorithms.

You're quite welcome and I'm glad you're getting use out of the scripts. At times I felt like the only one begging Props for MIDI out; I really really love using all their LFOs and Matrix curves synced to internal and external targets (spider CV is probably my favorite module, haha).

Like I said on my Reaper description post I got the idea from Peff's usage of CVs to analog gear tutorial. It came to me in the shower one night that if those signals could be decoded by a Minimoog then they could be decoded by an external audio app. After that it was 3 furious and obsessive days of programming. It was a lot of fun to implement and finally see it all working.

Feel free to ask me questions about the scripts. If you're an experienced Max/MSP programmer I have no doubt you'll be able to get the code working in that language and remove the shackles of Reaper for all the good Live folk. I have a feeling quite a few Logic users would prefer that too, but don't quote me on that.

Take care and talk to you soon.
-ZM

[#1thelark]

I played around with this again and Live 8.2+Reason 4.
Seems like you can't do more than just some simple Matrix-outputs...
I tried to use the Malstrom-Mods-Outputs as Note/Gate-CV but then Live 8.2 crashes all the time but I doubt that Reaper would do this without crashing.
I guess that running the LFOs and Mods from Reason into ReaJS is just too much data to handle for the scripts from zenmonkey...
Has anyone else tried this with some other CV2Audiooutput-combinations in Reason?
Cheers