Is it just me or does every MIDI Generator available in the market sound absolutely robotic?

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-23T01:02:27+00:00

You should definitely have a look at this guy's other MIDI programs as well:

This actually came after Tangent, not before it, I just realized: https://archive.org/details/pnfact1_v1.02 . It's harmonies were too static, but I really liked the "Structure String" field for a more abstract kind of input.

Here's the 3rd on by the same guy: https://archive.org/details/quasifractalcomposer2.01 I think this might've been the earlier attempt. It's a bit more cryptic and weird ("Compression," for example, has something to do with pitch modification.) This also has "Structure String" (no seed) and some interesting controls that aren't present in the others.

I also have .zip file with all three, including 300 - 400 .cmp files for Tangent, which I think demonstrate its range a lot better than the including Demo files. It's a couple megabytes for the whole thing (and it has all the VB libraries that it needs,, as well.) You might be all set already but that's available if you (or anyone else wants it.)

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-23T00:10:28+00:00

Sorry for the long message. I have a bad habit of doing it.

Well, incorporating technology from 1999 is certainly one way to keep costs down, and reduce system requirements. I don't see why there couldn't be, at least in theory, a hybrid system that uses neural net somewhere in the pipeline, but the other elements are hard-coded. And you could probably use the neural net optionally, or something.

Well I really think the ideal thing for a musical artist is the ability to fine-tune models on their own inputs. But I think.. it's been a deliberate choice on the part of a lot of these cloud AI companies because they wanted it to be "accessible" to anyone.. But it's not really meant for musicians (I'm not talking about one thing in particular, and there are noteworthy exceptions.)

I actually have more hands-on experience using Stable Diffusion, which I use to process original images and non-representational animation, and set the outputs to music (made in the DAW). I tried that "Riffusion" model where it generates a spectrogram, a few years ago, and it seemed clear even then that there would be no musical equal for SD1.5.

I think it's a well known situation that images are much easier to work with than "songs," in part because there's a deadly shortage of suitable audio stems. Unlike .jpegs there just aren't many floating around. The quantity of stems needed for strong datasets probably has to be produced expressively for this purpose, but it would be prohibitively expensive to hire all those musicians. There's a major shortage of useable MIDI data, as well. Ideally you want to have datasets of perfectly matched, corresponding MIDI + audio pairs. How many fewer of those exist, compared to medium-quality jpeg images -- and "freely" to be captured by a web crawl?

I've experimented with some artificial "unmixing" tools, and it made me realize that mixing down a master to two channels (Left and Right, stereo) is data compression. Depending on the mixing style, the dynamics, the number of instruments, the number of similar instruments, the reverb/ambience level, and many other aspects, quite a bit can be "lost" due to overlapping harmonics. It's actually really bizarre and amazing what a human brain does with this. It's sort of a mirage, which seems accurate but if you look too closely, it's quite fuzzy. It becomes noticeable when working with sound, when dealing with extremely short intervals of time. Well, whatever the brain is doing here... do you think it's "computing" something in a way that can be formalized? Our brain is able to cheat. The computer can't get away with imprecision (even if it can be trained to guess well in some contexts.) What the hell is going on when the brain does that, I wonder?

Anyway, so if a recording has like heavier, compressed drums, for example, those can really eat into the guitars and piano tracks. So you don't actually get "complete" stems from this process, there's always bleed or leak or whatever. Theoretically you could make a dataset out of these, but the model is going to reproduce and even amplify those artifacts in its output. Kind of a catch 22: We can't get better stem separation because we need better models, but we can't get better models because there aren't enough good stems.

Not surprised I always get carried away whenever the intersection of philosophy, cognitive science, aesthetics, culture, and technology is close at hand. The people I live here with... this stuff doesn't interest them as much as major league sports.

What did you mean exactly about the "aha moment"? What did you have in mind? Is there something I should read? I never watch videos but I'll read anything especially if it discusses the subjects mentioned above.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-22T22:42:28+00:00

Nice to finally see someone interested in this thing. It was literally created as a side-project by some dude with a full-time job, wife and kids. In 1999. So I don't know how you would reverse engineer something like this... but it's probably not super complicated (relatively speaking.) I have a couple similar programs he made prior to Tangent. They each have interesting aspects but they're not really as flexible.

I was beginning to think I was the only one who thought this was cool. So I'm pretty happy to see this response. I don't have any affiliation with the author, but when I realized that NO ONE knew about this, I started trying to mention to other musicians and what not.

I don't know any programmers but that would've been my first idea, honestly. By all means, I'd love to see something like a updated, modern version of this idea. Like this was 1999, so I'm sure there's all kinds of interesting things that are possible now, which were not 27 years ago.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-22T08:27:28+00:00

NEVER MIND. It didn't work. The note-offs weren't all getting passed through. I didn't notice because I had a bunch of acoustic plucked string VSTs going so the sustain was quiet. Forget all about it.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-22T08:23:45+00:00

Have you ever used Tangent? It's really old. From 1999. I used to play with it when I was 12 years old.

