Show HN: Bezie – Virtual MIDI controller for complex automation (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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)

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

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.

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?

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

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