[Ardour-Users] Directing MIDI input from a keyboard

[Leigh Dyer]

On 06/27/2011 09:11 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-06-27 at 12:19 +1000, Leigh Dyer wrote:
>> It's starting to sound like there isn't a good way to do this within
>> Ardour yet, so I'll add it to the bug tracker as a suggestion and go
>> from there.
>
> I didn't test Ardour3 until now, but I'm a MIDI dino and have some
> experiences with oldish synth and several sequencers. The issue you've
> got isn't related to Ardour only. And it can become much more worse.
> Nearly no, but anyway some synth, resp. MIDInterfaces, aren't able to
> understand running status.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean here. I do know, though, that 
Qtractor handles what I'm asking for pretty well -- when you hit the 
keys on your keyboard, it routes the MIDI to the track that you have 
highlighted in its main window, unless you override that by manually 
configuring MIDI monitoring on other tracks.

> There are some uncommon issues for dinos who like to use old hardware
> synth.

There might be, but think this is one of them -- this is a pretty 
fundamental question of how Ardour handles monitoring of MIDI data, and 
I think will impact most people doing serious MIDI work in it. Soloing 
tracks is a useful work-around, but I'd really hope for something better 
than that.

> My serious recommendation: I'm a guitarist and not a keyboarder, anyway,
> play those old synth without using MIDI, even if you should be an
> untalented keyboard as I'm.

I don't want to offend, and I know you're trying to be helpful, but it's 
hard to take this suggestion seriously. Ardour finally has MIDI 
sequencing, and your solution is to not use it?

FWIW, I'm not working with a legacy synth here -- it's a Waldorf 
Blofeld, purchased a couple of years ago, and I regularly run five or 
six tracks on it in any given project. Playing its keyboard directly 
isn't even an option, since it's a desktop module and doesn't have one. 
Regardless, this issue is just as relevant when using external 
softsynths via JACK, so it's not limited to hardware synths.

Thanks
Leig