mickwest1's Forum Page

Levendis – again thank you so much for your time and trouble to give me a comprehensive reply – I try to do the same on the EnergyXT forum

What concerns me though is that nobody from Zynewave has got involved – surely they should be concerned that people may be unhappy with their product – especially as it IS such a good program in general

I have been using computer sequencers for over 20 years – originally I used DrT KCS on the Atari and then on a PC emulator – but this is purely a (great) midi sequencer – and of course before the advent of VSTis

I went over to EnergyXT about 2 years ago after getting increasingly frustrated by Cubase

EnergyXT is excellent in it’s directness and lack of fuss – but as you suggest – the developer has done very little for a good while now – my issues with it are some annoying “bugs” with copying/ pasting controllers and a few other minor things – which I’m sure could be fairly easily cured – but despite my pleadings – haven’t been addressed.
The developer has suggested that he is working on a major update (Ext3) – but it’s not happened yet – and people are doubtful now that it will

Your comment about the mixer is interesting – I don’t use it much but it is necessary – In any sequencer I use I spend the majority of time on the tracks screen – but I know other people who hardly use it!

Podium has excellent editing and navigation and many lovely touches – although I have had to employ Autohotkey to achieve some useful key commands

when I started to try it a couple of weeks ago I gave up on it at least three times – but being quite pedantic I went back to it – and almost got to the point of considering using it and buying the full version

In case the developer may read this – here’s what I found

Firstly the handling of VSTs totally confused and angered me – because I use many VSTs the building of the database took ages and crashed the program twice – this was already reminding me of the horrors of Cubase – all this stuff about global and multitimbral instances and settings etc etc is just a pain – and totally unnecessary – EnergyXT has no such problems because it just loads VSTs as and when you want them – and I now realise that Podium CAN work like this – which should be made clear at first – although it involves going into the project screen etc (why?)

so – time spent setting up VSTs – Podium about 3 hours – EnergyXT about 3 minutes

I also spent another hour or so finding out how to set up a pitch correction plugin – It had been classified as an effect by Podium – but I had to re-define it as an instrument – again a level of unnecessary complexity

The next problem was trying to understand the creating and routing of tracks – in reality there are two types of tracks – Audio and Instrument (midi) – so why pretend there’s only one? – when setting up tracks everything seems to lean towards Audio – whereas for me instrument tracks would come first

As in the start of this thread I then tried to find out how to route tracks to VSTs in a flexible way – and have encountered the horrors and restrictions of group / child tracks etc etc – all ridiculously overcomplicated
and not at all helpful

more hours wasted – and no easy solution

Then it became apparent that I would have to do something about the strange key command set – and was horrified to find no way to do this – so employed Autohotkey – hoooray for straightforward usable software

And now it’s midifiles – if you drag a midifile into the arrange screen ( as everybody will want to do – eg: after exporting from another program) – only the first track appears!

If you import into the project screen the whole midifile appears in some separate arrangement and then you have to try to copy tracks into the arrangement you actually want them to be in

Also if you want to save a midifile with say just a bank and programme change this is also handled in some strange way

another issue that frustrates me with Podium – is not being able to select multiple tracks or parts – if you want to (eg) rename a collection of parts – it must be done individually – not helpful

… and not being able to select all the parts on a track – an important function often forgotten bu programmers

I have offered my services as a (free) – Beta tester to a few companies over the years and have been mostly ignored – I offer the same to Zynewave – but I’m not holding my breath for a reply

best regards
Mick

Hi

thanks very much for your reply –

by fiddling around I can get the midi in assigned to the child track – as far as I can tell it has to be set as a composite track(?)

I can get midi monitoring when I’m focussed on the child track (although it seems to be via the group master) – I hit record and all looks ok (as per your pic) – but nothing actually gets recorded –

any help greatly appreciated

by the way I can work around this by moving any existing parts on to the child track and recording onto the group track – then I would have to move those recorded parts to a child track –

but surely it’s got to be easier than this ???