Continuous MIDI and audio capture: Can I do this in my DAW or on Hardware?

The Lounge General Discussion
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My recent experience with Ableton Move makes me want to recreate the essentials of its “capture button” for both MIDI and Audio for my entire studio.

What I’m imagining is a setup like the following:

  • A MIDI buffer recording a a large number of MIDI events (on all channels), dropping old events when some limit is reached (Live already does this, see below)

  • An AUDIO buffer recording something like the past 5 minutes of audio coming through my audio interface (multiple channels is a bonus, but at least a single stereo channel), dropping old audio if it’s not captured. Even better would be if I could set this up to only start recording when input is above some threshold.

  • A wireless battery operated MIDI footswitch (e.g Boss FS-1-WL) that when triggered will capture the MIDI and AUDIO buffers above to separate files (or tracks in my DAW). I want a wireless/battery operated switch so I can move it around easily so it’s always close by when I’m playing different synths.

Essentially I’m looking to setup an “always listening” MIDI and Audio device that when in use allows me to seamlessly capture the last 5 minutes of my musical explorations even when I forgot/didn’t bother to hit record before hand.

In terms of my setup –

  • I have an MRCC MIDI hub which is capable of sending all (most) of it’s MIDI inputs to my computer

  • Ableton Live 12.1 is my DAW of choice, which is great as Live already implements MIDI capture for all input-monitored tracks (https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000776450-Capture-MIDI). Do other DAWs have a similar feature?

  • I assume I can probably get a MIDI footswitch to trigger the MIDI capture in Live.

Part I’m not sure how to do

So the unexplored part is the constantly recycling audio buffer and triggering and synchronizing the simultaneous capture. Does anyone have any recommendations in terms of tools to use to accomplish this? Is this already doable in Live or some other DAW or a piece of hardware (MPC maybe)?

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Logic can do capture for audio too. In Live, there are some plugins, like Rolling Sampler, which constantly record, but do not sync with the project like Live’s MIDI Capture.

I would also like a syncing version.

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After a fair amount of searching I finally stumbled upon this software tool called “Rewind” that does pretty much what I was looking for:

It works on both MacOS and Windows, and has a stand alone version as well as VST3 and AU versions. It costs $45.

Since the demo videos looked good I took the leap and so far it’s great (using it on a Mac, no idea about how well it works on windows).

It doesn’t do multi-track audio, but it allows threshold recording based on the audio input you choose, and you get MIDI and AUDIO in sync. I’ve only used the standalone version so far but it’s super easy to drag either little bits of audio or subsections of the recording MIDI directly into tracks in Ableton Live. Super convenient!

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