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Tempo Adjustment/VST Instruments

Hello!
After using Cakewalk Sonar (mainly as a MIDI sequencer) for several years, I'm thinking of switching to Linux and a free application, such as qtractor. In Cakewalk Sonar it's easy to adjust the tempo by drawing a curve, similar to the attachment that I've uploaded. Does qtractor have such a feature? This is very useful for me. What about VST instruments? Are they supported? I have some nice material, which I would like to use in Linux... Thanks a lot!

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Image icon Sonar-Tempo.jpg217.88 KB
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rncbc's picture

welcome aboard.

re. adjust the tempo by drawing a curve

unlike drawing a curve you can instead have a so called tempo-map. however tempo changes can only occur at bar locations (as against to beats as it appears in your attached picture).

re. about VST instruments?

yes, absolutely! you can have VSTi plugins in either of the two supported flavors: Windows VSTi (*.dll) via DSSI-VST / Wine(-32bit only afaict.), scanned as "DSSI" plugin type or native Linux VSTi (*.so) then scanned as nominal "VST" plugin type.

hth.
cheers

ps. I too was a proud Cakewalk (Pro Audio series) user once, during the late years of the late XX century--you can tell that's obvious by the way qtractor looks which is still a founding reference ;)

Thanks for responding! The tempo adjustments are very important for me. I write classical-like music, and I want to use such tempo changes in order to achieve a more "natural" feeling for my pieces. The tempo mapping (tempo changes at specific bar locations) is not exactly what I need. I don't know if a curve-like adjustment of the tempo could be added in the features of qtractor (in a new version maybe).
Another question: Applications like Cakewalk Sonar have an option which is called "freeze synth", which is really useful for exporting a MIDI track (or more tracks) as a wave file (rendering selected MIDI tracks or the entire MIDI file). Does qtractor support this type of "freezing"? If the answer is "yes", can I do this for ANY type of MIDI synth (i.e. qsynth, VST, etc) or not? Thanks again!

rncbc's picture

Does qtractor support this type of "freezing"?

yes. it is done as exporting audio tracks.

If the answer is "yes", can I do this for ANY type of MIDI synth (i.e. qsynth, VST, etc) or not?

you can export audio as it's rendered by any type of MIDI instrument plugin; else for external instruments, which aren't inserted as plugins (eg. qsynth) you'll have to bounce record their audio output in real-time as usual for most JACK client applications.

byee

Thanks again for responding! Qtractor seems very promising! The only critical issue (for me) is that it lacks the feature of making tempo adjustments via curve drawing. :( If this feature is added to Qtractor, I'll think again of switching to it.

Is it very difficult (regarding the programming of qtractor) for such a feature (tempo adjustments by drawing curves) to be implemented? Thanks.

rncbc's picture

not about difficulty but rather a path i simply don't choose to pave, follow or take atm.

however, if you're asking for visually depicting tempo changes as a stair-cased graphic, provided all nodes stick to bar/measure locations in the timeline, well, that's another story if i may say. maybe in some near future, or else, you can bribe some guy/gal to contribute and code it in ?--it's a git open-source world anyway, why don't you take the plunge? ;)

scnr.
cheers

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