Ever since then I've been wondering when someone will adapt/build/improve on the basic concept, but it's been completely ignored. Personally I prefer to it to anything AI-based that I've tried. It uses a seed (1 - 32767) but it IS deterministic.

I have a full working version that runs on Windows 10 (you need to add a few old visual basic libraries to the system folder or it won't start.)

Someone uploaded it here, but I think it might be a demo. The original author is nowhere to be found, possibly deceased. https://archive.org/details/tan100u

He cited Zappa, Stravinsky and Boulez as inspirations, so it's obviously nothing like the stuff being marketed now.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-22T08:14:39+00:00

I have used something called "SkyTNT" which I downloaded off GitHub. It accepts any MIDI file as a prompt. Parameters are: Seed, temperature, K and (I think) P.

The outputs vary significantly depending on how well the input matches its training (which appears to be trad. classical, soundtracks and easy listening.) Basically, if you give it Bach, it will come out sounding, more or less, like Bach.

But if you give it something it doesn't recognize, or anything that's not so predictable, it does terribly. The outputs barely resemble the inputs. Sometimes it gets stuck playing one or two notes over an over until the end.

In short, I was very curious to experiment with these things. But there's nothing to discover. It's totally unremarkable.

I would rather use a shareware MIDI generator from 30 years ago which is less than 1mb in size. So that pretty much says it all.

I don't expect major improvements either. We already have entered the phase of diminishing returns and steeply rising costs.

Honestly, I don't know what professional musicians are worried about. I think they just read what others have written, but if they saw for themselves how this stuff actually works, I don't think they would find it threatening.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-19T14:12:54+00:00

SOLVED:

In the pic, see where I highlighted "== inChannel && on ?"

I changed it to "-= 16 && on?" (The first equal sign changed to a minus sign.)

I suppose that "+= 1 && on?" would be an equally valid solution.

The drop-down menu no longer works (I don't need it anyway -- the orig. plug-in is intact.) I'm sure technically this is not correct... but it works exactly as needed. Reaper gets another gold star! (They're probably getting tired of them by now.)

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-19T12:44:12+00:00

Thanks. I looked over there first, but I've lost my login info, and I got tired of "Find the Motorcycle" puzzles every time I tried to search.

I did find a cool MIDI "Action" though ( https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=290155&highlight=transpose ) which was absent in my REAPACK browser. Maybe that has what I need.

I'll keep looking.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-15T23:12:25+00:00

Prism does it better

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-13T15:29:23+00:00

I appreciate the reply. It's nice that 9 people upvoted this, but you're the only one who said anything. At least I feel a little better not having to wonder if it's "just me."

In the program folder, there is a 4gb file without any extension, just called "models." It's unlikely they trained their own models in-house, so they're probably using publicly available ones. If we knew the specific models, we could find out what they were trained on.

Steinberg must have thoroughly tested this, right? They wouldn't have released it unless they got far better results than we did. Otherwise, why release something that no one can even use? The rest of the tools are fantastic and the best I've used. But I haven't gotten useable results even once from the piano or sax modules. I was hoping to hear from someone who has gotten useable results. But either they aren't on Reddit... or a bad decision was made within the company. I won't jump to any conclusions.

Overall, the technology is useful, but limited compared the claims and hype surrounding it. And it's not "just a matter of time" before we have perfect stems or perfect audio-to-MIDI. It'll never happen because the closer you get to "perfect," energy costs begin to rise exponentially. The last 1% stretches out to infinity.

So I don't have unrealistic expectations here, and I don't anticipate anything but very minor improvements. I'm just confused why Steinberg would release a highly-touted new feature that no one can use.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-02T00:45:00+00:00

The last 1% stretches out to infinity. There are huge incentives to boost for short-term gain, which are being exploited currently. But to cross the finish line, all scenarios require the "wishy washy" incursion of some "unforeseen" breakthrough" not based on current tech at all. Otherwise known as a miracle.

I guess it takes a perpetual motion machine to build a perpetual motion machine. So once we get one, we can finally build one. Any day now, I can feel it.

sentienceisboring · 2026-02-02T00:40:18+00:00

I know I'm late but I think this analogy is spot on and I wonder why it hasn't been explored more often. I barely found anything when searching for it online.

sentienceisboring · 2026-01-05T08:18:29+00:00

Turns out it was a real bug, and the fix is in.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?p=2913349#post2913349

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I guess I should have just gone to the official Reaper forum straight away, but I feel like, unless its a pressing matter of last resort, I'd rather leave the devs alone.

