Hi,
I would like to import some of my old school Octamed midi tracks to Renoise… But I am completely lost about the converting. Renoise cannot import MED V2, right? But there was some tracker that was able to read Octamed and as far as I remember to export as Fasttrekker…
Also there are some Oktalyzer tracks waiting to be converted to Renoise…
Years ago I suggested more and better import options (especially MED too) … but it’s maybe a lot of work to implement this and today, only a few people would use it.
BTW: OpenMTP supports OctaMED (more or less good) … I tryed a cross conversion to Renoise, but the results are not so good.
The biggest problems are midi stuff, pattern lengths and note offs.
Hm, trying with OpenMRT, but the MED import is quite horrible. Even steps in patterns are wrong…
med2xm 1.4 running on UAE (FS-UAE on Mac) produces much better results than OpenMRT. But still all octamed filters and lot of other commands are lost.
Is XM capable of using filters per channel? Never made any experiences with XM format…
EDIT: Yes it’s quite an acceptable workflow.
Little manual for converting MED2 to Renoise
Convert the desired med tracks to XM using UAE (with maximum chip and fast ram) and med2xm 1.4.
Open the song in Renoise and also PC Windows OctaMED 1.4 or 1.6 for comparison (runs fine in Wine).
First fix the track volumes and pannings. Since it’s from 0-64 in OctaMed, you have to trust your ears.
Check the song tempo settings. See how many ticks/line are setup in octamed. Convert the renoise song to new feature mode. Then fix the tempo by changing LPB.
Now fix the instruments. Check all Octamed instruments for hold and delay value. E.g. if hold value is 9 and ticks/line is 3, then the note must have 3 rows length. Change that by adding note-offs to the tracks. Also emulate delay by using Renoise’s ADHSR capabilities, if the instrument is a sample.
Fix the note-offs in the patterns. There is just some “00” written in the tracks. At these positions add a note-off.
Check Octamed’s effects/master echos. These can be simply emulated using Renoise’s delay effect.
Finally, if you used any filter modulation in the Octamed song, you will have to rebuild itcompletely.
Edit have to rework
Hehe cool additional info. Yes my were mmd2s. Open rat quite messed up the songs while importing here… Maybe I missed some options…
I really would like to see a way to convert future composer note data. Any clue if there was a converter available for Amiga? I remember there was something…
A good way is it to simply record midi from MED into a DAW using the PC-Version of MED. Afaik UAE has no midi capabilities …
If you have a Mac it’s also possible to run MED on a virtual Win machine (Parallels Desktop) and using a network midi-driver to transmit the midi data to OS X (http://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/rtpmidi.html).
This works well for me and I was able to record songs into Bitwig very nicely.
Recording into Renoise is possible too, but you have to find out a way to synchronous start/stop MED and Renoise (midi start-stop-messages?). You can imagine that’s not funny to fix misplaced recorded pattern data afterwards. This is only easy on a continuous timeline like in DAWs.
P.S.: In the past I used med2xm too but it was a lot of work fixing the bad converted songs.
but you have to find out a way to synchronous start/stop MED and Renoise (midi start-stop-messages?). You can imagine that’s not funny to fix misplaced recorded pattern data afterwards. This is only easy on a continuous timeline like in DAWs.
This is completely true, since the Renoise advanced edit’s nudge function for the whole song doesn’t work around pattern boundaries. The notes will be cut off. For such operations (maybe all advanced operations) I guess it would be much easier for the devs to handle, if the pattern structure would be converted to one linear gigantic pattern first or they would use a pointer array for line offsets of the whole linear song, then operation added and afterwards reconverted to the pattern structure again.
As said … afaik there are no ways to get the midi-data from an emulated AmigaOS (UAE), because the Amiga has no built-in midi-interface. I only read about some UAE feature requests about this by users …
Renoise Midi is possible via tool: http://www.renoise.com/tools/midi-convert
Maybe if you still have a serial port on your PC, you could add a Amiga midi interface to uae? But the med2xm conversion wasn’t too bad… Instead one could write a renoise script that fixes the usual problems.
Maybe … that could be possible, Jurek.
Another way could be collecting some money and maybe pay a programmer to write a converting tool. 
(I had this idea - coding a converter by myself - in the past, but I’m only able to write some PHP in a non professional way - this would be a lot of slow and hard work for me.)
Renoise file format description is available/known (it’s xml) … there are some old MED file format descriptions available (afaik). 