Hookpad+ Midi-In from Logic Pro X Bug

bug reports
1

Hey Hooktheory,

First of all, excellent work with your platform. It is an enjoyable experience to make music with your system, and the suggestions it provides is beneficial! I love it.

Now, let’s come to the nitty-gritty. I created a music piece using Sibelius and exported out a Midi file to edit on Logic. Since the composition is kinda long, I don’t want to manually insert all the notes all over again in Hookpad+. So, on my Mac, I turned on IAC Driver, asked Logic to output the Midi track to the IAC Driver on playback. So far so good!

Hookpad+ v2.1.3 + Chrome + Logic + IAC Driver: On Hookpad+, the Midi dropdown does list IAC Driver Bus 1 as the Input. But when I play the music, nothing gets recorded and Hookpad+ freezes the chrome tab.

Hookpad+ v1.8.12 + Chrome + Logic + IAC Driver: On Hookpad+, the midi dropdown does auto connect to IAC Driver and when I play the midi file on Logic, Hookpad+ does start playing the piano, and records the notes. However, it freezes after writing a few notes and seems like it can’t keep up with Logic and freezes the tab. Also, the recorded notes don’t play right, or logic is moving too fast such that Hookpad+ may have skipped over a few notes during playback.

Any idea why this is bugging out?

I don’t know where you guys are at with Midi or Sheetmusic import, but it would be ultra cool if you can roll out that feature out sooner.

Thanks for the beautiful product, and I hope someone will be able to solve this issue or help me find an efficient alternative solution.

BTW, on Hookpad+ v2.1.3, Help -> Support Forum links to https://forum.hooktheory.com, and it gives a connection error refused error. But http://forum.hooktheory.com works fine.

Thanks,
Roosevelt

2

Hey Roosevelt,

Thanks for the note, and glad you’re enjoying Hookpad!

This is a very creative use of the IAC driver, and I admit that we hadn’t considered this use case. In theory this should work, assuming all the timings are set up correctly, and that the melodies you’re recording are monophonic (hookpad melody and chord tracks are monophonic). I’ll investigate this further and get back to you.

I think it’s clear that a much better solution would be to import midi files directly, since recording into Hookpad from Logic is cumbersome. This is a feature that we have been planning on implementing for a long time but there are a lot of edge cases, since Hookpad would require the midi files to be in a pretty specific format, and we would want the experience of importing files to be as least frustrating as possible. Now that we’ve moved Hookpad (and soon TheoryTab) off of flash, we can focus more on these additional features.