Emulated DirectMusic IS A BUG! >:(

[Timur]

Sorry, but I am really a bit upset now. It cannot be my job to keep telling your customers on the forum to switch their USB Midi devices from Emulated DirectMusic to MME for the rest of my life. I told you during Beta already that using Emulated DirectMusic is a very bad idea to begin with!

There has been a number of posts now where people are experiencing problems with their Midi controllers that are solved as soon as they switch from DirectMusic to MME. People think this to be a bug in Live 7 because the very same Sets worked without problems on their Live 6 installation (which always uses MME).

I do not ask to get rid of DirectMusic, by no means, it's great to finally have it in another DAW than Cubase. It's even quite a shame that it took so many years to finally be recognized as the better Midi option eventhough it's been around for so many years.

But PLEASE change the default behavior of Live's Midi preferences or put a LARGE popup upon starting Live that has to be confirmed that this has changed and where to find the setting. This setting is hidden so deep in the Preferences that it's even hard to tell people where to find it when you know where to look.

My prefered solution would be that Live activates DirectMusic on only those ports that support it natively and switches to MME for all ports that do not come with native DirectMusic drivers. According to what was written during Beta Live is able to discern emulated from native ports anyway (I reallyreallyreally hope this is true).

Wish you some nice holidays over christmas, by the way!

[djsynchro]

Couldn't find anything in the manual about it either. Sucks.

[Timur]

Just told another user to switch to MME which solved his problems. I think Ableton should start paying me for customer support and quality assurance. Please stop making emulated DirectMusic the default setting for USB gear. Emulated DirectMusic has no benefit over MME whatsoever as far as I know, but only drawbacks.

Only six days left in 2007 and I'm not yet convinced to buy Live 7 (as I do not own Live 6 to get over the time until instabilities and misbehaving timings are fixed).

[Timur]

MME or Directmusic? Which is the emulated driver... how would I know?

have a look at what driver type your different interfaces are using. After Jan asked that question, it does seem to follow this behavior: DM drivers are getting the cumulative lag, and the MME drivers are staying OK

But this was the source of the problems. Changed to MME, and the machinedrum was once more back to fluctuating a few tenths of a bpm (about as good as it gets with midi clock).

It seems that changing it to MME has fixed the problem for me. cheers Scourge.

I had that problem, setting the driver to MME solved it.

Try changing the preferences for your Midi input from DirectMusic to MME (use the small arrow right beside your Midi input name).

thank you very much my man.

thx! that explains why i'm running with MME much better than direct music

so if my midi interface would support direct music i'd get better performance (less jitter)

Hah! That was it. I clicked on the arrow to the left of each MIDI port, and changed it from "Direct Music" to "MME". Problem solved! I didn't know that option was there.
Thanks for the help!

Timur, that seemed to do the trick. Nice one! 15 minutes of use and everythings behaving itself. I'm in your debt.

For the record, it's an Edirol FA-101 and an X-station 25 pumping in the good stuff.

thanks Timur, that seems to have done the trick. Always nice to learnn something useful here.

[Timur]

Same here...thanks to timur I finally switched everything to MME, and everything is groovy. Whew...I was starting to worry there...

[[nis]]

hi timur,

no worries. we will most likely make MME the default setting as quite a lot of interfaces are affected by bad DM driver support. thanks for the effort, though.

best,
nico

[Timur]

WaitWaitWait, NoNoNo!

Are you really sure that "quite a lot of interfaces are affected by bad DM driver support"?

As far as I can tell all problems reported on the forum are related to devices that offer no native DirectMusic drivers (probably all USB midi devices). I strongly suggest to make MME a default for only those devices that do not bring native DirectMusic drivers with them and thus are using the utterly useless (for audio applications) [Emulated] drivers. But when a device offers native DirectMusic drivers then DirectMusic is still the better choice.

I can imagine that quite some work went into implementing this and it would be a shame and do your coders injustice to generally turn this very useful feature off! And according to a post on the beta forum Live is already able to distinguish emulated from native DirectMusic ports anyway. Don't replace one mistake with another, just get rid of any emulated DirectMusic usage!

Happy new year!

[[nis]]

timur, I am not a developer, so I don't know how easy it is to distinguish between native and emulated DM drivers, or how easy it is to implement such a 'port scan' function or whatever other problems this may cause, but I can assure you that these things have already been extensively discussed here and if there is a way to implement it that way, then we will do so.

if this is not possible for any reasons, making MME the default setting is the lesser of the 2 evils IMO.

best,
nico

[Timur]

Thanks for the answers Nico!

When Live encounters both the native and the emulated driver, it will offer the native one.

According to Herrn Buchholz Live already seems to distinguish between the two, so I'm hoping for the more elegant solution. Personally I don't care, because I know where to find these settings and how to set it manually for best performance anyway, but many other people don't seem to have a clue.

So yes, the lesser evil is better, but you could have avoided the mess all together, because it was already discussed during Beta!