Pick Pocket Manual

1 · What's new in 0.1.40

A redesigned Pick Pocket: one screen laid out like a piece of studio hardware, a sixteen-pad kit you can fill from the Vault or your own samples, and a pad mixer with real meters. Each item links to where it's covered in full.

• A new faceplate. Everything on one screen: the Groove card on the left, Transients and MIDI Out in the middle, Detect on the right, a Console underneath (kit, VU meters, export), and a panel at the bottom for Kit, Pocket, Velocity, Groove DNA and Keys. The window scales to any size. More →
• A sixteen-pad kit and the kit editor. Every pad of the drum map has its own sound, from the Vault or your own samples. Step through sounds with ‹ ›, lock the pads you like, and fill every unlocked pad from a Vault pack or one of your folders in one click — or shuffle them. More →
• A 16-pad mixer. A horizontal fader for every pad, riding an LED meter with yellow and red peak lamps. Levels print into WAV exports; the MIDI stays as played. More →
• Drop a loop or a whole song on the header's drop zone (or anywhere on the window) — or click it to browse. Song-length files now load reliably instead of jumping back to the previous loop. More →
• One transport. A single play button with a Loop / MIDI / Both selector — it starts on Loop, and Space plays whichever is selected. More →
• Hear a note by clicking it in MIDI Out — it plays through the current kit, and plays again as you drag it to another lane. More →
• All sixteen MIDI Out lanes always fit, so kick, snare and hat are in view without scrolling or folding. More →
• Balanced kits. One-shots are level-matched as a kit loads, and a pad never goes silent: a sample that's moved in the catalog is found again by name, and otherwise the built-in Session Kit plays. More →
• A home button. Click the PICK POCKET logo to close whatever's open — the kit editor, the Vault library, MIDI Remap — and get back to the main view. More →

Earlier: 0.1.35 – 0.1.39

• Song overview. Drop in a whole song and Pick Pocket maps it — every groove, every fill, the intro, outro and breaks — and lets you open just the part you want. More →
• Full Kit detection. Besides kick, snare and hat, Pick Pocket now hears open hats, crashes, ride and three toms (high, mid, floor), with Toms, Cymbals and Ride sliders and an on/off lamp for every voice. Groove mode keeps it to the core three. More →
• The whole kit in MIDI Out. Up to sixteen pad lanes, cymbals on top, with Fold to hide the empty ones. More →
• Undo & redo in the plugin. ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z on Windows), plus Undo and Redo in the menu (the ⋯ menu since 0.1.40). More →
• MIDI Remap inside the plugin. Convert drum MIDI written for one sampler so it plays another — one file at a time in demo, whole batches and folders once activated. More →
• Zoom that stays sharp. Transients and MIDI Out zoom and scroll together up to 800%; hits and notes keep their size so zooming spreads them apart, and MIDI Out has a playhead. More →
• Delete hits in Transients — shift-click to select, Delete to remove. More →
• Sharper detection. Re-tuned against thousands of Yurt Rock catalog loops that ship with matching MIDI: quiet hats and ghost snares are caught more often, and hard kicks are misread as snares less often. More →
• Sign-in that finishes on its own. Sign in from the plugin, finish in your browser, and the plugin activates by itself — even in a DAW that hides plugin windows. License owners can now sign in with their account too. More →
• A clearer transport. Play answers the moment you press it (Preparing…, Waiting for bar…), and previewing a sound no longer stops the loop. More →
• Version & updates. The installed version sits in the bottom-right corner, with an Update available link when a newer build is out. More →
• Reliability. In Pro Tools, Pick Pocket never opens a second audio device; the standalone recovers when its saved audio device is gone; the Windows installer offers a desktop shortcut for the standalone. More →

2 · What Pick Pocket is

Pick Pocket listens to a drum groove — a loop you drop in, a Vault loop, a whole song, or whatever's playing on a track in your DAW — and hands you its feel as MIDI: every hit's timing and velocity, unquantized. The pocket stays; the sounds become yours.

