Riffworks and MIDID Controll Surfaces

[JouniL]

Hi!

I wonder if you guys at RW have any plans adding support for MIDI Mixing Control Surfaces like Frontier Alphatrack, PreSonus FaderPort or Mackie MCU compatible products.

I realize that the visionary scope of RW is towards an audience not primarly using this kind of stuff. However, from my personal view mixing large/complex songs in RW is a bit tedious, fiddling around with the mouse on rather small knobs in RW. A tactile hardware device mapped properly to RW gain, pan, eq and effects would coertainly speed up the process!

Regards,

/Jouni

[davenz]

Yep, this issue has been thrashed out here in the forums ad nauseum. Midi support is all well and good for those who want to wire RW up as part of some uber-complex studio system, but for me, that is not what Riffworks is all about. If Sonoma go adding all that extra fluff to it, not only does it complicate the bejingers out of it for meat-and-potatoes people like me, (I have no idea how midi works or how to rewire or whatever you call it) it adds more unwanted complexity, code weight and potential problems to the software.

By the sound of it some people here have successfully wired up midi controllers to Riffworks and have it running, so that is probably the best bet; find someone who found a way of doing it and copy their setup, or wait for someone to develop a third-party plugin that enables midi support for those who want it.

Still, if tomorrow Sonoma release a version with Midi support and it works well and does what people want, I will still pay for upgrades; I have nothing against midi and those ultra complex setups that people love using, it just isn't me. I was attracted to the software in the first place because refreshingly, it didn't rely on all the synth-clock this and rewire that stuff to record my guitar playing - other software can do that already, but at a huge learning curve cost that I have neither the time nor the intelligence to deal with. I also think there are more important aspects of the software that could be developed/fixed/improved first before getting into that whole Midi scene.

Dave.

[JouniL]

Dave!

You are absolutely right, RW is not headed for gearheads like me.

But that doesn't stop me from dreaming So here we go!

There are several things in the "mixing" process part of RW that could be better. RW is brilliantly designed for that first creative/spontaneous phase of recording with its riff/loop based approach. The problems starts when you have large collabs with 20-30 riffs with 6-10 layers in each. What happens is that you loose structure which you need if you want to do a decent mix. Several things could be better:

1. Moving layers within a riff so you get cosistent layer structures between riffs.

2. Copying layers between riffs (honestly, this request almost comes naturally when using RW for 5 minutes)

3. I wish RW could remember the placement/colours of the riffs between sessions. I usually like to group verses, choruses, intros, breaks and endings into groups of riffs within a color. If you organize them this way and then log out and then log into Rifflink again your structure is lost.

4. Administrator rights for the creator of a rifflink collab (which usually is the one mixing and riffcasting the collab) which means the admin can change or delete any riff but also protct(freeze) a riff or a layer.

5. Could it be possible to get a numerical feedback when turning a knob in RW? Just a number that tells which value you just dialed in on that knob.

6. Layered export from RW to WAV. If you have a song which you wish to mix in an external mixing program like Reaper or Audacity you need to manually export the layers of a song separately which is a tedious work.

An interesting feature would be an export option which makes RW export each layer by name (including drums and songlayers) to separate WAV files. Let me give you an example: you have an song with four riffs. Each riff consists of three layers named BASS, RYTHM and LEAD named consistently over all riffs. In the songlayer you have two Layers, VOX and CHOIRS. The song has an ID, for an example "MATTSORUM-BASIC". Now if you wish to export it "by layer" RW would create the following WAV-files (of equal length):

bass.wav
rythm.Wav
lead.wav
vox.wav
choir.wav
mattsorum-basic.wav

and it would be a breeze to import them into another more advanced mixing application. Now this was a fairly simple example which still would be perfectly manageable to export by hand from RW, but when you wish to mix a collab with 20 riffs and 8-10 layers in each it gets kind of complicated. For this to work properly you need to be quite disciplined when naming you layers.

Finally I have a rant regarding almost all VST/effects GUIs on the market today. Why do they have to look like some 70s/80s hardware? It's awfull.

[davenz]

Well, that all sounds pretty reasonable to me, and some very good ideas there. Hopefully the devs are reading that and taking some notes.

I too wonder what the go is with all these 'vintage look' things; it makes one think that the only good hardware was something from back then, when inreality a lot of those old effects were noisy, sounded like something your dog produces and, in some cases, were downright dangerous to use. Mind you, its the fashion isn't it? Even now we have 70's and 89's clothes back 'in', with all the flares, thin ties and trilby hats chucked in together. I guess this is a reflection of that. Mind you, some of the nineties harware was a little uninspired as well as far as 'look' went; you can only have so much brushed aluminium (that's aluminum for the Americans).

Dave