Hey Folks, well after years of playing around with the MG demos, I finally bought a license back in September of last year. But I’m just now finally getting around to using MG2 in my DAW of choice, which happens to be Cakewalk. I’ve been a CW user since the Pro Audio 9 days – way back when Win98 was the latest OS – and I’ve always stuck with it because it does what I need.
About 20 years ago, I bought a Roland GR-33 guitar synth, and had a lot of fun with it, but I’ve retired it in favor of MG2 because MG2, as software, actually tracks way better than the Roland hardware does.
But here’s the big difference that I’m finding myself stuck with at the moment. With the Roland, I can lay down a for-real MIDI track. With MG2, I have to lay a track down in an audio channel. So I’ve recorded MIDI as audio – well, sort of. I can go back in that track where I’ve laid down a track with MG2 and, using MG2, I can change the instruments around to other MG2 instruments while the track is playing. Now, if this were a for-real audio track, I wouldn’t be able to do that. So MG2 is laying down something in between a MIDI track and an audio track. But I just want to get to the MIDI file so I can edit it.
I tried setting up a track with Cakewalk’s TTS-1 multitimbral synth and then assigned a MIDI track to it. TTS-1 will generate an audio track with instrument sounds based on the settings used in the MIDI track. Well, what I did was just set the MIDI track to the same channel that MG2 defaults to (ch 4) and left everything else alone, since I wanted MG2 and not the MIDI track, really. Then I set the Cakewalk TTS-1 track up the way I always do, calling MG2 up as an effect, rather than an instrument (big problem, in my opinion – MG2 is an instrument and not an effect!). Then, with the Input Echo set to On and the track primed to Record, I hit record. And it lays down an MG2 track, but it’s audio, not MIDI.
How do I get MG2 to record in MIDI? So that I wind up with a file that I can edit and play back the corrected version, etc, maybe even being able to assign different voices than what MG2 has available?
I’m feeling a bit exasperated. I bought MG2 because I wanted to convert audio to MIDI, not the other way around.