Every hit is detected and classified — kick, snare and hi-hat, plus open hat, crash, ride and toms in Full Kit mode — with the groove's swing, push/drag, and tightness measured to the millisecond. You can audition the extracted MIDI through a real Yurt Rock kit — solo, or layered in lockstep with the original — then drag it onto your timeline as a standard MIDI file (pre-mapped for the major drum samplers), an Ableton .agr groove file, or rendered WAV.

Pick Pocket runs four ways, and they all share the same interface: as an AU, VST3 or AAX plugin inside your DAW (AAX is for Pro Tools, on both Mac and Windows), as a standalone app, and in the browser inside The Vault. A few features — the song overview, the in-plugin MIDI Remap screen and DAW capture — are plugin and standalone only.

3 · Requirements

• macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later — Apple Silicon and Intel, native on both.
• Windows 10 or later, 64-bit.
• A DAW that hosts AU, VST3 or AAX plugins (Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, FL Studio, Cubase, Studio One, Reaper, and more), or none at all — the standalone app runs by itself.
• Internet for installation and activation. After that Pick Pocket starts without a connection — nothing is checked when your DAW loads a session — and only needs to go online now and then to renew its licence in the background.

The AAX plug-in runs in retail Pro Tools on Mac and Windows — it's PACE-signed, and no iLok is required: activation is your Yurt Rock login or licence key, same as every other format.

4 · Installation

macOS

1. Open the downloaded PickPocket.pkg and follow the installer. It's signed and notarized by Apple, so there's nothing to bypass.
2. The installer lets you choose what to install: the AU plug-in (Logic Pro, GarageBand), the VST3 plug-in (Ableton Live, Cubase, FL Studio, Studio One and most others), the AAX plug-in (Pro Tools), and the standalone Pick Pocket app. All are selected by default.
3. Restart your DAW (Logic users: it re-scans AUs on launch; other DAWs may need a plugin re-scan). Pro Tools scans at launch only, so quit it fully first.

Installed locations: /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components (AU), /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 (VST3), /Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins (AAX), /Applications (app).

Windows

1. Run the downloaded PickPocket-Setup installer. It installs the VST3 and AAX plug-ins machine-wide plus the standalone app, and fetches the WebView2 runtime if your PC doesn't already have it.
2. On the shortcuts page, Create a desktop shortcut for the standalone app is ticked by default — untick it if you only use Pick Pocket inside a DAW. The standalone is always in the Start menu either way.
3. Re-scan plugins in your DAW if it doesn't pick them up automatically; quit and relaunch Pro Tools, which scans at launch only.

Installed locations: C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 (VST3), C:\Program Files\Common Files\Avid\Audio\Plug-Ins (AAX), C:\Program Files\Yurt Rock\Pick Pocket (app).

5 · Activation & licensing

Pick Pocket activates with your Yurt Rock account login or a license key — no iLok, no dongle, no challenge files.

• Free tier: the download runs the full analyzer and groove editor on the included starter grooves and your own loops. Only exporting (and batch MIDI Remap) requires activation.
• License ($49): yours forever. Activate with the serial number from your order email — or sign in with the account you bought with — on up to 3 machines, with self-serve deactivation when you move computers.
• Vault membership: Pick Pocket is included — just sign in inside the plugin. Members also unlock groove extraction from every loop in the Vault catalog.

Activating

Click the license chip at the right of the header — it reads Demo · Activate until you're activated, then turns green: ✓ Active. Any locked export also opens the same panel. Then either:

• Sign in with Yurt Rock — for Vault members and license owners. Your browser opens; sign in there. The button reads Waiting for sign-in… while you do, and Pick Pocket activates on its own as soon as you're done — you don't need to switch back at the right moment, and it still works if your DAW hides the plugin window while the browser is in front (Pro Tools does), or if you close and reopen the window mid-sign-in. The browser page tells you the real outcome: activated, or signed in but not activated (return to Pick Pocket for the reason). Changed your mind? Click Cancel sign-in.
• License key — paste your serial (PKPT-…) into the field. Plugin windows often don't receive ⌘V, so use the Paste button beside the field, then Activate.

