# Addictive Drums MIDI to EZ Drummer conversion?



## Metalman X (Dec 13, 2017)

This is one thats been bedeviling me for a bit. I got a couple of old tracks with the drums done in Addictive Drums 2, but currently been experimenting with EZ Drummer again after a long time.

Thing is, is their an easy way to take the old MIDI I did in AD2, but convert it to to EZD's format?

Theirs that Mark Heath MIDI File Mapper program. That works great for converting EZD midi to AD2.... BUT it doesn't do it the other way around. I've googled the crap out of this, and their doesn't seem to be an easy similar solution for this.

If I gotta go and drag and drop MIDI around part by part in the piano-roll I'm gonna go bat-shit crazy. Especially since I'm looking at 2 old tracks, and possibly a couple more depending what else I dig out to work on/re-work.

I have Ableton Live as a DAW, so maybe theirs a tool in that I'm unaware of? 

I also recently started using/learning Reaper, and it looks like theirs a lot of user support/add-ons. I searched the plug-ins and it has nothing that looks quite like what I'd need for this particular task. But I've only had Reaper kicking around for a couple of weeks, so I'm sure theirs some stuff I've yet to learn that might be helpful here too.


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## pastanator (Dec 13, 2017)

can you not just change ez drummer's midi settings to the same ones as addictive? like say for examples addictive's kick is C2, you should be able to configure ez drummer and make its kick C2 as well (and so on and so on for each piece of the kit)


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## Metalman X (Dec 13, 2017)

pastanator said:


> can you not just change ez drummer's midi settings to the same ones as addictive? like say for examples addictive's kick is C2, you should be able to configure ez drummer and make its kick C2 as well (and so on and so on for each piece of the kit)




Yes.... but theirs a LOT of cymbal stuff going on... and fills. It'd be faster at this point for me to just rebuild the entire track in EZ Drummer than shifting all that stuff around manually. I started doing it, and my stress levels when through the roof, lol. And I have a couple more tracks in the same predicament I want to use. I've used MidiFileMapper in the past for similar conversion when helping friends with projects.... makes it super easy. But it doesnt have an option for going AD2 to EZ2, only the other way around. In addition, I also have a drum map I can load into AD2 that matches EZ drummer, so I don't even need to convert it. It's like toast... you can never get it back to bread again, lol.

I started loading parts of the song into EZ Drummer.... breaking it down into sections (verse 1, 2 chorus A, B, bridge, etc), and than using EZ's editor to cut and paste the MIDI for each part based on what it shows being used in that loop.... which somehow seems easier than shifting everything around over the entire 7 minutes of the track, even though its kind of not (it's a perception thing I think....like taking longer route of back roads because the shorter route means sitting in traffic and just feels more aggrevating.... funny thing about depression.... _everything_ seems to make you mad, very quickly, and meds ain't helping, heh). 

I'm just hoping theirs a similar solution to that Midifilemapper app since I'm going to have to be doing this for several tracks. 

Although, I'm not as experienced with EZ as I am AD, but I much like its beat creation setup more than AD (Tap 2 Find is the shiznite! I can usually find a loop thats like 80-90% what I have in mind, and it tailoring it the rest of the way takes only a few minutes). I havent found a function in EZ that lets me, say, load in an AD drum map.... whereas I can do that vice versa for AD. So I do need to learn it more.... just not sure if I'm looking for a solution/option that doesn't exist.


One cool thing I could do, which doesnt help me for this scenario, was I could use that program to convert all the AD MIDI to EZ format, which is great because it saves me money I dont have, I can utilize that library in EZ.

Although EZ has way more "metal" packs, which is why I'm switching over now.... plus while less tweakable soundwise than AD, the couple EZX's I have get me closer to the sound in my head, specifically the snares. It's just much more metal friendly all around. I'd probably love Superior Drummer, but I cant afford new shit right nor for the foreseeable future, so trying to get the most out of what I already have, which really, should be more than enough anyway for my purposes. It's just trying to create some "cross compatibility" thats hanging me up.


