[Ardour-Users] Directing MIDI input from a keyboard

[Paul Davis]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 10:14 AM, Leigh Dyer <lsd at wootangent.net> wrote:
> On 06/27/2011 11:32 PM, Al Thompson wrote:
>>
>> On 06/27/2011 07:41 AM, Leigh Dyer wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I finally figured out that it's not the input to the MIDI track that you
>> are concerned with, it's the MIDI routing.  Correct?
>
> Yep, that's correct -- I want to be able to connect the input from my
> keyboard to the inputs on multiple tracks, but then configure how Ardour
> routes the MIDI internally.
>
>> I believe that the workflow you want is to have MIDI routed from a MIDI
>> input to whichever MIDI channel/port is associated with a track that you
>> click on in the main window.  Is that correct?  That's how Sonar works,
>> if I remember correctly.
>
> I think this is what Qtractor does, too, and I think that would do the job.
> I'm not sure if it's the best solution, but it would work for me!

I've been away for a long weekend, hence the lack of any comments from
me until now.

There's some interesting material in the exchanges so far. I'm not
sure that "route MIDI input to whichever channel/port is associated
with the selected track" scales well or is particularly
workflow-friendly. It doesn't scale as soon as you have more than 1
MIDI input device (especially if they are different kinds of things,
like a keyboard and a drumpad thing like a drumkat/handsonic etc). It
messes up workflow by making visual selection in the editor have a far
more important role in signal routing.

That said, I can definitely understand the issue and some solution is
clearly required. Anybody in the most common situation (1 MIDI input
device, multiple MIDI tracks with synths) is going to find the current
arrangement very cumbersome. I'm also happy because along with the
issues about note-off and region truncation, this is probably the
first substantive issue someone has raised about a3's MIDI support,
and I've been very skeptical that anyone has actually been using it
because of the lack of this type of report :)

SOme thinking to be done ...

See you on IRC :)