Cubase 12. Is it possible to set up Midi Input "Groups"?

Cubase
1

As title, is there a way to setup midi input “groups”? As of Cubase 12, it appears that it’s “ALL” or just a single one. For Instance:

Input routing Choices:

  1. All MIDI Inputs
  2. Akai Midi Controller
  3. Yamaha Midi Controller
  4. Sensel Morph 1
  5. Sensel Morph 2

I can only pick one of the 5. However, I need to have an input use #4 and #5 while excluding #2 and #3, and there’s no way I can figure out how to do that in Cubase (or override from an App on the PC, something like midiloopback that fools cubase into seeing ports that aren’t actually there).

I have a lot of midi devices and I use them at different times. Some are motion detected which screws up automation when I’m moving around if I don’t disable it first. This is a problem for me.

Would be far easier to have midi groups assigned, seems like something that would be so easy (and frankly very useful in many ways) to do, alas I can’t figure it out. I’d be genuinely surprised if Cubase (or other hosts) can’t do this already somehow. Anyone know if this is possible in some way?

1 Like
2

As far as I know this is not possible in Cubase. You would need to look for third party solutions.

I should add: back in the old days when we only had MIDI, either the multi-I/O MIDI interface took care of such things or you would have the input devices connected serially to the same MIDI Input of Cubase and use different MIDI channels to define what gets blocked and what gets passed through.

Maybe trying different MIDI channels works in your case, too.

3

If you want to use MIDI channels you leave the MIDI Input Port at “All MIDI Inputs”.
Then use the Input Transformer (Track) to filter out data from undesired MIDI channels…

grafik
grafik880×656 19.3 KB

Here I filter out channel 1 and 5.

Having 4 different modules available and a preset system I think this is basically what you need.

4

Here’s how I do this:

  1. Create 2 separate MIDI tracks for the desired input devices in a folder track
  • Folder tracks make it easy to enable/disable Record and Monitor settings for all of the tracks in the folder

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  1. Set the output of each of those midi channels to the desired target instrument track
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    and
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Further related productivity improvements:

A. Optionally create one or more macros for desired multi-step operations if they need to be done a lot.

B. Optionally create one or more project template(s) with the those configurations all set up for future projects.

  • In larger templates with many plugins, optionally deactivate the plugins and activate each track only as needed as work on the project progresses. (This makes the template load much faster, since deactivated tracks don’t load their plugins until they get activated).
  • For larger projects and templates, showing and hiding tracks (with key commands and/or midi remote control and/or macros can also be a good productivity booster).
5

Thanks for the replies and ideas, I’ll experiment and see if I can come up with a workaround.

Would be so much more intuitive and a useful feature if Cubase devs would simply do something like:

Menu: Midi Input Maps
New Input Midi Mapped Device [Rename: MPK/KX1 Combo One]
Add Devices: MPK249
Add Device: Yamaha KX1
Save

Then just choose “: MPK/KX1 Combo One” as the input routing when needed.

Would be great for any projects, but even greater with larger ones with multiple midi out devices in use – couple combos able to be created similar to my example above would be a time and life saver.