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## pastanator (Dec 13, 2017)

alot of cymbal stuff and fills shouldnt matter. youd be literally making the same notes trigger the same pieces of the drumkit


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## Winspear (Dec 16, 2017)

Just throwing it out there that even a compete manual remap should only take minutes. You should be able to just click a key on the piano roll to select all instances of that note and then drag them all to the new note at once. Or use a transposition tool


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## Metalman X (Dec 20, 2017)

Winspear said:


> Just throwing it out there that even a compete manual remap should only take minutes. *You should be able to just click a key on the piano roll to select all instances of that note and then drag them all to the new note at once*. Or use a transposition tool


I must be missing something than. Like I said, I'm new to Reaper, and its MIDI handling is quite different from Ableton

The highlighted part of your response... I tried that. It doesn't move anything in Reaper that way apparently. What I CAN do is right click than choose "select all notes of same pitch"... and you'd THINK than I could just drag them over to the new location, or cut/paste.... but Reapers not letting me do that. For some reason, after cutting or copying...tried both... than selecting the note I want to move to and I hit paste, it keeps dropping the selected notes BACK onto the original location, which seems extremely unusual considering this is most obvious way of doing it, you'd think.

What I HAVE found that works is after "select all notes of same pitch" I have to right click than select "note properties" (I think, I'm at my laptop now, not in front of my desktop/workstation... but if not that, it was a choice worded similarly). Than in note properties I have to change it from, example Key 49 to Key 22, and NOW the MIDI notes all move to the new key. which seems like a lot of unnecessary steps for what should, as you said, be a simple drag n' drop affair.

So, that method works. But it gets to be a clusterfook real quick when your moving one thing to another spot... but another part is in that key and you have to move it to its new location now, to fit the notes for the other kitpeice into that location. so now you end up with a lot juggling, moving one line of hits from one location to another in a series of moves instead. When your doing this for a track thats using kits with 4 toms, 6-7 crash cymbals, sometimes 2 different rides, and so on, and when you factor in the different hits for each piece also having their own notes, this task gets excruciatingly tedious real quick. I just spen 20 minutes doing that, which really netted me moving two part of the kit in total only.... and I'm literally yelling at the screen and looking for shit to throw across the room to vent my agitation.

.... and I have 3 other tracks I need/want to do this with as well. FML.

I feel their MUST be a more efficient way of making this transition. Otherwise, I'm gonna be stuck with some tracks having totally different drum sounds from the rest of this batch of songs, which might not be an issue for some, but will annoy the crap out of me. OR I'm gonna just have to rewrite half the MIDI again, essentially starting over, and I'm not feeling that either. OR I just abandon the tracks completely and focus on my other tunes (but I'm wanting to do all this cuz I really like those ones, and want to build them further)

This is why I'm trying to find a more "automated" solution, like MidiFileMapper... which does exactly this function, just no option to go from AD2 midi to EZD2 midi. Maybe it's just a case of toast never being able to become bread again.

Truthfully, this stuff would be tedious on the best of days, but I'm dealing with a nasty, long stretching bout of depression (by "long" I mean 3 years on, with no apparent end in sight), and despite meds and therapy, my temper flares at the slightest little "wall" like this I hit, and I'm trying to keep moving forward creatively. I put a LOT of hours and work into tracks that ultimately nobody ever even seems to want to listen to other than myself anyway. I'm simultaneously wanting to move my shit forward, and improve my knowledge, but also feeling like it's completely pointless as well... which is how I feel about almost everything these days.
(sorry for the vent... I'm just feeling beyond agitated, even moreso today than usual... and was hoping this stuff would take my mind off it all for a bit, but instead it's just given me something else to feel really pissed off about)





pastanator said:


> alot of cymbal stuff and fills shouldnt matter. youd be literally making the same notes trigger the same pieces of the drumkit



Sadly, only a small handful of articulations are the same. The kick, and some of the snare hits being those. The toms and cymbals are mapped quite differently making for some really f*cky, unpleasant sounding fills unless I move stuff to its proper spot. Like I got for example, rack toms that unless moved, will trigger hihat articulations instead.


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