MIDI problem with IAC driver

[slx]

Hello,

short description:
my problem is that i can not use the MIDI data for playing an instrument that live recieves through an IAC driver.

my system and involved programs:
mac osx 10.5.8
ableton live 8.1.1
puredata extended 0.40.30
IAC driver

problem description in detail:
i am sending midi notes with puredata through an IAC driver as output.

live is configurated to recieve these datas like this:
in live preferences i activated the track option of the IAC driver under midi ports.
in session view of a midi track i selected as input "midi from" the IAC driver listening to "all channel" (tried also channel 1 which is where i am sending from puredata)

the midi led in the top right corner of live is blinking, so it seems to recieve midi, but there is no signal in the mixer of the midi track. when i activate midi mapping i can see that live recieves datas, because it assigns the recieved midi note to the selected button.

what really is curious, is that deactivating the audio output in the preferences, the mixer of the midi track shows a signal.

thanks for your attention and hopefully help,
sebastian

[slx]

after deinstallation of the Automap Server everything worked like expected

greetings,
sebastian

[outershpongolia]

PROBLEM SOLVED

after deinstallation of the Automap Server everything worked like expected

greetings,
sebastian

Haha that's how I got my launchpad to cooperate.. had to UNINSTALL the software that came with it. How fun.

[slx]

The above described problem occured again. Automap is deinstall and i haven't installed anything new or changed something. the only thing was that i restarted my computer ...

[Vaz]

I'm having the exact same issue.

I have MIDI input coming from the IAC driver, the MIDI In light is flashing when it should be, in the I/O of the channel it doesn't matter what settings I use (listen on All Ins, or just IAC Bus) or what channel I pick (or send from), there is no sound.

If I hook up a midi keyboard it works okay (although it won't play if I set it to listen to All Ins, only if I set it to the keyboard.

[randomtechnoguy]

Hello,

I would like to revisit this old but unsolved issue.

I can perfectly reproduce all of six's mentioned symptoms. I tried around and googled for two hours, using several virtual midi architecture for OSX but live just won't accept notes coming from a virtual port.

my system and involved programs:
mac osx 10.6.3
ableton live 8.1.1 or 8.2.1
puredata extended 0.41.4 or BCRStep (as note generators)
IAC driver or Midipipe or Midi Patchbay

This is just such a downer! Anybody knows how to solve that problem? I tried it the other days by using a physical Midi interface and a cable going from out to in and that worked fine!

In Midimonitor I could see that the events coming from virtual ports do not have a "time" associated to them. This timestamp seems to have nothing to do with the usual MIDI timestamps and clocks, at least it is not mentioned in the Midi specs for Note On and Off. I think it is a meta-information that is added by the midi stacks of the operating system. Apparently Live seems to WANT that in order to actually use a note event.



Cheers,
Ludwig

[broc]

I have experienced the same problem and finally found a workaround with MaxForLive.
There are special Max objects that allow to bypass Live's midi i/o handling.

Nevertheless, I would like to get to the bottom of the issue.
In my experience it happens only if programs are involved that create virtual ports dynamically.
Apparently Live's port management gets confused by this sometimes.

[chrisjh]

Very frustrating for sure! Same thing happened to me. I thought maybe it was lack of timestamp coming from my MIDI source (a python script which uses pygame's midi). Blinking "midi in" light on Live but NO audio output from the synth I was trying to trigger...

A small workaround I used was midiPipe.. created a simple pipe taking pythonMidi --> midiPipe --> ableton live and it works... My app was sending its data through the IAC virtual midi driver; midipipe took the input from that and routed it to its own midiPipe midi out, into ableton. A bizarre solution, but for now does the trick.

------ my stuff:

mac osx 10.6.8
ableton live 8.1
midiPipe 1.4.3
IAC driver
python 2.6

good luck

EDIT: this stopped working shortly after for a completely unknown reason. and midipipe doesn't add a timestamp or whatever, so that's probably not the issue either
chris

[chrisjh]

Solved MY problem (I'm using python with pygame's midi wrapper)! I think. If the latency of the midi device is set to 0 (which may be default), timestamps aren't sent with the midi message, which Ableton doesn't like. So I set the latency to 10 (ms) and it worked thereafter (it works on 1ms latency as well). I checked the pymidi docs and realized where to set the latency:

pygame.midi.Output

Output is used to send midi to an output device
Output(device_id)
Output(device_id, latency = 0)
Output(device_id, buffer_size = 4096)
Output(device_id, latency, buffer_size)

Here is my corrected line of code, with latency set to 10:

Code: Select all

midi_out = pygame.midi.Output(port, 10, 4096)   # latency = 10ms, buffer_size = 4096