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I am proud to present to the PW community a pet project of mine: a small "set and forget" free application for automatic retrospective saving of live playing. The program is continuously running and listening to MIDI events and automatically saves midi files of your playing, split by silent intervals between takes.

The main goal of this application is to complement the VSTs standalone applications that commonly do not permit MIDI recording; with AutoSaveMIDI you don't need to use a DAW if you are only interested in simple MIDI recording. I took inspiration from a very useful feature of pianoteq and cantabile...

You can download the application for Windows here:

https://sites.google.com/view/autosavemidi/



Using AutoSaveMIDI is straight-forward, and the webpage of the project contains pertinent information about configuration. Hope you enjoy it...

It seems to work just fine. I wonder, though, why it uses so much CPU when it's just sitting idle. It uses 13% continuously. Only a video game uses more. That seems odd.

I believe it's because of the non CPU-optimized python MIDI libraries that I use, or the way python uses thread processes (or, most probably, because I am a crappy amateur programmer). I am sure that in C++ it would perform better, but this was a created just for the fun, and it turned out really ok, and in record time and I will not move it to another language (and the CPU usage does not affect my VST performance, although it causes a bit more fan activity in the laptop).

Well done, I'm a programmer myself, and I can see just from the screenshot that you put a lot of work into this app.

Great to see your project is launched. This is a great tool for me, so nice to see a tool like this present online!

I am using a beta version of this tool for some months and is really useful to be sure anything you play gets recorded without worrying about it. The automatic file saving, based on a configurable delay since last note was played, works wonderfully to separate pieces.

Thanks for this great tool!

Thanks all for the kind words. And a special "thank you" to David Lai and EB5AGV that were a stellar team of beta-testers that suffered through a series of software iterations while I was ironing out a few crinckles in the code. Some of their very good suggestions made their way to the final version.

Although we tried to test the application as best as we could, it was basically tested only on three keyboard models: Kawai VPC1 and 2 yamaha (one old CLP model, and a very basic PSR non-weighted model). Therefore, all feedback on AutoSaveMIDI user experience is greatly appreaciated.

Nice job vagfilm!

By the way, as a Windows tool, shouldn't the forwardslash (/) be a backslash (\) in the path selection box?

Kind regards,
James
x

This looks like a useful tool I would use if there was a version for Mac 😉

Hello,

@vagfilm, Congratulations! And thumbs up to beta testers @EB5AGV and @David Lai.

A question: does AutoSaveMIDI also have a playback function for the recorded MIDI files? And/or how would AutoSaveMIDI pair up best with a playback tool, if one (like me) only uses standalone piano VSTis?

Cheers and happy recording,

HZ

Windows natively supports both.

Thanks for the kind words, but have you tried it? Does it work well in newer Kawai pianos? (it is well tested in VPC1 but that is an old model soon to be replaced, correct? 😉😉😉

This was programmed in Python that follows its own rules for better integration of Win, Mac and Linux systems. You may see /, \, or \\ depending on the libraries used and the computer OS. I could do a "cosmetic" transformation: the internal value of the value would be whatever the computer wanted, but what was shown in the user interface was always changed to / for consistency, but quite frankly it is not worth the effort...

As I said above, this was programmed in Python (and QT5 for the GUI) for two reasons: dead easy MIDI libraries for simple MIDI processing (that are a bit useless for more complex things and, as noted above, are heavily CPU dependent because they are always sampling the MIDI ports), and secondly for straightforward creation of Mac applications from the same code. I am only waiting for bug reports of this version before posting the Mac version

Thanks, appears to be useful but a bit too standalone for me.
Yes, i can record midi "as advertised" but only in stealth mode with no active player.

Tried to use it with Plogue Sforzando player the app is killed with the start button.
Checked with Pianoteq, same result.
Starting order and used keyboard do not matter.

-Rhodes74

I guess this is why the CPU usage is high ...

Is the program sitting in-between the MIDI hardware (or USB) and whatever software is meant to use the MIDI signals? In that case you might want to add the ability to let the user set a velocity curve, so that the MIDI signals sent along to the software is altered in agreement with that velocity curve. That would be majorly useful.

Hello,


I suspect this has something to do with MIDI ports being single-client under Windows. If you route your MIDI input to a virtual port (e.g. using the free loopMIDI tool), and then let your sforzando (or other VSTi) *and* @vagfilm's tool 'listen' to that virtual port, it may work fine. As said, I suspect.

Maybe @vagfilm can confirm this and provide further support.

Cheers and happy experimentations,

HZ

I use LoopMidi.

I have a velocity program (freeware) that reads MIDI data from my Presonus interface, and it writes the velocity-adjusted MIDI to a port in LoopMidi.
Kontakt reads from that LoopMidi port.
This is the velocity adjustment that Quasi wants.

This new AutoSaveMidi program also reads from that Presonus interface, no problems.

So both the auto-save and the velocity program read from the same MIDI input without issue.
I don't know why Rhodes74 has problems when using Plogue Sforzando.

I just thought of a business idea Create a small MIDI DIN dongle that will be inserted into the MIDI OUT of your piano and will have a micro SD card to save your MIDI performances. It can be powered from the MIDI IN port which has s 5V power, similar to the WIDI Master:

Actually the MIDI OUT has 5V power, so no need for the additional dongle, only a single MIDI OUT dongle is enough.

My lowly 2005-era Clav can record to a thumb drive in the MIDI-to-device socket.
Surely all the newer pianos can, too?