Hello!
I would love to have a text file (instead of an audio file) "drive" some parameters.
For example, I might want to do some fancy "offline" analysis of a song -- and pull out some new themes/structures. I would love to then use my new "data" to drive the visuals.
I was thinking I could do my analysis or whatever and then sort of re-code them as MIDI codes (somehow?) and us these to achieve what I desire.
But, a text (or even excel?) file would be cool.
e.g. Column1 is time... column2 is "CustomVar1", column3 is "CustomVar2", etc...
Then I could link to "CustomVar1".
Does that make sense? Is it possible? Sensible? Other work-around ideas?
Thanks! -james
Text files to drive parameters?
Re: Text files to drive parameters?
It's definitely possible from a technical standpoint, but it's only sensible if your analysis results in very few changes over time. Otherwise you'd be dealing with 60 values per second, so for a one minute piece, your text file would be 3600 lines long.
The thing about MIDI is that it's exactly designed for the purpose you describe. It's not just for notes but also control data. So if there's some way you can use a standard DAW to design a MIDI track based on your analysis, you could save it as a .mid file and import it into Magic. It really would be the best solution. Besides, you would get the nice timeline-based GUI that comes with MIDI editors, which you wouldn't get with text editors.
If you do want to work with text files, you could try something like this: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/midicsv. It was the first thing I found after spending a couple minutes Googling around. It appears to let you convert back and forth between MIDI and CSV (comma-separated values; sort of like a spreadsheet, but in standard text file format). You might want to try it or try searching for similar things.
The thing about MIDI is that it's exactly designed for the purpose you describe. It's not just for notes but also control data. So if there's some way you can use a standard DAW to design a MIDI track based on your analysis, you could save it as a .mid file and import it into Magic. It really would be the best solution. Besides, you would get the nice timeline-based GUI that comes with MIDI editors, which you wouldn't get with text editors.
If you do want to work with text files, you could try something like this: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/midicsv. It was the first thing I found after spending a couple minutes Googling around. It appears to let you convert back and forth between MIDI and CSV (comma-separated values; sort of like a spreadsheet, but in standard text file format). You might want to try it or try searching for similar things.