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Major Feature Request: Drum Track with Dedicated Mixer
Ola again,
Since the development of the Tempo & Time Signature map is on its way, there is one thing that will be an obstacle in fully enjoying its fruits: the Drum track.
I am using Hydrogen as a drum sequencer, and I believe most users do the same (or any other external drum sequencer). It has a Pattern Editor, Instrument Editor (using wave/flac etc samples) and a dedicated Mixer where one can apply Effects and other plugins. Quite good and respectable work.
Now, I understand that Jack isn't and it is NOT going to support Tempo Changes in the future. Since Hydrogen is tied up with jack, working on drums in Qtractor and using the Tempo/Signature map will leave Hydrogen (& other drum sequencers) out.
At the moment, there are two 'drum solutions' in Qtractor:
- recording all the drums on a single channel - no decent control of volume, pan, plugins etc
- record every part of a drum kit on a separate channel: this doesn't add to the natural process of performing, adding/cutting/experimenting with various beats etc.
Once the Tempo/signature map is fully finished, the next step should be a Drum track with dedicated Mixer and if possible an Instrument Editor. This way, all major music input will be done on Qtractor: Audio, Midi, Drums. I personally believe that the Drums should take an equal importance as the Audio or Midi implementation.
I call all you musicians who work or think to work on Qtractor to join this discussion and post your opinions on this topic, as well as the wise words of Master Rui, to see whether this feature is indeed needed (or not).
Re: Major Feature Request: Drum Track with Dedicated Mixer
Now that's one can of worms that is being opened. Qtractor doesn't have to embed Hydrogen, one way or the other, nor the other way around.
What we should think about is how the two can sync each-other in face and despite the presence of a tempo/time-signature map, which should be shared between the two applications but that's not the point, I think. Yeah, things might just go wrong sometimes; take loops, MIDI clock or MIDI song position protocol in particular. That is, if applications fail to share the very same tempo map, there will be a point, sooner or later, when they will be severely but systematically out of sync.
However, given this is an open implementation hiatus, so to speak, hydrogen and qtractor do reference absolute time. Basically they're both sequencers, one specialized as a drum/percussion sampler (h2) and the other a generic audio/MIDI sequencer. Also, it is no coincidence that both are JACK transport aware. I strongly suspect there must be this potential problem which seems related to both competing as JACK transport timebase masters. I know I have not dealt with this thoroughly, if at all, mostly because I don't use H2 that often ;)
Anyway, this is indeed open for discussion at large, and I surely appreciate all ideas, use cases and what not, to let qtractor and hydrogen inter-operate seamlessly to the least. The most the better :)
Cheers.
Hydrogen and JACK transport
Rui,
From what I remember there is a plan to make Hydrogen available as an LV2 plug-in, so it could be used as something like NI Battery. Which means, in fact, that having a drum editor in Qtractor would be a good solution indeed. I've done quite a bit of syncing Rosegarden and Hydrogen in the past and the best way to do it was not to do it at all — I ended up using H2 as sampler, not as a drum sequencer, using Rosegarden's drum editor. This is because sequencing part of H2 is quite immature.
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