After activation Pick Pocket never needs the internet to run. To free a machine, open the same panel and choose Deactivate this machine.

6 · The plugin window

Pick Pocket is one screen. Top to bottom:

• The header — where audio comes in, the transport, and the kit (below).
• The Groove card (left) — the loop's tempo and name, its vitals (swing, push or drag, tightness, bars), the Pocket and Dynamics sliders, and the Grid. See Pocket, Dynamics & the grid.
• Transients and MIDI Out (middle) — the waveform with every detected hit, and the groove as notes. See Detection and The MIDI editor.
• The Detect card (right) — what Pick Pocket listens for. See Detection.
• The Console — the kit's kick, snare and hat (click one to change it), the Loop / MIDI / Master VU meters with their faders, and Export.
• The bottom panel — choose Kit (the default: the pad mixer), Pocket, Velocity, Groove DNA or Keys from the list on its left.
• The status strip — the licence chip on the left, what Pick Pocket is doing, the undo shortcuts, and the version on the right.

The header

Left to right:

• The PICK POCKET logo is the home button: it closes whatever is open over the main view — the kit editor, the Vault library, MIDI Remap, the activation panel or Trim.
• ‹ Starter › — step through the curated starter loops, or open the menu for the full list, Browse the Vault library… and Open an audio file…
• ● Capture — records what's playing through the plugin's channel; it reads Stop · 4.2s while it listens. See Getting audio in.
• Trim — set the loop's in and out points by hand.
• Drop loop / song — drag a file here (or anywhere on the window), or click to browse.
• Tempo, the round play button and Loop / MIDI / Both — see Auditioning.
• Kit menu, the dice and A / B — see Kits.
• ⋯ — the menu below.

The ⋯ menu

Window size

Drag the window's edge or corner to make Pick Pocket any size from about 60% to 200% of its design size — everything scales together, on Mac and Windows.

Version & updates

The installed version (for example v0.1.40) sits at the right of the status strip. When a newer release is out, a gold Update available · v… link appears beside it — click it to open Your Plug-Ins on The Vault, where the installers live.

7 · Getting audio in

Drop a loop

Drag any audio file anywhere onto the plugin — WAV, AIFF, MP3, M4A, FLAC — and the header's Drop loop / song zone lights up; let go and analysis starts. Or click that zone to pick a file in your computer's own file dialog. A drum loop goes straight into the editor; a song-length file (24 bars or more) opens on the song overview.

Capture from a track

In the plugin, press ● Capture and play your DAW. Pick Pocket records whatever passes through the channel it's inserted on (a live waveform shows while it listens); press it again (Stop) when you have enough. Its automatic loop detection then finds a clean loop and cuts it click-free. Insert it on a drum bus, a sampler channel, or right after a vinyl loop — anything that plays drums.

After a capture, 2 bar · 4 bar · 8 bar · Full buttons appear in the Transients header to re-cut the same take — no need to capture again.

Trim by hand

Trim in the header opens the full source audio with draggable in and out handles. Set the in point, then use From the in point: 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 bars for an exact musical length (or Full), and Apply trim. The original is always kept, so reopening Trim shows the whole file again.

Starter loops & the Vault library

The Starter picker holds curated starter loops — real grooves from players like Nate Smith, Clyde Stubblefield, Marcus Finnie, and Darren King — that convert cleanly, with hand-checked MIDI; ‹ › steps through them. Browse the Vault library… (also in the ⋯ menu) lets you browse and audition the full Yurt Rock catalog inside the plugin; Vault members can extract any loop's groove instantly.

Source BPM

The big BPM number at the top of the Groove card is the loop's own tempo (it reads BPM · est when Pick Pocket estimated it). It sets the analysis grid — where the bar lines fall, the swing math — and the tempo written into exported MIDI. If detection guessed wrong, click the number, type the right one (or use its arrows) and everything recalculates.

