
Show HN: Bezie – Virtual MIDI controller for complex automation - bezieio
http://www.bezie.io
======
sago
It looks cool, Nice little app. As a Reason user, I particularly like that it
does everything through midi rather than VST. I agree with the point about
notes: it would be quite neat to see this overlaid on a note lane. Still,
adding new features is always easy to suggest. Well done on getting this far.
I can't promise to buy (I'll have to have more of a think of a use case for
me) but I hope you get some custom.

Pedantic nerd point: your beziers are not beziers days, are they? Looks like
Catmull-Rom - they'll that doesn't quite make such a good brand-name.

~~~
bezieio
I followed De Casteljau's algorithm, not Catmull-Rom. The control points that
you drag are at t=0.5 for quadratic and t=0.25 and t=0.75 for cubic beziers.
De Casteljau's algorithm gave me a bit more flexibility to validate and
constrain the automation curves. Thanks for the feedback!

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thirdsun
It looks very solid, but it in my opinion it has to be very impressive to
persuade me to use a third party tool instead of the automation tools that are
integrated with my DAW.

I'm not trying to degrade your product, which, again, looks great, but you
just targeted an area that is handled quite well in most DAWs already.

Have you considered turning this into a mobile app? Having this run on an iPad
next to my keyboard with immediate access may be a better use case than alt-
tabbing between my DAW and Bezie. And of course there are countless iOS DAWs
that could make use of your advanced automations.

~~~
Cshelton
Now that's an idea I like. Somehow be able to have the virtual midi as an app
on my IPad that can sync over wifi or even with the IPad plugged into my mac
book. Be able to control the envelope automation, or other automations, with
touch.

OP, have you looked at BitWig's midi controller API? I wonder if something
could be done with that. I use BitWig.

~~~
eropple
Both TouchOSC and Lemur already exist and do this over Wi-Fi. I believe Lemur
allows for XY parameter control but I'm not sure if it offers curves.
(TouchOSC is more limited.)

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TTPrograms
This is pretty cool. Back when I was DJing I would have definitely bought this
(and may yet, if I put my setup together again).

I'd suggest showing this working with Traktor or Serato - Ableton can
functionally do something like this already (with Max/MSP) in which case
you're competing on UI. This sort of thing is basically impossible in Traktor,
last I checked, so you're bringing a much bigger improvement to those users.
The live DJ market also benefits much more from improvements to their MIDI
controls. If you make a demo video like Ean Golden does with the Midi Fighter
[1] or NI does with Traktor [2] I think you'd see significant interest.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13AHLkIziNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13AHLkIziNY)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEP4wF1hgrM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEP4wF1hgrM)

~~~
TTPrograms
Also, you should reach out to DJTechTools:
[http://djtechtools.com/](http://djtechtools.com/)

~~~
bezieio
Thanks for the suggestions! Do you have any examples or ideas of how a
software controller like Bezie could be used in a DJ setup? I'm open to
exploring this a bit further - feel free to contact me directly at
support@bezie.io. Thanks again!

------
bezieio
The original motivation of Bezie was to build a simple tool to enable finer
control over bézier curve automation. It evolved from a MIDI clip generator
into a MIDI controller. Bezie opens up new possibilities with cubic and
quadratic bézier curves. Bezie runs as a virtual MIDI controller outside of
your DAW, not as a VST. This makes MIDI mapping extremely simple and no
different than mapping from a hardware controller. Bezie also has several
unique features including: vertical & horizontal envelope inversion, copy &
paste, grid control and concurrent envelope rendering. Bezie is built with
Electron, React and Redux and takes advantage of node-midi for virtual MIDI
and SVG for the automation UI.

~~~
iamcreasy
From the video demonstration, it looks useful with Ableton. But what about
other DAWs that already has feature rich automation tools. For example, FL
studio.[1]

Do you think using Bezie with FL studio would give the user a finer control
over automation curve?

[1] :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Gut0fK1n4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6Gut0fK1n4)

~~~
bezieio
Bezie gives you finer automation control in many DAWs, but not all. I don't
think you'd gain anything from Bezie in FL Studio. Aside from automation,
Bezie also allows you to connect a MIDI controller and trigger Bezie
automation for use with DJ software [1] like Traktor.

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBM5gAm83ao&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBM5gAm83ao&feature=youtu.be&t=132)

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djaychela
I'll give this a good workout later today. I'm a music tech teacher and use
Cubase, and this fills one of the biggest holes in Cubase to my mind - bezier-
type automation and the tools available for creating and manipulating that
data. It looks good, but as others have mentioned, using a third-party app for
this can be a little obtrusive in terms of workflow (I know there's no way
round this for you, so it's not a criticism, more a statement of the
unavoidable).

I've lost count of the number of times I've had to create an automation
'curve' using points to approximate a curve (particularly for filter cutoff
frequency for fairly obvious reasons), so if I can find a way to integrate
this well enough to make it work for me during sessions then it will be hugely
appreciated. FWIW I'll give it a review on my (tiny) YT channel.

The sad thing about this is that these kind of facilities have been asked for
for -years- by users of Cubase, and they haven't made it in to the feature
set, despite the clear advantages they would give in creativity. I'm not a
programmer (IANAP?), so I'm not sure how many man-years went into creating
this, but surely it's not beyond the ken of people who have created something
like Cubase to do this, or is it that there's something lurking in the code
already that makes it much more difficult to do than if you do it from
scratch? (Is this technical debt? I see the term sometimes)

~~~
bezieio
Yeah - Bezie definitely didn't take years! It's interesting that basic curves
don't exist in some DAWs. My guess is that the codebase is monolithic and
there's probably lots of legacy code that is hard to touch. Hopefully Bezie
works out for you and thanks so much for the review!

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's more that Bezier curves are questionably useful for audio parameter
automation.

If you're automating level and panning you need assorted log/lin/exp curves,
not Beziers. You also need to be able to see the waveform you're automating,
which is something Bezie fails to offer.

Parameters automation works better with standard ease in/out curves and
keyframing. Beziers are a special case of a more general problem.

This looks very nice, but I'm not sure how useful it's going to be to most
users in practice.

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lightedman
No support for note alteration? Not useful for complex automation where
precise pitch variance upwards of two full octaves is needed, then, drat.

~~~
bezieio
There will be more control to select specific MIDI channels per envelope in
the next release, pitch bend being one of them.

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peapicker
Looks fascinating, I expect I'd probably use it eventually. It is about $10
too high for me for a 'buy it now, learn/use it when I get the chance' \-- but
it will go on my backlog for when I've mastered more of Ableton Suite.

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alnitak
Do you have plans to support automating MIDI notes or some sort of notes
transformations, or is it out of the scope of this tool?

~~~
bezieio
MIDI notes are definitely out of scope for Bezie - I've had a couple of ideas,
but they all make sense as separate utilities.

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goodmachine
This is quite nice, would be great on iPad. Any chance of some bounce curves?

~~~
bezieio
Thanks! Do have any examples? I'm not familiar with bounce curves.

~~~
goodmachine
They're very common in gaming or animation

[https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/10277/equation-f...](https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/10277/equation-
for-bouncing-graph)

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liam_ja
This looks very similar to Xfer LFO Tool - how do they compare?

~~~
bezieio
Bezie has some overlap, but the use case is a bit different. There are a
couple of VSTs like LFO Tool and MIDIShaper that allow you to create a fixed
width shape and toggle how many bars it should stretch over. In Bezie, if you
select 8 bars, you'll literally get 8 bars to automate. As an example, if you
wanted to map a couple different parameters to play with a song transition or
drop, it'd make sense in Bezie, not so much in the others.

