rename your midi ports! figured out a way.

Johnisfaster · Post by **Johnisfaster** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:27 pm

I've got a midisport 4x4 going to various synths in the room, it would be really handy if I could name each port the name of the actual device it was going to.

also, my padkontrol used to be listed in lives preferences as "pad kontrol" now it is simply "usb audio device", same problem with my bcr2000 "usb audio device (2)"

so having 4 ins and 4 outs and 2 controllers each with several ports of their own as well as a virtual midi port and microsoft whatchamacallit (which is wasting space) I've got way too many ports with non descript names.

lil help?

:::::::::::::::::::::::figured out my own way to do it. go into lives remote midi device scripts and copy the padkontrol remote script out to your desktop, then rename it to whatever you want (in my case nord lead 2, juno 106 and so forth) then go into live and open that script and tell it the ins and outs that go to that device. now in your midi devices you'll see the name of that device before you see which device it is.

so far I'm not seeing a downside to this, though there might be a gremlin lerking around the concept.::::::::::::::::::

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:31 pm

same problems, never saw a solution than to write it down on a sticky note and post it somewhere.

the whole USB Device[2] etc naming drives me nuts, makes me less confident it's all installed right but it usually seems to work.

can this be done in other DAWs?

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:35 pm

The only thing i can think of is to create and name your own virtual midi cables like : http://www.marblesound.com/

problem is, how to connect your synths to these cables...

donnydonny · Post by **donnydonny** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 6:57 pm

You may have to reinstall the drivers for whatever your device is. However they show up in Live, is how they're showing up in XP's Device Manager. What you can also try doing is manually updating the driver from Device Manager, and manually pick out the correct driver for it to load up.

Johnisfaster · Post by **Johnisfaster** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:09 pm

donnydonny wrote:You may have to reinstall the drivers for whatever your device is. However they show up in Live, is how they're showing up in XP's Device Manager. What you can also try doing is manually updating the driver from Device Manager, and manually pick out the correct driver for it to load up.

of course I'm considering reinstalling, but the midisport 4x4 still has "in A, out A, in B out B" I don't suppose you can name those "nord, juno" in device manager?

theres gotta be a way to do this, theres a way to do everything on the computer it's just a question of how.

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:13 pm

try going in to windows registry with regedit (start/run type regedit) and do a search for what ever your midi interface name(s) is and see if you can change the names, then reboot. Just an idea...

Johnisfaster · Post by **Johnisfaster** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:14 pm

ava wrote:try going in to windows registry with regedit (start/run type regedit) and do a search for what ever your midi interface name(s) is and see if you can change the names, then reboot. Just an idea...

can anyone confirm that this isn't going to kill my computer?

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:17 pm

Or, your driver(s) comes with a .ini file (on the cd) for installation, if you copy your driver installation cd on to your harddrive then you could change the names there in this file, then reinstall, that will work.

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:19 pm

Johnisfaster wrote:
ava wrote:try going in to windows registry with regedit (start/run type regedit) and do a search for what ever your midi interface name(s) is and see if you can change the names, then reboot. Just an idea...
can anyone confirm that this isn't going to kill my computer?

It should work as windows uses a id for identifying the interface, the name is just for us humans to read.

We needed to know this stuff to create a windows driver for our lighting interface.

Just keep the names short as we don't know how long they can be. And only use characters like 0-9 a-z and spaces, don't use any funny characters just incase.

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:31 pm

Theres no harm in just searching the registry for the midi ports, if there there then it's up to you.

What's the worse that could happen?
A: you need to put the names back.
B: you need to reinstall your drivers.
C you need to reinstall windows

But i guarantee, it wont blow up!

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 7:45 pm

If you want more advice then go here http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/default.aspx

the microsoft msdn forum, programmers there will confirm what I have said, just point them to this forum thread

Johnisfaster · Post by **Johnisfaster** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 8:13 pm

so I found the midi devices in the registry but I couldn't tell what I would actually want to rename, is the device and the port 2 different places in the registry?

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 8:16 pm

Johnisfaster wrote:so I found the midi devices in the registry but I couldn't tell what I would actually want to rename, is the device and the port 2 different places in the registry?

possibly, do a search for the port name as it apears in ableton list.

Johnisfaster · Post by **Johnisfaster** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 8:46 pm

figured out my own way to do it. go into lives remote midi device scripts and copy the padkontrol remote script out to your desktop, then rename it to whatever you want (in my case nord lead 2, juno 106 and so forth) then go into live and open that script and tell it the ins and outs that go to that device. now in your midi devices you'll see the name of that device before you see which device it is.

so far I'm not seeing a downside to this, though there might be a gremlin lerking around the concept.

ava · Post by **ava** » Tue Feb 05, 2008 8:52 pm

Johnisfaster wrote:so far I'm not seeing a downside to this, though there might be a gremlin lerking around the concept.

Never tried it, so fingers cross.
May be someone from ableton can confirm what you have done. Good old tech support.