8 · The song overview

Drop a whole song into the plugin and you don't get every bar of MIDI at once. Files of 24 bars or more open on the song overview: a map of the song, one card per groove, and the fills — so you can open just the verse beat, just the chorus, or just the fills. The header badge reads Song. (The song overview is in the plugin and standalone; the browser version still works on loops.)

What's on the overview

• The song map — every section to scale, coloured by groove, with fills as red slivers and a minutes ruler underneath. Hover a section for its bar range and time; click it to highlight it.
• Groove cards (Groove A, B, …) — each shows a one-bar pattern preview (kick, snare, hats, and toms when there are any), the loop length it will open at, how many times it plays and what share of the song it covers, and Heard at the times it appears. Open in editor loads it; the play button listens to it first.
• Fills — every one-bar fill, with its bar number and time. Click a fill's pattern to open it; its play button plays the fill with the bar before it, so you hear it in context. Open all … fills together loads every fill back to back as one clip, so you can edit and export them in one go.
• Also in the song — chips for the parts that aren't a repeating groove: Intro, Outro, Break (a silent stretch), or Other. Click one to open it.
• Open the whole song — the old behaviour, one click away: every bar in the editor at once.

Working on a part

When you open a part, it's cut from the full audio (bar lines snapped to the downbeats, so cuts are clean) and loaded into the normal editor. A section bar sits above it:

• ‹ Song overview takes you back to the map — picking another part is instant.
• The part's name, its bar range and time, and a mini song map with the open part lit.
• Length 8 / 4 / 2 / 1 bars (grooves only; lengths longer than that section are left out) re-cuts the groove at a different length.
• Next take (1/3) › opens the same groove from the next place it's played in the song — handy for picking the cleanest take.

9 · Detection & the Transients view

Detect

The Detect card on the right decides what the extractor listens for.

• Full Kit / Groove. Full Kit (the default) listens for open hat, crash, ride, and high, mid and floor toms as well as kick, snare and hat — told apart by how they ring. Groove keeps to kick, snare and hat, the three voices every groove is made of. Your choice is remembered on this computer.
• Layered / Single. Layered (the default) lets one hit strike two voices at once — kick and hat together, the way drummers play. Single gives every hit one voice: the loudest wins.
• Sensitivity sets how eager the detector is overall: toward More hits to catch ghost notes, toward Fewer hits to ignore bleed and rattle. Double-click resets it.
• Kick, Snare, Hat knobs balance the three core voices — turn up to hear more of that voice. Drag a knob up or down (hold Shift for fine moves); double-click resets it.
• Toms, Cymbals, Ride knobs (Full Kit only). The default is tuned; up hears more (more toms, more open hats and crashes, a ride in shorter rings); down keeps only the unmistakable ones.
• Lamps. Every voice's name has a lamp: green = listening for it, red = not. Click the name to switch. Switching off kick, snare or hat removes that voice from every hit (a hit left with nothing is dropped). Switching off toms, cymbals or ride just stops Pick Pocket splitting them out — those hits stay on the voice the core detector heard, so a crash stays a hat and a tom goes back to kick or snare.
• Reset puts every knob back to its default, switches every lamp on, returns to Layered, and clears your hand edits (pinned voices, velocities, timing, mutes, added and deleted notes).

Sensitivity's default was tuned against Yurt Rock catalog loops that ship with matching MIDI — so quiet 8th-note hats and ghost snares are caught, and a hard kick is less likely to be read as a snare too.

The Transients view

The Transients panel shows the waveform with every detected hit marked and colored by voice.

• Click a hit to cycle its voice through the voices the current mode offers, then back to what the detector heard. If a rimshot got read as a hat, a click or two pins it as a snare. Pinned hits are outlined and survive re-detection.
• Drag a hit up or down to set its velocity by hand.
• Shift-click selects hits (a gold ring); Delete or Backspace removes the selection — or, with nothing selected, the hit under the pointer. Esc or a click on empty space clears the selection.
• Click empty space to set where playback starts; double-click to reset it to the top of the loop.

The Groove card shows the groove's vitals — BPM, swing %, push or drag against the grid, tightness, and bars — and the Transients header shows the hit count (and how many you've pinned).

