Wednesday 20 June 2007

noatikl and Plug-in formats

Our biggest challenge with noatikl is that there are so many plug-in formats, each of which behaves differently on different platforms. noatikl is a MIDI-based generative music engine, and therefore needs to emit (and respond to) MIDI events. However, each sequencer requires a slightly different variant of plug-in!

Just as well that the Juce toolkit isolates us from a lot of this craziness!

Cubase SE - noatikl is deployed as a VSTi, or as a MIDI Effect written using the VST Module Architecture SDK. The output from this is fed-in to your favourite VSTi to render the MIDI events using the sounds you want.

Cakewalk Sonar Home Studio - noatikl is deployed as a VSTi, or as a MIDI Effect written using the DXi/MFX format. The output from this is fed-in to your favourite VSTi to render the MIDI events using the sounds you want.

Reaper - noatikl is deployed as a VSTi plugin, as Reaper does not support MIDI effects, but can instead route MIDI events generated from the noatikl VSTi plugin into other VSTi synthesizers.

Logic (for Mac) - now I know this might sound odd, but Logic simply doesn't support MIDI event generation by any Audio Unit plug-in. This is apparently addressed in Mac OS 10.5 ... Even the intent Sound System (that I wrote for the now-defunct Tao Group, as a fully-featured integrated audio platform for mobile phones running the intent platform) supported both MIDI and audio plug-ins. On mobile phones! So to use Logic with noatikl, you need to use the standalone version of noatikl and route the data via the IAC ports. This solution actually works very nicely, we've put some nice tutorial videos our our site showing how to do it.

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