Removing an instrument and all its notes

ruinatokyo · January 17, 2016, 02:27:15

hey guys,

is there an easy way to remove a sample/instrument and all its notes? I need this for a few different operations, but here is an example of a very convoluted one:

i do a lot of converting to midi (MPT -> IT -> BeroTracker -> Reaper) and there are all sorts of problems. (The biggest issue is that BeroTracker chokes on exporting any IT w/ strange pattern lengths. I am not sure what the exact issue is, but any time I get an empty 1k .mid out of BeroTracker, it's because the MPT had differing pattern lengths or non-standard pattern lengths.)

Anyway, when that happens, I try a bunch of different options, one of which is exporting the midi in MPT and fixing all the timing issues and such later.

The problem is that I want one instrument per track in the DAW, so for an MPTM file with lots of instruments (I'm working on one now that has 80 instruments), it takes _forever_ clicking to get the right instrument isolated to its own MIDI channel in the MPT midi export window (MIDI Conversion Setup). I.e., if I want instrument 1 alone on midi channel 1, I have to click through the other 80 instruments, changing "MIDI Channel: Melodic (Any)" to say midi channel 16, then export. If I only need 15 instruments, I can set those to midi channels 1-15 and the other 65 instruments one-by-one to midi channel 16, but if I need more than 15 instruments, the process gets even more ridiculous.

If I could first remove all samples and instruments and notes that I'm not going to export into the MIDI file (say, sample-based effects rather than tonal instruments), it would cut down on the time a lot.

Thanks!

Saga Musix · January 17, 2016, 02:50:55

The actual solution to your problem would be to update to the latest version of OpenMPT, which writes each instrument to a separate track (so they all end up in different tracks in Reaper - regardless of MIDI channels) and it also exports all the pattern commands including tempo changes. No need to use BeRoTracker or weird instrument deletion hacks.

ruinatokyo · January 18, 2016, 01:16:16

Thanks! I had no idea

. I just gave it a whirl and it went 1 instrument-per-reaper-track so it looks good. That might solve a lot of headaches

.

ruinatokyo · February 24, 2016, 00:48:57

The new MIDI functionality is awesome. Thanks.

However, another problem. I have a bunch of long songs with lots of instruments. I want to isolate one instrument to see how it sounds by itself, try different things with it in audio editors, etc.

Exporting as WAV per instrument takes an hour per song when I just want one instrument.

Any clues how to do this more efficiently?

MakeNoize · February 24, 2016, 10:30:07

If you have one instrument per track, just solo the track before exporting.
If not, I guess you can always delete the sample/instrument on a copy of your file.
As I don't think you can select multiple samples to delete them all in one operation, perhaps keeping the samples on disk and deleting from there might be an option.

Saga Musix · February 24, 2016, 10:33:02

If the instrument has its own channel(s), you can just solo that channel(s) for the export.
Otherwise, solo the instrument in the tree view.

ruinatokyo · February 25, 2016, 01:12:21

Thanks guys. I've never touched the tree view so again I had no idea

And I'd thought I'd gotten pretty good at MPT after all these years..

LPChip · February 25, 2016, 07:51:36

Saga Musix's method is the best, but if you'd like an answer to your original question, it would be doable.

You basically remove the samples and instruments manually, then do a search/replace to remove all notes that match a certain instrument number.

It would be: Search for: [v] instrument [number]
Replace with: check everything, and set to nothing.

Saga Musix · February 25, 2016, 11:57:12

You wouldn't even need to remove the samples / instruments, you merely need to do the Find&Replace step.

LPChip · February 25, 2016, 18:20:13

Right!