Zoom & scroll

Transients and MIDI Out zoom together: use − / + on either panel (100% up to 800%) and fit to see the whole loop again. Past 100% each panel gets a horizontal scrollbar, and scrolling one scrolls the other, so they always show the same stretch of time. Zooming keeps what you were looking at in view.

Hits, notes and text keep their on-screen size as you zoom — zooming spreads close hits apart instead of fattening them — and the waveform is redrawn in finer detail. A new loop starts at fit.

10 · The MIDI editor

The MIDI Out panel is the extracted groove as notes, one lane per pad, exactly as it will export. Each lane is labelled with its name and the note number for the current export map, and a white playhead runs through it in step with the Transients view.

Which lanes you see

• Groove mode: three lanes — kick, snare, hat.
• Full Kit: every pad the export map has, cymbals on top like a DAW. On General MIDI, Superior / EZdrummer, SSD5 and Groove Agent that's sixteen lanes: china, crash, ride bell, ride, open hat, pedal hat, hat, tambourine, cowbell, clap, side stick, high tom, mid tom, snare, floor tom, kick. BFD 3 and Addictive Drums 2 show nine: kick, snare, hat, open hat, crash, ride and the three toms.
• All the lanes always fit the panel, so kick, snare and hat are in view the moment a loop loads.
• Fold (Full Kit only, in the MIDI Out header) hides the empty lanes, leaving only what's been detected or drawn. Pick Pocket remembers it.
• The single-note export maps (Groove template and Ableton .agr) show one lane, since every hit shares a note.

China, ride bell, pedal hat, tambourine, cowbell, clap and side stick are never detected — they're there to draw into. A note you add on one of those lanes exports through the map like any other.

Editing

• Click selects a note and plays it through the current kit. Shift-click adds to the selection. Drag on empty space lassos.
• Drag a selection to move it in time — or up and down to another lane (you hear the new pad as it lands).
• Delete / Backspace removes the selection — per voice, so deleting a hat under a kick leaves the kick alone.
• Double-click empty space adds a note on that lane at that position.
• ⌘Z undoes and ⇧⌘Z redoes (Ctrl on Windows) — see Undo & redo.

Keys & recording

Choose Keys in the bottom panel for the preview keys: they play the current kit — click them, or play the mapped notes from your MIDI controller (they flash with the groove as it plays). Arm Rec and play along while the groove loops to punch new hits straight into the MIDI, unquantized. Click adds a metronome that follows the audition tempo; Count-in gives you a bar of clicks before playback starts.

MIDI controllers in the standalone app: plug in a pad controller, keyboard or e-kit and it connects by itself — no setup, including one you plug in while the app is open. Play the notes shown on the keys (they follow the drum map you've chosen) to play the whole sixteen-pad kit, at the pad-mixer levels. Velocity curve and a MIDI on/off switch are in the ⋯ menu; to exclude one device, untick it under Options → Audio/MIDI Settings.

MIDI in a DAW (VST3 and AAX): create a MIDI track and send its output to Pick Pocket — in Ableton Live choose the track Pick Pocket is on under MIDI To, then the plug-in; in Pro Tools pick Pick Pocket as the MIDI track's output. Your controller (or a MIDI clip) then plays the kit through the plug-in's channel, and Rec works the same way. The Audio Unit version (Logic, GarageBand) can't receive MIDI — Logic doesn't route MIDI to insert effects — so use the on-screen keys there, or the standalone app.

Every edit feeds straight into the audition and the export — what you see is what you drag out.

11 · Undo & redo

Pick Pocket keeps a history of your note edits:

• What's covered: re-assigning a hit's voice, velocity changes, timing changes (Pocket dots and moved notes), added notes, deleted notes and per-voice deletes, and Groove DNA step mutes.
• One gesture, one step: a whole drag undoes in one go. Up to 200 steps are kept.
• History starts over when you load a new loop or open a different part of a song, or change something that re-runs detection: Sensitivity, the Grid, Layered/Single, or the Kick/Snare/Hat sliders.
• The shortcuts only reach Pick Pocket while its window has focus, so your DAW's own ⌘Z keeps working whenever the DAW is in front. Text fields (like Source BPM) keep their own undo.

