Using MidiEditor and LoopBe1 with Standalone Unify (Win10)

These are two free utilities (non commercial use only) and useful for editing and auditioning Type1 MIDI files (multi-track files)

MidiEditor

LoopBe1

LoopBe1 is a virtual MIDI cable, once it is installed there will be an icon in the system tray (bottom right of windows 10) and there is only one option and that is to "mute/turn off" the device.  Pluginguru Unify (standalone) will automatically detect the LoopBe1 virtual MIDI input device.

What does this mean!?

Say we want to edit one of the MIDI drum grooves within Unify.

I have found a multi-track MIDI drum pattern patch within the Cloudcity library - it's called ...
BPM DRUM - Hip Skip Welcome To Miami

I can see that the patch contains one instrument layer consisting of MIDIBOX, JITTERBOX, followed by GURUSAMPLER.

In amongst the Macro Knobs (bottom of Unify), I can see there is a dial for selecting each of the 25 MIDI tracks within MIDIBOX.

MIDIBOX has one midi file "Skip Hip 25 Grv Stack.mid", it is 8 bars/measures in length and the track selection pull down menu reveals that this is a multi-track midi file and judging by the names of those tracks it would appear that a bit of a wild adventure may have happened down there in Miami!!  The MIDIBOX sends the MIDI data to JITTERBOX and then on to GURUSAMPLER containing "DRUM KIT - Hip Skip Kit"

In order to make ourselves an "edit" for any of those multi-tracks we can do that by installing MidiEditor.

Before any edits are made... in Unify, we need to "bypass" the MIDIBOX and the JITTERBOX so click each of the "B" boxes so they turn light grey with a white "B".  This allows us to audition the MIDI notes individually, otherwise MIDIBOX will take over and start to play the drum loops and change their pitches up and down the keyboard (just like it is supposed to do).  Bypassing the MIDIBOX will allow us to make edits and hear each sample that has been assigned to each of the keys.

The attached graphic shows you what happened when I dragged the light blue midi file name from within MIDIBOX onto the MidiEditor.

 MidiEditor.png

Initially all of the tracks are visible (and audible) so we need to fix that to just the track we want to edit.

Also, we need to check the MIDI setup within MidiEditor - at the top left there is a MIDI pull down menu, click that and select settings and tick/enable the MIDI I/O for "LoopBe Internal MIDI".  This will enable us to audition our edits and unify will play us those edits.

To the far top right of MidiEditor is a tab called "Tracks" and it has four buttons.  Hover over each of the buttons.  We want to click the "Mute All Tracks" button and also click the "Hide All Tracks" button.

The editor will turn blank as everything is now hidden.

From the tracks tab, within one of the tracks, .. for this example I will select Track 1 "Mony Talks" and there are four buttons in that track.  I will click the "Track Visible" and "Track Audible" buttons.   Notice that there is a "Tt" button for renaming the track.

So long as you have "Bypassed" the MIDIBOX in Unify, when we press the "Play" button in MidiEditor, it should now only be playing back the 8 measures of MIDI data within Track 1 (Mony Talks).   We can now make edits to the notes.   

The piano roll to the left is where you can listen to each of the individually assigned samples within the "DRUM KIT - Hip Skip Kit" ... I have noticed that there is an arbitrary note length for the audition so your tapped rhythms on that piano roll will be reduced - it's just a quirk of the editor.

Have Fun!

File, save as -- this will initially send you to the library where the original MIDI file exists... it's probably good etiquette to save your edited file to your user library within unify so navigate to there and save your edited MIDI file.  Then go back into unify, click the "B" bypass buttons to re-enable MIDIBOX and/or JITTERBOX - then double-click into MIDIBOX and drag your edited MIDI file into the light blue midi file name.

If you are happy with your edits, save the unify patch to your user library.