Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Questions and Discussions about the G-Stomper VA-Beast Synthesizer
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planet-h
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Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby planet-h » Tue Dec 24, 2013 1:55 pm

As already mentioned, the VA-Beast supports the connection to external Midi equipment.

Midi Support:
G-Stomper VA-Beast supports MIDI over USB.
To use the USB MIDI connectivity your Android device must support USB Host Mode (most newer devices do, but not all), please check your device specifications for that.
To connect an USB compliant device you need an USB 2.0 A Female to Micro B Male Adapter Cable Micro USB Host Mode OTG Cable and optionally, if you want to connect equipment with traditional midi connectors, an USB 2.0 MIDI Interface Cable.
You can connect external Keyboards, Hardware/Software Sequencers, what ever you up to.
The latency, audio and midi, strongly depends on your device and Android version (e.g. Galaxy Nexus: 39ms, Nexus7 v2: 40ms, Galaxy Tab 10.1 v1: 92ms)

So far, I've tested va-beast midi implementation on a nexus 7 v2 and on a galaxy nexus phone using an M-Audio Oxygen Keyboard as well as a Hardware Electribe as external sequencer. I'll do some further tests on galaxy tab 10.1 and 7.9 soon... finally got a converter cable for the samsung port today.
I also got successful reports from users on kindle and bionic tablets.

It would be very interesting to hear your experience with the Midi connectivity.
Is it successful?
Any unexpected behavior?
Model, Brand and Android Version of your device?
Model and Brand of your external Midi KB or other DAW (whatever you connect)?

Thanks a lot in advance
jph
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Joined: Thu Jan 23, 2014 5:14 pm

Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby jph » Thu Jan 23, 2014 5:27 pm

one key nothing two keys trigger ? I made a tinny video to show this issue,.


Seems not to trigger a note unless more than one is played? I did get it to seeming trigger but perhaps this was due to fading notes,. not sure.
Anyway the latency is minimal when playing chords and the pitch-bend and modulation seems very accurate,. this is using a cheep usb-midi converter I got of amazon for <$5 and an old Korg DW-6000 (so no velocity). I tried also with an Ensoniq VFX that has velocity and poly-aftertouch however I got lots of notes being re-triggered (on the aftertouch,. i think) and the latency was bad,. I assume the amount of midi data being pushed out of this keyboard is overwhelming the cheep-ass midi interface,. . This was just a quick test, I will see what else I can learn I also have an old Alesis Photon25 midi controller, will try that next.

Anyway the synth itself is amazingly great,. all the modulation and sync stuff really gives a wide range of sounds. Should really roc in the sequencer eventually.
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planet-h
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby planet-h » Thu Jan 23, 2014 6:35 pm

Thanks a lot for your report, and welcome to the forum, jph :)

jph wrote:one key nothing two keys trigger ? I made a tinny video to show this issue,.
Seems not to trigger a note unless more than one is played? I did get it to seeming trigger but perhaps this was due to fading notes,. not sure.


That's a strange behavior, which I didn't experienced so far. I'm curious to hear if this still happens with an another interface.
It could also be that you've used a patch which has the mono switch enabled an legato = on or auto.
But still, that shouldn't be like that.

jph wrote:Anyway the latency is minimal when playing chords and the pitch-bend and modulation seems very accurate,. this is using a cheep usb-midi converter I got of amazon for <$5 and an old Korg DW-6000 (so no velocity). I tried also with an Ensoniq VFX that has velocity and poly-aftertouch however I got lots of notes being re-triggered (on the aftertouch,. i think) and the latency was bad,. I assume the amount of midi data being pushed out of this keyboard is overwhelming the cheep-ass midi interface,.


Yes, that may me, sounds a bit like the keyboard toggled between aftertouch and trigger and so produced a lot of events. Actually the VA-Beast doesn't consume after touch events yet. It only listens to ctrl change and note on/off events (and the sync of course).
On the other hand, the midi integration is still experiemental, so unexpected behavior is in fact possible.

jph wrote:This was just a quick test, I will see what else I can learn I also have an old Alesis Photon25 midi controller, will try that next.
Anyway the synth itself is amazingly great,. all the modulation and sync stuff really gives a wide range of sounds. Should really roc in the sequencer eventually.


Thanks again for your report, very much appreciated.

About VA-Beast and the sequencer, here are the first views of G-Stomper 3.0:

http://www.planet-h.com/gstomperbb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=214
J-Fon
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby J-Fon » Tue Mar 04, 2014 5:18 pm

Just to confirm I also have a two key trigger issue, but on an very old cheap evolution mk 149 midi keyboard, I don't have any other application to test with, also the usb midi cables are old so I thought it was broke, i did however look at this post and got an Oxygen 25 which so far is working good.
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planet-h
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby planet-h » Wed Mar 05, 2014 10:54 am

J-Fon wrote:Just to confirm I also have a two key trigger issue, but on an very old cheap evolution mk 149 midi keyboard, I don't have any other application to test with, also the usb midi cables are old so I thought it was broke, i did however look at this post and got an Oxygen 25 which so far is working good.


