I feel like I'm losing my mind!

So I wanted to bounce some MIDI->External Synth tracks to audio. It didn't do anything so I found some posts here saying you can't do it, along with advice on how to acomplish the same thing (this place is great!). Well, Akai give you the option so if it can't do it they should disable the button; they know they can't do it because they can detect the track is controlling an external synth. Also, they COULD actually do it because that's what they do when I instead mute all tracks except the one I want to convert to audio, make a new audio track and then record the track to it. It would be a nice shortcut. Anyway, that approach worked but that's where my real confusion begins!

So now I have these 3 new audio tracks, an intro, verse and chorus in audio form. I can mute or even completely delete my original midi track for the intro verse and chorus and the audio for that track stills plays. This is exactly what I wanted. But how does it do this? When I look at each sequence there is nothing in any of the midi tracks to indicate that this audio will be played when that sequence plays. Fair enough, they're audio tracks, but If I switch to the audio tab for that sequence then it shows me all those new recorded audio tracks with the correct names I gave them but none of them seem to be "tied" to the sequence and I can cycle through them at will without it affecting what gets played for each of the sequences.

What's going on?

Thanks for any help!

I don't know your skill level so excuse me if any of my assumptions are beneath you. But to be clear, a midi track is not Audio, it is just data. In order to manipulate your audio that is controlled by midi data it has to be recorded into the MPC. Either you need to record your synth to an audio track or with the sampler/looper. Once it is recorded, you can then put it in a clip program, a drum program or an audio track.

SuperKonquer wrote:I don't know your skill level so excuse me if any of my assumptions are beneath you. But to be clear, a midi track is not Audio, it is just data. In order to manipulate your audio that is controlled by midi data it has to be recorded into the MPC. Either you need to record your synth to an audio track or with the sampler/looper. Once it is recorded, you can then put it in a clip program, a drum program or an audio track.

Thanks. Yeah, I know that (I appreciate my post mad me sound a bit clueless!)

Each of my sequences has a number of tracks, each track is set to an external midi synth. When I select a sequence I can then see all the tracks that are in that sequence, and each AND EVERY track will play when I play that sequence. After recording a midi track to audio I find myself with a bunch of audio tracks as well. However, each sequence shows me ALL the audio tracks, even those that were not recorded from the original midi track in that sequence. It does make a bit more sense now as I noticed that if the audio track IS the one recorded for a sequence then it shows the waveform on that audio track but if I move to another sequence then that audio TRACK still shows for that sequence but there is no waveform on the track. This is different behaviour than for MIDI tracks though.

For it to make sense to me I think I'd have to go LampDog's route and instead of having an audio track I should have it as a clip that shows up in the MIDI section rather than the audio tab.

That said, I've moved to using Reaper (at least as an experiment) because I run into these issues all the time. I bought the MPC Bible about a year ago and it's an amazing source of information but the MPC workflow will never click with me I think, plus the type of music I make doesn't utilise the things the MPC excels at e.g. sampling, hip-hop type stuff hence I was basically blocked from using the MPC all the time the midi not off bug was around (and that was like a tear IIRC) whereas nobody else really cared

Thanks for all the assists over the last year and a bit everyone. If I don't get on with Reaper I may give the MPC one last go now that I know I could use LampDog's workflow for this.

Bradley Smith wrote:

SuperKonquer wrote:I don't know your skill level so excuse me if any of my assumptions are beneath you. But to be clear, a midi track is not Audio, it is just data. In order to manipulate your audio that is controlled by midi data it has to be recorded into the MPC. Either you need to record your synth to an audio track or with the sampler/looper. Once it is recorded, you can then put it in a clip program, a drum program or an audio track.

Thanks. Yeah, I know that (I appreciate my post mad me sound a bit clueless!)

Each of my sequences has a number of tracks, each track is set to an external midi synth. When I select a sequence I can then see all the tracks that are in that sequence, and each AND EVERY track will play when I play that sequence. After recording a midi track to audio I find myself with a bunch of audio tracks as well. However, each sequence shows me ALL the audio tracks, even those that were not recorded from the original midi track in that sequence. It does make a bit more sense now as I noticed that if the audio track IS the one recorded for a sequence then it shows the waveform on that audio track but if I move to another sequence then that audio TRACK still shows for that sequence but there is no waveform on the track. This is different behaviour than for MIDI tracks though.

For it to make sense to me I think I'd have to go LampDog's route and instead of having an audio track I should have it as a clip that shows up in the MIDI section rather than the audio tab.

That said, I've moved to using Reaper (at least as an experiment) because I run into these issues all the time. I bought the MPC Bible about a year ago and it's an amazing source of information but the MPC workflow will never click with me I think, plus the type of music I make doesn't utilise the things the MPC excels at e.g. sampling, hip-hop type stuff hence I was basically blocked from using the MPC all the time the midi not off bug was around (and that was like a tear IIRC) whereas nobody else really cared

Thanks for all the assists over the last year and a bit everyone. If I don't get on with Reaper I may give the MPC one last go now that I know I could use LampDog's workflow for this.

I also do it like LampDog sometimes, but you could also use "Bounce to Sample" instead of "Bounce to Audio Track" in the Track Menu, which works. The bounced audio file is then right in the Browser list on the left.
I have a empty "SYNTH-RESAMPLE" Drum program where i put the file then.

You have multi track record arm on. You either need to turn off multi rec arm in preferences or you need to disarm all the tracks you don’t want to record on when you press rec. If you don’t disarm the tracks then every track will record something from their assigned input, even the silence. This is why you have empty audio files and one track with your intended source audio.

SuperKonquer wrote:You have multi track record arm on. You either need to turn off multi rec arm in preferences or you need to disarm all the tracks you don’t want to record on when you press rec. If you don’t disarm the tracks then every track will record something from their assigned input, even the silence. This is why you have empty audio files and one track with your intended source audio.

This makes an incredible amount of sense! Thank you.

Bradley Smith wrote:

SuperKonquer wrote:You have multi track record arm on. You either need to turn off multi rec arm in preferences or you need to disarm all the tracks you don’t want to record on when you press rec. If you don’t disarm the tracks then every track will record something from their assigned input, even the silence. This is why you have empty audio files and one track with your intended source audio.

This makes an incredible amount of sense! Thank you.

That wasn't the problem though. You can't disarm individual audio tracks. When you're in the audio tab you can turn arm on and off but scrolling through the audio tracks doesn't changed the armed status of that track. It looks like it just records to whatever track you have selected. In fact I created a new audio track called Audio 002, recorded my intro to it (by muting all the other instruments in the sequence in the track mute page because solo is broken for external midi devices currently and just mutes everything). Then I moved to my verse and without adding a new audio track I recorded that sequence and now I have an audio track called Audio 002 that has 2 different samples on it depending on which sequence I'm on. In the sample editor I can see the two separate recordings called Audio 002_Rec1 and Audio 002_Rec2

Also I don't have multi track record arm switched on in prefs. So I still don't get what's going on but appreciate the suggestion!

yes, you have to think audio tracks as actual channels on a multitrack tape, let's say an analog 8 tracks reel to reel tape recorder. you can have a maximum of 8 audio tracks in your project, all the sequences in your project will have the same audio tracks, that means that if you put a compressor on Audio 001 on sequence 1, when you switch to sequence 2 you'll notice that you still have your compressor on Audio 001, why? well, because that's the exact same physical track, BUT... you can record something on that track in sequence 1 and something else, even totally different on that track in sequence 2. the best way to use them, imho, is to dedicate them to different things, audio 001 is vocals, audio 002 is guitars, audio 003 is bass etc etc....