RubberOnion

Years ago I got JazzWare and it was probably the most simplified thing I've ever seen... really easy just to click and drag out sustain in the piano roll and that's about it. No really ability to change the tempo or anything but I like it because it's the closest to just "playing" it. I'm completely proficient in using it (because it's so simple) but there are often things I want to do like a crescendo during a sustained note that I can't do with that program... that's when I would just convert it to a wav and import that wav into acid and use the volume tags to manually make the effect I wanted. Does it make any real sense to learn to write the music in ACID itself? I might be able to answer my own question there because I want to hear the MIDI utilizing the soundfonts I have as I write them (which I can't do with JazzWare). I checked out cakewalk sfz... (http://www.rgcaudio.com/sfz.htm) is that what you meant? It'd take a bit of reading because I'm not exactly an "electronic" musician... but I'm not a one man orchestra either so I'm trying to find a happy medium haha. I'm going to try working in Acid and see what I come up with. The only thing I'm having a hard time grasping right now is the soundfont "host" issue. It's pretty new to me at the moment.

wow you guys are fast! ok well I don't want to be the guy asking about everything... but if you could direct me to some good tutorials on how to make music in acid using midi (and preferably sound fonts because I just spent a week searching for good ones haha) that would be appreciated. though don't go out of your way or anything... im going to do some searching on my own anyway. i really just want to write orchestral music and have it sound better than... well... typical midi

Thanks for the quick responses guys. That was informative, if a bit depressing haha. So I guess my question then becomes, if I'm going to write any more music with midi (i like the notational control) and if I write a long file right IN FLs itself... it'll have a problem dealing with it? I heard that acid is good... and I got that in the sony bundle... but so far I've only used it for mixing SFX for videos... soundtrack/dialogue syncing, that sort of thing. It just seems like a really foreboding program. andyjayne - you said "try importing channels one at a time into separate patters"... I've tried that before and it always asks me if I want to save, and then will open a new file with just the channel that I've tried to import. And when I do import just one channel... if there's silence before it... it gets shifted. That's probably do to the other problem but at the risk of sounding too "n00bish"... how do you import different midi files into the same fl project file? can you open more than one step sequencer panel? MaliceX - I'll try to check out those programs... seems everytime I learn a program for something I have to learn another one to pick up the slack of the one I just learned to solve the problem from the last one! haha

I used to write a lot of music in MIDI. It eventually evolved to the point where I would convert each "track" (like string, brass sections) to wav and alter it the best I could to make it sound "real". Now I'm using sound fonts in FL to try to convert my old MIDI's to a better sound. My problem comes when I import the MIDI's. In a new FL file, I select inport MIDI and select import all tracks. When I play it, there are parts of the song where it increasingly becomes out of sinc... things get shifted here and there by 16th notes and sometimes whole measures if they don't have something playing directly before them. My question is, am I doing something wrong on import? Is this an issue in FL itself? Am I dumb? I don't want to have to rewrite all the music just because of this syncing problem. Anyone encountered it and have a solution?