I lost a whole day of my life trying to solve a loss of incoming midi. I’ve used Cantabile with my XK3 setup for years but just took delivery of a new XK-5 so wanted to route that to all the previous racks/states etc… I took the NUC and UR22 interface out of the XK3 and set it up again next to the XK5 just to get started with everything. Then NO midi to be seen anywhere. Cantabile saw the XK-5, the UR22 and another interface I had but no midi. MidiView saw nothing nor did MidiOX. I searched everywhere on the internet and tried every suggestion including deleting the various stuff from the Windows Device Manager. Still nothing. I had sound from the virtual keyboard but no midi. Once more onto the internet and I noticed an oblique reference to some audio problems with Microsoft Remote Desktop. I was using this to connect my main computer to the NUC in order to make it easier to do all the changes in Cantabile (normally I use a small touch screen for gigs).
This morning I reconnected my small screen directly to the NUC and immediately all the midi was back (I hadn’t restarted the computer so it was in the same no-midi state as the night before). Bizarre! Has anyone here ever come across this issue?
Yes, I had this problem too when I was first setting up my headless pc. In my case it happened because the Windows Remote Desktop client has a (somewhat buried) configuration option called “Audio Playback” that must be changed to “Play on remote PC” in order for certain midi devices to become usable over remote sessions.
The “Audio Playback” option is rather poorly named by Microsoft, in my opinion. It determines whether the host pc makes certain host peripherals available to the remote client, but the affected peripherals seem to be somewhat random and not always related to audio.
Thanks for the reply - I feel better knowing someone else had this issue! I’ll try it again tomorrow and see if the ‘Play on remote PC’ works for me as well. It’s certainly very obscure and a day of my life I’m not getting back
I had a lot of problems with Remote Desktop Audio. I now only use it for maintenance and to check the installation status of large libraries, but I avoid using it to send/receive audio streams. The troubles are all very different and never the same. They go from Cantabile freezing to BSOD, quite randomly.
Nevertheless, I’ve been using Remote Desktop since the beta developer version of Windows 2000, even NT4, I don’t remember. I also used the audio at that time, but it seems I have no luck with ‘remote’ ASIO.
Small update: I found the setting for ‘Play on remote PC’ and sure enough it then saw midi without problems. Thanks @Hamlen for the info, I never thought to look for that. Meanwhile I’d set up a bigger wired monitor to do my edits but it’s good to know the other way also works.
I have learned to deeply distrust Windows Remote Desktop - it’s just too intrusive for my taste. I prefer solutions like VNC or RustDesk that let me work on my little touch screen for most of the session, but when I need to do some editing that requires a bigger screen and a mouse, I simply open RustDesk on my studio PC and do the edits - without locking me out of my touchscreen session or messing up any audio or MIDI settings…
