Best practise for MIDI port management

[workspace]

In my setup I used to assign MIDI ports OUT1-4 (and channels) to all the tracks I needed. I saved several patterns / groups with this settings.

Recently I changed my hardware setup to Quad IIC. Unfortunately all my patterns are saved with OUT1-4 ports. Is there a way to change this without editing every track and saving the pattern again?

I might also want to change my setup temporarily to use the USB ports for this patterns and experimenting with the sounds of the softsynths on my computer.

I reckon there is a best practice to do this. Maybe sending CC using a loopback track to set/change the MIDI ports? But before I dig deeper into this I wanted to know if I'm on the right track or if there is an easier / more elegant way.

Thanks

Michael

 

[Hawkeye]

Hi Michael,

imho, this is a common problem. Your setup grows, you realize you have to move synths to other OUT ports (IIC, or virtual on USB) - and all old sessions are not updated.
What *would* be great, would be a virtual synthesizer "chooser" instead of the MIDI OUT / CHN selector for the upcoming MBSEQ V4+. I had the same problem multiple times and will recommend this in the SEQ thread, maybe other users would like that too... I had the idea for a long time, but now you report the same problem... :-)

Sorry, other than that, no immediate other solution other than to write down your setup for every song (i do this on pen+paper, and it works most of the time ;-)).

Many greets,

Peter

 

[workspace]

Dear Peter,

thanks for your reply. I'm thinking about another approach with groups, patterns and tracks that has more flexibility and could solve this. But I worrying that it also would lead to a MBSEQ V5 ....

Best Michael

[mongrol]

Some virtual mapping layer defo seems like the way to go. The world can never have too many API layers.

[Rowan]

I also see some use for an abstraction layer for the hardware I/O. 

 

To me the logical place to do this would be the MIDI router menu. Hardware ports could be mapped to virtual port. Tracks are then mapped to these virtual ports. 

One nice side effect could be that only mapped virtual ports could be mapped to tracks thereby reducing the number of outputs avalible to a tracks to only ports that are used, assuming the physical>virtual mapping is set up correctly.