Hi. I'm faily new with pd and digital audio in general so please forgive my stupidness. I'm reading midi notes from a text file using a patch that I created and sending those to Reason in order to listen and record them. I have managed to get the playback part working and I'm able to send midi to two separate channels and play different instruments in Reason but I still cannot record two or more instruments simultaneously . Does anyone know how to achieve this or if its even possible?

Hi Jovito, welcome to the forum,

What exactly do you mean you can't record two or more instruments simultaneously? If you are able to send them to two different channels as you wrote, then that should have done the trick. Maybe you have some configuration problem in Reason, could that be?

Cheers,
Gilberto

I can get Reason to record the midi being send by pd by creating controllers, one for each bus (Reason 5 provides up to 4 input ports), disabling the master controller and locking the others to different tracks. The problem though is that I would be restricted to recording only 3 different instruments at once. Curiously, midi sent to the same port but different channels gets mixed in as if it was all being sent to a single channel in the same port.

I really believe this is a matter of configuration on Reason, which I am not familiar at all with.

Curiously, midi sent to the same port but different channels gets mixed in as if it was all sent to a single channel in the same port.

Well, I use REAPER and it deals very well with different channels being sent through a same port.

Maybe someone else familiar with Reason can give you some more specific advice.

@gsagostinho Could you explain how to synchronize a [metro] with Reaper on Windows?

What do you mean to synchronize a [metro]? You mean to synchronize with the bars and tempo in REAPER? If so, I don't personally bother with that as the music I create this way is written in proportional notation anyway, and I use REAPER just to preview how it will sound, nothing else.

I'd like to record the midi notes send by pd in Reaper so can I edit them after recording. For that I thought I would need to synchronize a object in my patch that acts like a transport sending bangs at a rate of 60000/bpm/res with Reaper's midi clock. That way the notes would be perfectly (or almost perfectly) aligned to the grid.

I see. Well, as I wrote I never bothered with the grid, but given that the MIDI output of Pd should be rock solid, then you can try:

1. set the recording track in REAPER and set the bpm and time signature for whatever you want
2. record the output from Pd without bothering with alignment
3. after recording, simply slide the recorded data in that track to the left or to the right until it aligns. If the bpm of the track on REAPER coincide with the tempo you used in your Pd patch to generate, they should fit perfectly well (in theory )

That said, I never tried this and there may be better ways of synchronizing things. Maybe someone else can share their 2 cents here as well...

Cheers!
Gilberto