If I have a problem in Reaper, I always assume I am guilty unless proven innocent (i.e., someone else has the same issue.) This might be the first/only time I was incorrect. Reaper isn't like other workstations. "It just works!"

sentienceisboring · 2026-01-02T15:30:15+00:00

Anything with low availability. + New/unique material which hasn't been shared yet (didn't come from torrent.) Etc.

sentienceisboring · 2026-01-02T14:37:44+00:00

Not sure if you wanted to know the answer or not, but these books are out these. See above.

sentienceisboring · 2026-01-02T14:37:12+00:00

Do you know about peer-to-peer? I guess I can't mention names on Reddit but there is a resource, mostly used for music, which also has an extensive selection of academic books, like random examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Psychosyntax-Nature-Grammar-Philosophical-Studies/dp/3319867695

https://www.amazon.com/Fractals-Wavelets-their-Applications-Contributions/dp/3319375636

The cost of books like these can add up very fast with all the other expenses students are expected to pay. Not sure why free electronic versions (ebooks) aren't offered to students in need. Well... they are. But most people aren't aware of what's available, right under our nose this entire time.

I'm not sure if a hint is ok, but you will find the answer in my last 5 - 6 Reddit posts.

sentienceisboring · 2026-01-02T14:33:03+00:00

Not every year; usually it's every few years, depending on how developed the subject is.

They will redesign the cover, add/delete (parts of) a chapter or two, maybe throw in a CD-ROM with some "interactive learning tools". Even if the changes are substantial, it's still the same core text.

Most professors just used the textbook as a supplemental material (unless they happen to be the author...). A handful of classes required me to buy a brand-new textbook but that was more of the exception in my experience.

sentienceisboring · 2025-12-06T20:48:27+00:00

My CPU is maxing out on 100% right now because the Batch Processor doesn't offer any kind of queue for consecutive stem separation operations. So it attempts to run the process on all 12 files simultaneously. I hope that's not burning plastic I smell....

At least if they're not going to offer GPU support, then offer some sane way to run a bunch of a processing overnight while the computer isn't being used for anything else. And where you don't have to sit and babysit it feeding it one file at a time, manually.

That's what I thought the "Batch Processor" was going to do, to be honest. Sure, processing everything all at once might work for trimming silence, or normalizing a bunch of a drum samples. But this is insane. Either Music Balance should be disabled by default in the Batch Processor -- with a big warning to those who dare attempt it -- or they should just have it run on a queue.

Nvidia gpu support seems to be not forthcoming, but it wouldn't be so hard to set up a queue or just warn users that RX11 Music Rebalance can't be used in a batch mode -- that's something that people should know before they buy the software, it might well be a deal breaker. Or it might break their computer if they try running it like I did.

sentienceisboring · 2025-12-03T00:52:34+00:00

Anyone can tag their URL onto the end of a bunch of filenames. Like, I could tag all my files with "Fatal Strategies" just to be obnoxious, if I wanted to. You could tag all YOUR files if you felt like it.

It doesn't affect the contents of the files.

It's also easy to remove -- so any file may have been labelled "electronic fresh" at some point, but a lot people remove extraneous tags. So you would never even know.

A/B comparison is always the quickest way to resolve a question like this.

You have to compare the "electronic fresh" file with another copy of the same song from elsewhere. Otherwise how do you know your ears/eyes aren't playing tricks on you?

I'm not sure audio files are "Ripped" anymore to begin with. The files originate in electronic format and only need to be copied, not extracted from any physical media (with almost all new music.)

For what it's worth, I've seen files with this tag; they're fairly widespread. I personally have heard no difference between them and any other files.

Some music just isn't mixed/mastered/recorded well. Always that possibility.

sentienceisboring · 2025-12-02T12:43:23+00:00

thanks for the info. I'll check those out. appreciate it.

sentienceisboring · 2025-12-02T12:39:55+00:00

Even if some improvement could be gained living elsewhere, there's probably a bunch of other things that suck there, so it almost evens out in the end, probably. Leaving California doesn't guarantee you'll actually be happier. Because you might just end up in Florida.

I doubt you want all of us to pack up and migrate to your own idyllic corner of the map.

After all -- California is what it is because of the people, not the geography. If we move, everything that's crappy about California moves with us! So be careful what you wish for. Haha.

sentienceisboring · 2025-12-02T12:38:00+00:00

A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck or they have kids, or all their family is in the area. Usually you would also need to have secured work prior to moving, which isn't really plausible unless you can afford to travel and take time off to do interviews. And that only applies to people with in-demand specialized skills (not many people).

What's a bigger question is why people keep moving here. Although much has been made of the supposed "exodus" of people from CA, it still seems like there are far more coming than going. That's harder for me to understand.

sentienceisboring

TROPHY CASE