Playback templates & MIDI Instruments

Dorico
#1

Brilliant design on Playback templates by the way. I love how there’s a ‘multiple waterfall’ configurability, I get levels of assignment choices. Wonderful to create a template containing VST/Endpoints from different libraries, and it will quietly make all the appropriate set ups for me, very quick and easy with fallbacks.

One thing I’m having trouble with is a MIDI Instrument which is being used by the Time track, not an instrument (it’s a visual metronome - I hate hearing metronomes). It’s not getting picked up, and further isn’t getting added to MIDI Instruments. However a regular synthesizer does get applied, so it appears that Time and Chords are excluded from the party - would it make sense to include them too, since they have the same behavior that you can send their output to an endpoint?

#2

I don’t have a suitable MIDI device to test this with myself, but you should certainly be able to choose your MIDI instrument as an endpoint for the chords or time track, provided it shows up in the MIDI Instruments section of the VST Instruments panel in Play mode. That, I think, is the first thing to investigate. Can you check that it appears in Audio MIDI Setup’s MIDI Studio window, and that the device is online and set to receive on at least one channel?

#3

I didn’t explain it clearly enough, sorry about the confusion.

I have working a MIDI Instrument for a visual metronome (blinky LED device). The time track is set to this instead of the DoricoBeep. That all works just great, and I’d like to save it in a Playback Template because I want to use it for every single project going forward. So I saved the MIDI Endpoint for the MIDI instrument, and then add it to a custom playback template.

Now when I change to the newly created playback template, the MIDI instrument is not being added, and it’s not (obviously) being set as the ‘instrument’ for the Time track. Again maybe I did something wrong but I tried it several times.

To verify MIDI Instruments work in general I verified it does work for a Synthesizer player which goes to a (synth) MIDI Instrument. I created a custom playback template just for that case, created a new file with a synth player and applied the template. A new MIDI Instrument is added and the synth player is set to that.

So my belief is that the Playback template apply algorithm is not applying MIDI Endpoints that are set for the Time (and probably Chords) tracks, but they do work obviously for the player tracks. If true it’s just a corner case.

I think you can test this with any arbitrary MIDI port - if on Mac just use the IAC or any port you happen to have.

#4

Right, I see what you mean. The playback template indeed does not automatically assign devices to the time and chords tracks at present.