How-to use the AIR Music Ignite audio output in REAL-TIME in a DAW

AIR Music Ignite is the tool I used at the beginning because it was sold together my first toy MIDI keyboard

I had a lot of fun with it, but I gave up when I started using a DAW, because Ignite is not a plugin, and it doesn’t have a MIDI/Audio output in real-time

Here and there I searched a software able to use Ignite in a DAW as a plugin, but without any success

I also searched for an arranger VST, and I found vArranger that seems doable, but its price was too high

One evening I suddenly realized that a simple mini-jack male-male cable could have worked, and I tried

I removed the stereo output mini-jack from my PC external speaker and entered it in the Guitar input of my Komplete Audio 1 ASIO soundcard

A distant reminiscence of the Larsen effect suggested me to start from very low levels :grinning:, then increasing them slowly and it worked, BINGO!

P.S: a similar cable but stereo-to-mono may work better, but unsure about

So here is the workflow:

Start Ableton first, so you can remove the MIDI keyboard from its inputs, then set this routing, possibly adding Spectrum if you want to investigate deeper the sound produced by AIR Ignite

Start AIR Ignite then, so it can use your MIDI keyboard, play some notes, and you’ll should see the green LED blinking left to Audio From 2

Fiddle CAREFULLY with the knobs on your external soundcard to avoid the Larsen effect, and record; at the end you should see an audio recorded like the one below

The volume is not so high, but is perfectly doable, and you can fiddle further with the knobs on your external soundcard, or just add a compressor

Note 1: I also used Scaler Audio to recognize the chords played, and it seemed to me that one can play other instruments in tune with the AIR Ignite track, but I didn’t test it deeply enough

Note 2: I found that interesting series of chords may come out from Scaler Audio, and quite oddly they are different, i.e. more complex, than the AIR Ignite ones: this is strange but cool

All that opens a door, also because AIR Ignite devs produced many extensions that may enrich the Ignite capabilities

On the contrary, too bad it is impossible having a MIDI output from Ignite!

I tried DODO Midi 2 hoping to transform in real-time the Ignite’s audio in Midi but it didn’t work

P.S: this trick can work with any other Audio output, like for example a browser, an audio player, etc.

Have fun!