12 · Pocket, Dynamics & the grid

In the Groove card:

• Pocket scales the timing feel: 0% is quantized dead onto the grid, 100% is exactly as played, and beyond exaggerates the push and drag. Double-click resets to 100%.
• Dynamics does the same for velocity: 0% flattens every hit, 100% is as played, beyond makes the accents more dramatic.
• Grid chooses the division the groove is measured against: 8th, 8T (triplet), 16th or 32nd.

In the bottom panel:

• Pocket shows each hit's deviation from the grid as a dot — drag a dot up to push a hit ahead, down to drag it behind.
• Velocity shows every hit's dynamics (1–127) as a stick; drag its cap up or down to set it.
• Groove DNA folds the groove's velocity heat into one bar; click a step to mute it everywhere it repeats.

13 · Auditioning & the mixer

The round play button in the header plays what the selector beside it says: Loop (the original audio — where Pick Pocket starts), MIDI (the extracted groove through the current kit), or Both (the MIDI layered in lockstep on top of the original — if it sounds doubled, the pocket transferred). Switch the selector while playing and the audition changes on the spot. Space starts and stops whichever is selected.

The button answers the moment you press it. If Pick Pocket needs a moment — stretching to a new tempo, loading a kit — it shows a clock and breathes; when it's waiting for your DAW's next bar line it does the same; while playing it lights up. Pressing it again during preparation cancels, and each press replaces the one before, so a double-click never starts two attempts. Previewing a sound while the loop plays — a key, a note, a sample in the kit editor — never stops the loop.

The VU meters in the middle of the Console — Loop, MIDI, Master — each have a fader. Balance the original against the kit before you commit; WAV exports honor the fader levels you hear. For the level of each pad, use the pad mixer.

The Tempo box changes audition playback speed (pitch preserved via the Signalsmith Stretch engine, exports untouched): click it and type a BPM, use ↑ / ↓ (Shift for ±5), or double-click its label for the loop's own tempo. In the plugin, Host syncs the audition to your DAW's tempo (the label then reads Sync), and audio plays through the channel the plugin sits on — so your channel strip and monitoring path apply.

14 · Kits, the pad mixer & the kit editor

The kit is what you hear the MIDI through — the extracted MIDI never depends on it. It has sixteen pads, one for every lane of the drum map: kick, snare, side stick, clap, hat, open hat, pedal hat, tambourine, high / mid / floor tom, cowbell, crash, china, ride and ride bell.

Choosing a kit

• The Kit menu in the header holds the Artist kits and Your kits: Custom kit (the one you're building) and every kit you've saved.
• The dice rolls a random kick, snare and hat; A / B hops between this kit and the previous one.
• Change any pad of an artist kit and it becomes your Custom kit, keeping the artist's other sounds.

The pad mixer

Choose Kit in the bottom panel (it's there by default). Every pad has a horizontal fader riding an LED meter: green, yellow in the last 6 dB, red past full scale, with a peak marker that holds for a moment. Beside each fader, the level in dB and two lamps — yellow when the pad peaks within 6 dB of full scale, red when it hits full scale.

• Click or drag anywhere on a fader; Shift-drag for fine moves; double-click returns it to 0 dB; all the way left mutes the pad. Fader moves are heard straight away without stopping playback.
• Levels apply to the MIDI audition, the console's play buttons, your MIDI controller and WAV exports — .mid exports stay exactly as played.
• The meters move with the MIDI audition, and when you play a key, a note or a pad.
• Pick Pocket remembers the levels on this computer.

The kit editor

Click Edit kit…, a pad's name in the pad mixer, or the kick, snare or hat in the Console. The editor opens over the main view, with all sixteen pads on the left and a sound browser on the right; Done (or the logo) closes it.

