Got it … thanks. Looks like Media Player is not the right tool.
I’m basically trying to add a software drum machine to my rig. Something along the lines of this 2021 discussion: Recommendations for Drum Accompaniment
Native Instrument Battery 4 seems ideal for my purposes … I just (??just??) need a sequencer. Basic requirements would be:
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looping,
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the ability to track an external MIDI time sync (with C4’s transport slaved to that external sync),
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respond to start, stop, and pause messages,
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be able to take MIDI drum patterns from files and live, and
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controllable by external MIDI.
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Bonus would be some modulation capability (although the NDLR can send MOD sources to hardware devices, so it could well be able to control Battery directly).
After a several hours of searching, the prime candidate seems to be Topiary Beatz, developed by @Tom_Tollenaere. I’ve set this up in my rig and it performs very well so far. I have not yet tried controlling it via external MIDI.
However, I did hit one gotcha that appears to be an issue. I’ve logged it just now on the GitHub project for Tom … Here’s a summary:
Tracking of a Changing slaved MIDI tempo in Cantabile causes Major Tempo Glitches
Setup is: a NDLR MIDI controller sending master MIDI clock sync to Cantabile,
which is slaved to the MIDI clock. Beatz runs under Cantabile, sending MIDI to
Native Instruments Battery 4.
Everything works ***great*** until I adjust the tempo on the NDLR. Even changing
by one BPM causes Beatz to temporarily go haywire in timing. The tempo in
Cantabile appears to track the change on the NDLR nicely (the tempo change is
slightly delayed in Cantabile ...). However, when lowering the tempo on the NDLR,
Beatz seems to ***dramatically*** lower the tempo for a while before recovering.