Ableton Forum

Hello, I just made an M4L MIDI effect that can split MIDI data into multiple channels for use with Aria Player, but it isn't working. I eventually found out that back in Live 8, Ableton would change all MIDI to channel 1 between devices--is that still the case in Live 10.1? I hope not, but I can't find any other explanation.

You should be able to send to different channel, but only since L11.
Another option is to use the [imp.midiin] Max external.
You might even just need to use the External Instrument after your midi FX, but it all depends on what you're doing and how your stuff is set.

@[jur]: You mean they removed the "hard-coded to channel 1" behaviour in Live 11? I just downloaded the beta and it appears to be the same. Is there a setting for this I can change somewhere?

You can send to midi to external hardware with M4L in L11.
I realized afterward that you're talking about a plugin and in this case I'm not sure it's possible.
Check the [BrowseRouting2] abstraction with "midi_outputs 0" argument in M4L to see what's possible.

Yes, I'm talking about a plugin.

How do I get BrowseRouting2? It doesn't appear as an available Max object.

I've also read about a community Max object called imp.midiout that's intended for this purpose, but it hasn't been updated to Max 8.

BTW, I thought I might be able to cheat by telling L11 that my controller supports MPE and layering a muted Wavetable with my sound, so it would enable all 16 channels for MPE support, but that didn't work.

I submitted a suggestion to the L11 public beta program to add support for MIDI channels 2-16, explaining that I need to be able to output multiple MIDI channels from a single M4L device.

I found a solution. I just spent half an hour documenting it for future forum-searchers, but my forum login timed out and it got deleted.

Is there no way to attach a screenshot to a forum reply?

Envergure wrote: ↑

Wed Feb 24, 2021 7:23 pm

Is there no way to attach a screenshot to a forum reply?

You need to use an external image hosting server.

Too bad you loose your how-to post, would have been great to read your discoveries.

I'm not going to take the time to find an external image server and create an account, but in brief, I found out that "send" and "receive" objects are able to send messages between different running instances of Max, because signal names' scope extends at least throughout an entire Live set. This is very counterintuitive―I expected each Max patch instance to be a separate program with its own namespace.

Instead of outputting MIDI to Ableton, I broadcast it as list messages with a send object. I then need an instrument rack with 16 External Instruments pointed at the VST plugin, each with a Max MIDI effect that receives MIDI through the Max send and only passes one channel. It took a long time to set up, but now I have a way to pass MIDI behind the back of Ableton's channel-1-only commissar. This solution works on multi-out VSTs only, because External Instrument devices can't target stereo-output VSTs.