• Each pad card shows its sound, ‹ › to step to the next or previous sound of the same type (each step plays it), a lock, a play button and its fader. Click a card to choose a sound for it in the browser.
• The Vault — the Yurt Rock one-shot catalog. Search, pick a pack, and filter by type (the filter follows the pad you've selected); click ▶ to preview and Use (or double-click) to put it on the pad. Everyone can browse and preview everything; free sounds are marked FREE, and a Vault membership unlocks the rest.
• Your samples — Add folder… or Add files… opens your computer's file dialog (WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, OGG). A folder brings in every audio file under it, subfolders included. Pick Pocket reads a file only when you play or use it, your files never leave your computer, and it remembers your folders. Each file is tagged with the pad its name suggests (kick, snare, hat, tom, crash, ride…).
• Fill the whole kit at once. With a Vault pack selected, Fill … from this pack puts that pack's kick, snare and hat on every unlocked one of those pads. With one of your folders selected, Fill … from this folder sorts the folder onto all sixteen pads by file name and fills every unlocked pad that has a match.
• Shuffle unlocked re-rolls every pad you haven't locked (also on the Kit panel). Lock the sounds you love first.
• Save kit… saves all sixteen pads under a name; saved kits appear in the header's Kit menu. Kits saved by earlier versions (kick, snare and hat) load onto those three pads.

15 · Exporting

In the Console's Export section, pick the target in Map, then drag the file out of the plugin straight onto your timeline from the gold strip at the bottom of the window — or click Export to save it with a file dialog. The file name is shown above the button.

MIDI keymaps included: Superior Drummer / EZdrummer, BFD3, Slate SSD5, Addictive Drums 2, Groove Agent (Cubase), and General MIDI. The mapping is baked into the exported notes, so the file lands on the right pads with no re-mapping.

Working on a song part? The export is the part that's open — a groove, a fill, or all the fills back to back.

16 · MIDI Remap

Drum MIDI is written for one sampler's key map. Play a Superior Drummer groove through Addictive Drums and the hats land on the wrong pads. MIDI Remap fixes that: drop in drum MIDI, pick the sampler it should play, and get it back mapped. Timing, velocity and tempo are untouched — only the note numbers move.

Open it from the ⋯ menu › MIDI Remap; the PICK POCKET logo (or ← Back to Pick Pocket) returns you to the extractor, exactly as you left it.

1. Add MIDI. Drop .mid / .midi files or a whole folder onto the drop zone, or use Choose files / Choose a folder.
2. From — the map the files were written for. Detect from the notes (the default) works it out per file; or pick one.
3. To — the sampler that should play them: General MIDI, Addictive Drums 2, Superior Drummer / EZdrummer, Groove Agent, BFD 3, or Steven Slate SSD5.
4. Unmapped notes — Keep leaves a note the source map doesn't know exactly as it was; Drop leaves it out.
5. Check the report — how many notes were mapped, which kit pieces were found, and any unknown note numbers, file by file — then Download .mid (one file) or Download … as zip (several).

Converted files get the target in their name, e.g. Verse Groove [AD2].mid. A batch comes back as one zip that keeps your folder structure. In the plugin, downloads are saved to your Downloads folder.

17 · The DAW workflow

1. Insert Pick Pocket on the track that has the groove — or on any track, and drop a file in. A whole song? Pick the groove or fill you want from the song overview.
2. ● Capture while the DAW plays, or drop the loop on the window. Let detection run.
3. Check the Transients view; fix any mis-voiced hits with a click, delete strays, and adjust the Detect knobs or Sensitivity if it missed ghosts or caught bleed. Made a wrong move? ⌘Z.
4. Audition layered with Both — original plus kit together. When it sounds doubled, you're done. With the DAW transport looping the section, play drops in bar-synced, so you can also judge the groove against the full arrangement.
5. Choose your sampler in the Export Map and drag the .mid onto a track running that sampler.
6. Delete or mute the original audio — the feel is now yours, playing your sounds.

Your work saves with the DAW project: every knob, edit, and override comes back when the session reopens.

18 · Troubleshooting

The plugin doesn't show up in my DAW.