Thank you for your report J-Fon. Looks like I have to get me some old midi equipment to reproduce this.
weirdingmodule
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby weirdingmodule » Mon Mar 09, 2015 2:15 am

Samsung GS5 with Lollipop on Tmobile
Kurzweil PC3K6
Kurz connected with usb otg is detected fine.
OpenSL selected in common settings.
20 ms latency. Plays fine but 20 is 4 times too much!
And lollipop is supposed to be low latency? What a crock. Great app so far but until this plays under 5ms with no artifacts, its a joke. Google hasn't a clue. Any way to make it faster? ;)

Jonathan Adams Leonard
Weirdingmodule.com
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planet-h
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby planet-h » Thu Mar 12, 2015 8:09 am

weirdingmodule wrote:Samsung GS5 with Lollipop on Tmobile
Kurzweil PC3K6
Kurz connected with usb otg is detected fine.
OpenSL selected in common settings.
20 ms latency. Plays fine but 20 is 4 times too much!
And lollipop is supposed to be low latency? What a crock. Great app so far but until this plays under 5ms with no artifacts, its a joke. Google hasn't a clue. Any way to make it faster? ;)

Jonathan Adams Leonard
Weirdingmodule.com


Welcome to the forum weirdingmodule.
And thanks a lot for applying the details about your setup.

Yes, it actually will be better. I finally got a GS5 (running on Lollipop) these days. I'll start the first tests with the Samsung Pro Audio SDK soon. Once this is integrated, Samsung devices will definitely get lower latencies.I don't know yet how low exactly it'll be, but I'm quite sure it'll be less than 20ms.
pie
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby pie » Thu Jun 01, 2017 2:13 am

Hi, I just had a chance to use an akai lpk25 to play my va-beast, but I am getting a high latency (I didn't measure it but it's too much to play it in real time).
I have a samsung galaxy tab s (sm t805) on android 4.4.2 stock, and the lpk is plugged in "directly" through an otg cable. G-stomper updated today.

I believe (and hope) it is due to some settings because the videos I could find on youtube seems to show a totally different behaviour.. :geek: another option could be the usb otg cable, but it works flawlessly on other tasks.
Do you have any suggestion about which settings to change to try to reduce midi-in real-time latency?

Thank you very much! G-stomper rules! :)
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planet-h
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Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby planet-h » Thu Jun 01, 2017 6:26 am

Welcome to the forum, Pie.
And thanks for your message.

pie wrote:Hi, I just had a chance to use an akai lpk25 to play my va-beast, but I am getting a high latency (I didn't measure it but it's too much to play it in real time).
I have a samsung galaxy tab s (sm t805) on android 4.4.2 stock, and the lpk is plugged in "directly" through an otg cable. G-stomper updated today.

I believe (and hope) it is due to some settings because the videos I could find on youtube seems to show a totally different behaviour.. :geek: another option could be the usb otg cable, but it works flawlessly on other tasks.
Do you have any suggestion about which settings to change to try to reduce midi-in real-time latency?

Thank you very much! G-stomper rules! :)


As long as you use Android 4.4.2, it's technically impossible to get adequate results.
What you need to do is to update your Galaxy Tab S to Android 6.x (Marshmallow). That update should be available for that device since a while.
With Android M you'll get overall around 30% more performance headroom and definitely better latency results, as with Android M you can use OpenSL very well.
Main Screen / SETUP / AUD / Audio System = OpenSL
Main Screen / SETUP / AUD / Internal Latency = Low
(please take note that Android 4.4.2 cannot handle the load when you use the above settings)
Also, with Android M, G-Stomper will use a newer and better performing Android M based MIDI driver.

Even with the upgrade, it probably won't be exactly that fast as the Nexus 9 in the videos, as Nexus and Pixel devices have always been the low latency kings. But it will surely be a lot better than with 4.4.2.

Hope that's helpful.
TIXE DOPE
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Joined: Wed Dec 16, 2015 7:35 pm

Re: Please share your experience with the VA-Beast and Midi

Postby TIXE DOPE » Tue Jun 27, 2017 8:35 pm

When I used a Midi controller (Samson Graphite mf8) I would have to turn the nobs really fast and hard for it to trigger In the app and when they did trigger the parameter in the app would only go so far and then stop. And if I would try to turn the nob to adjust it the parameter would reset and go back to zero and I would have to turn it again and again. (almost like the "initialize parameter automation" function). Same with faders, any time I move a fader it resets and starts from zero no matter where the actual fader on the controller is held. also when play keys on a keyboard (arturia minilab) you have to hit the keys really hard and fast for them trigger, and even though you hit them very hard every time there is still a big variance in velocity from very quiet to loudest. I was hoping there would be a velocity range or a set velocity that could be preset for your keyboard.

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