Small, high-performance, free and often real "salvastress" that can allow us to solve nasty problems quickly and easily without having to resort to useless complications and pachydermal software. The network is teeming with free or almost free resources that we can refer to, but only a few of them will become an integral part of our audio worskstation. Follow us in this new series of articles, a fascinating journey to discover small programs, which, at first sight, may seem trifles for the onerous task that you want to assign to them but, due to their simplicity of use and power, do not they have nothing to envy to professional range products.
We begin our selection of utilities that, in one way or another, have returned to the collection of tools within a sort of "Swiss army knife", in order to facilitate our work and avoid further baldness due to self-harming nervous reactions . I would say that there is no better start than in presenting two wonderful freeware: MidiOX and MidiYoke. Both available on www.midiox.com are, respectively, a sophisticated program for monitoring and manipulating MIDI signals (MidiOX) and a driver for virtual midi interfaces (Midi Yoke).
MidiOX (Fig 1) is very useful for monitoring all traffic across both ends of a MIDI connection. Once the input and output ports have been selected, it is possible to activate the monitor that shows us everything that happens: type of message, channel, values. Personally I found this program indispensable when there were problems of "feedback" between various devices or to try to calibrate some controls. Furthermore, the routing flexibility that you will have at your disposal will allow you to be able to route MIDI messages between the different peripherals connected to your PC with a couple of clicks. A “simple” and free MIDI patch bay. The section dedicated to the manipulation of exclusive system messages (SysEx) is also superb. With MidiOX, therefore, you can also make a backup of the sounds from your synthesizers that support this protocol and also view the type of messages it uses for certain functions. If you are a developer, this program will become indispensable for intercepting SysEx messages useful for developing an Editor / Librarian for a synthesizer. 
Midi Yoke (Fig 2), on the other hand, creates up to 16 virtual midi ports through an easily installable driver. Said so it seems a trivial software but, trust me, it is another utility that will become indispensable and will take root in your system. Let's say you want to use a standalone program that isn't available in plugin format and doesn't have any kind of interconnection with your favorite sequencer. Here is Midi Yoke proving to be fundamental. Open the offending program and select as Midi In one of the virtual doors. Open your sequencer and assign the virtual Midi Out with the same number as the one used for the controlled program to the track you want to use to drive the software. It seems cryptic but once you understand how it works and its potential (Box 1) Midi Yoke will become an integral part of your system, so much so that it will seem strange not to find it on a newly purchased machine. 
Personal experience:
A user I know had a problem with Final 2007 e Synthogy Ivory. The person in question, an old Finale user, upgraded to the new version from 2006 to 2007 and after reading the advertising specifications of this software * decided to buy Ivory. Unfortunately, Finale 2007 is temporarily unable to read all the VSTi's and consequently the 2 products were incompatible with each other. The user tried to contact the two parent companies directly, unfortunately having as an answer that at the moment it was not possible to make the two software communicate. With Midi Yoke, on the other hand, it was possible to make both applications work in standalone mode connected via two dummy ports and, in this way, the user was able to carry on his transcription work by being able to take advantage of an excellent piano sound in the '' waiting for the resolution of the momentary compatibility problem between the two aforementioned softwares. * Finale for the moment is the only music notation program that embraces the modern philosophy of plug-ins, i.e. those utilities also developed by third parties that can be inserted into the program to add new functions or facilitate the use of those existing.
AnalogX:
Now let's move on to AnalogX (www.analogx.com), where we can find many juicy freeware for various applications. AutoTune (Fig 3) is a handy program that will allow you to "tune" your samples. Have you ever wanted to use a certain loop or phrasing that wasn't in tune with your piece? AutoTune will analyze the files you submit to it and then change the pitch according to the note you want. The great convenience is that you can process entire folders full of WAV and let the program do it all by itself, with a convenient automation. Also from the same site is available Midi Mouse Mod (Fig 4), which will give you the ability to control up to four MIDI parameters in real time via your mouse. If you know the Korg Wavestation joystick, then it will be clearer what kind of help this program can give you. This way you will avoid loading heavier and more complex software just to take advantage of similar control. Virtual Piano (Fig 5), instead, will allow you to use the keys on your computer as a midi keyboard in order to send notes. Obviously you will not be able to play virtuosic parts but, in conjunction with Midi Yoke and in the absence of a controller, it will be very useful to be able to listen to what you are programming. Delay Calculator (Fig 6) is another nice program that, given a time in BPM, gives you the time in milliseconds up to 1/32 triplets. Indispensable for calculating the right times on delays that do not have time synchronization functions. .gif)
Analog X it really has a lot of interesting utilities. Unfortunately space is a tyrant and we cannot list others, otherwise it would end up monopolizing this article.
At the end:
Hermann Seib (www.hermannseib.com) is another programmer who has developed some very interesting freeware utilities. MidiTrix (Fig 7) is a matrix router for midi interfaces. It will allow you to route the various connections as if you had a patchbay by simply clicking the match on the grid. SAVIHost (Fig 8) is another small masterpiece. It allows you to launch plugins as standalone simply by placing the file "savihost.exe" in the folder of our plugin and renaming the aforementioned executable with the name of the "dll" to be controlled (Fig.8a). Example: in the VSTPlugins folder there is a VST called pippo.dll and we want to check it without using Cubase. We copy “savihost.exe” in the VSTPlugins folder and rename it “pippo.exe”. It will be enough, therefore, to make two clicks on this executable and here is our Pippo Plugin appear on our screen ready to be used for our performances. 
Still on the subject of performance, we point out that Livelab (HYPERLINK "http://www.livelab.dk/"HYPERLINK" http://www.livelab.dk/"www.livelab.dk) offers "Touchpad 2 MIDI" a greedy freeware VST that will allow you to use the touchpad (Fig 9) of your laptop in the manner of a midi controller configurable as: X / Y controller (Kaosspad type, so to speak), series of 4 sliders or grid of 4 buttons. Also from the same house are available some interesting and cheap commercial products such as LiveSlice (Fig 10), a real-time beat slicer and re-arranger (for neo Aphex Twin wannabes), and “Tablet 2 MIDI” to use a graphics tablet (or tablet PC) as a midi controller. 
As icing on the cake, the last utility of this first episode, we offer you Piano Tuners, an editor for dynamics curves (Fig 11). Have you ever had to record a piano part with a plugin, perhaps with excellent samples, but your controller lacks dynamics? With this program you can easily create a dynamic curve for each single note in order to greatly improve the quality of response to your touch. If such a thing were available on every master keyboard, we would certainly have less pain in playing parts where the wide dynamics of a real weighting is often irreplaceable.
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See you on the next episode