Re-scan plugins (most DAWs have a rescan in preferences). On macOS, Logic lists it under AU; Live and Cubase under VST3. Pro Tools scans at launch only, so quit and relaunch it — Pick Pocket files under Instrument. Confirm your DAW is 64-bit and meets the OS minimum.

Detection misses hits or hears extras.

Adjust Sensitivity and the Detect knobs first. If the bar lines look wrong, fix Source BPM — a wrong tempo scrambles the grid math. Individual stragglers: click to re-voice, shift-click and Delete to remove, or add notes in the MIDI editor.

A hit is on the wrong instrument.

Click it in the Transients view to cycle through the voices. The pin survives re-analysis. If toms or cymbals keep appearing where there are none, turn down the Toms or Cymbals knob, switch that lamp off, or switch Detect to Groove.

My long file opened on a "Song overview" instead of the editor.

That's the song overview — files of 24 bars or more open there. Pick a groove or fill, or click Open the whole song to edit every bar at once.

A whole song loaded, then Pick Pocket jumped back to the previous loop.

Fixed in 0.1.40 — long files now load reliably. Update to the latest version.

A kit pad (or the console's play button) is silent.

Check that pad's fader in the pad mixer — all the way left mutes it. Since 0.1.40 a pad whose sample can't be found plays the built-in Session Kit sound instead of nothing.

Where did the gear, the Vault Library tab and MIDI Remap go?

They're all in the ⋯ menu at the right end of the header. See The plugin window.

⌘Z / Ctrl+Z doesn't undo.

Click inside the Pick Pocket window first so it has focus. Some DAWs keep ⌘-shortcuts for themselves — use ⋯ menu › Edit › Undo. Remember that history starts over after a new loop or a detection change (see Undo & redo).

The exported MIDI plays the wrong drums in my sampler.

Check the Export Map matches the sampler you're dragging into. General MIDI is the safe fallback for anything unlisted. For MIDI files you already have, use MIDI Remap.

Audition is silent in the plugin.

Pick Pocket plays through the channel it's inserted on — check that track's fader, mute state, and output routing in your DAW. In Pro Tools, previews only ever play through the channel. Pro Tools can pause plug-ins on silent tracks (its Dynamic Plug-in Processing option), and while it does, Pick Pocket can't be heard — start playback, or turn Dynamic Plug-in Processing off, and previews come back.

Pro Tools slowed down or the audio went wrong with Pick Pocket inserted.

Older versions could open a second connection to your audio interface when Pro Tools paused the plugin, re-clocking the session. Current versions never do that inside Pro Tools — update to the latest version. In other DAWs, that fallback now always matches the host's own sample rate and buffer size.

Playback stopped by itself partway through, or Play seemed to do nothing.

Both were fixed: previewing a sound no longer stops the loop, and the Play buttons now show Preparing… or Waiting for bar… straight away. Update if you're on an older version.

The standalone app is silent, or says it couldn't open the output device.

Usually a saved audio device that's been unplugged, or a sample rate the current device can't run. The standalone now falls back to your default devices (then output only) so there's always sound — update to the latest version, then pick your interface again in its audio settings if you want a different one.

Export is locked.

Exporting needs an activated license or a signed-in Vault membership. Everything else works free — including remapping one MIDI file at a time.

Sign-in finished in the browser, but the plugin didn't activate.

Current versions activate on their own once the browser is done, and the browser page says whether activation worked. If it says you're signed in but Pick Pocket couldn't activate, go back to the plugin — the panel shows why (most often: no membership or purchased license on that email). You can Cancel sign-in and try again, or activate with your license key.

I can't paste my license key.

Plugin windows often don't receive ⌘V. Copy the key, then click the Paste button beside the field.

I moved to a new computer.

Deactivate on the old machine from the license panel (self-serve), then activate on the new one. Licenses cover up to 3 machines at once.

19 · Specifications

20 · Support

Stuck on something this manual doesn't cover? Email support@yurtrock.com and the team will follow up ASAP. Include the version number from the bottom-right corner of the plugin.

Try Pick Pocket in the browser any time at vault.yurtrock.com/labs/pick-pocket — same engine, no install.