Hacking the Rack

Inside a rack, the hardware audio and MIDI inputs do not show up in the drop down menu for adding inputs. Only the rack inputs show up. You can however place hardware inputs directly inside a rack by copying one at the song level and pasting it into the rack. This is useful when you have a rack that represents a piece of hardware and ALWAYS uses that hardware input. For instance, I currently have racks for the faders, knobs and buttons on my MPK261. Each rack has outputs for individual controls (A1-C8) that all output MIDI CC 0 messages, and banks (A-C) that output MIDI CC 0-7 messages. This really simplifies my workflow, and changing the input configuration in the shared rack updates all my songs at once.

Unfortunately you can’t bind anything inside the rack directly to a hardware MIDI input as it must be routed to some output of some kind to be active. The work around is to paste the hardware input instead into an embedded “inner rack” and route it directly to the output. Then in the “outer rack” you can bind anything to the output of the inner rack.

My question is this: @brad, is there a particular reason you chose to make C3 unable to add hardware inputs inside racks? Also, by using this workaround, am I setting myself up for disaster down the road? (Updates breaking the workaround, etc.)

If you go to Options -> Miscellaneous, and enable “Show Environment Audio and MIDI Ports in Racks”, you should see those ports inside your racks, and can select them in the normal way.

I think this is disabled by default to encourage people to use song-level routing, so that racks are more re-usable, but your use case is a classic example of where you might want that direct routing inside the rack.

Neil

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That sounds like me… creating a completely useless hack… lol! Thanks, @Neil_Durant. Despite you making my ignorance plain, I appreciate the knowledge. I’ll do that.

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