Logic: Convert MIDI to Pattern from XLN’s XO very lossy – Hosts & Applications (Sequencers, DAWs, Audio Editors, etc.) Forum

I’ve been using XLN Audio’s excellent XO drum plugin lately in Logic. It’s fantastic for coming up with unique kits made from every sample in your library and creating short, custom drum patterns.

That said, using it in a song is a bit of a chore, because the step sequencer gives you a maximum of 2 bars of content and there’s no way to save several versions of the pattern in a single preset. When I write a song, I would need many variants of the core pattern that evolve and build with the song.

XO allows you to drag-drop the MIDI of the drum pattern right into the host, which is great. You can just turn off host sync and let the exported MIDI drive the plugin. But of course, editing a drum pattern as MIDI once it’s dropped is extremely suboptimal.

I figured I’d simply use Logic’s “Convert MIDI Region to Pattern” function to then use Logic’s very deep pattern editor to modify the core patten throughout the song. However, upon trying this with one of XO’s stock patterns, I got a warning that not all MIDI data could be converted to the pattern.

“Hmmm,” I think, “let me convert the pattern region back to MIDI and compare it with the original MIDI generated by XO to see what I lost”

The answer? A lot. It wasn’t just nuance that was removed – almost 20% of the MIDI note-on events were completely dropped and velocities of those that did get converted were changed in the round trip of MIDI -> Pattern -> MIDI. (I’m sure more was lost, but at that point it just made trying to use the pattern sequencer pointless. The beat was kind of ruined.

So, bummer. I’m not certain what causes items to not get converted to a pattern. It seemed like repeats were lost despite the fact that the step sequencer supports them. I’m not sure why velocities were changed. It would be awesome if you could import drum sequences directly as fully-realized patterns.

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