Not strictly a Cantabile question

Hi guys,

Like the title says, this is not strictly a cantabile question, but hopefully someone here may be able to answer it.

I’m using an Arturia Keylab MKII and I used to use the MIDI out from it, into the MIDI in of my audio interface. When I did that, whichever MIDI inputs I had open in any open programs (Sibelius, Dorico, Cubase, Cantabile et al) would receive MIDI data from this input. However, since discovering the joys of being able to control the lights etc on the Keylab, I’ve been using the USB MIDI as it’s bi-directional, in order to get the sysex out of Cantabile back to the Keylab. However, this seems to have stopped my ability to get MIDI to more than one program at the same time, whichever program I open first gets the MIDI and none of the others do, in fact, I can’t select the Keylab MIDI as an input in any of the subsequent programs. Is this a limitation of USB MIDI or just an thing with the Arturia.

I know I could use both MIDI in and out from my audio interface, which would work fine for this keyboard but when I’m out live and using 2 boards, that means the number of cables doubles and causes other issues with channel allocations etc (admittedly, none of which are un-solvable).

Anybody know if USB MIDI/Keylab is causing this issue?

Cheers as always,

P

For what I know this is a limit of windows usb driver. It’s not multiclient.
For these reason most producers such as Korg, Roland did their own multiclient drivers but Arturia didn’t !!

I wll explain how I succeed with Arturia, Cantabile and ShowCueSystem on the same machine.

I installed Midiberry (app from microsoft store) and LoopBe, then I redirect Midi input to LoopBe and then I assigned LoopBe to Main Keyboard in Cantabile. In SCS I did the same selecting LoopBe as midi control input.

In this way, all signal coming from midi (or several midi ports) will be redirected without conflicts.

I did this today and it works for me.

Let me know if you experience alternative solutions …

Thanks Oktogon,

Since your answer I did some more searching and it seems that you’re right, it’s a windows usb driver issue. I’ll hassle the folks at Arturia and see if they’re going to sort it out. I’ll have a look into the solution you worked out and see if I can get it to work…

Thanks for your answer.

Pierce

This is disappointing but a lot of users have been asking for multiclient driver since Keylab 1 and nobody listened …

I got an email back saying they’re going to add it to the developers list, we’ll see what happens…

Any news on multiclient driver from Arturia ?

Nope. I think I’m just going to use the midi out…

I’ll chase it again at some point but I’m not going to hold my breath…

P

Hi Toaster,

as long as Cantabile is one of the DAWs involved what about this:

  1. Get yourself a virtual midi cable (f.e. free LoopBe1 or Tobias Ericson‘s virtualMIDI)

  2. Use USB midi in Cantabile as usual (so control of LEDs should still work)

  3. Place a routing inside Cantabiles background rack where you route the USB midi to the virtual midi cable

  4. Inside another DAW you now should find virtual midi cable as one of the midi inputs carrying the USB midi information

As the routing is placed to the background rack, it is automatically available as soon as Cantabile is running and independently from the songs you select.

Regards, Volker

1 Like

Great idea Volker!

To be fair, the only place I need more than one MIDI input to work at any one time is at home in the studio, so it’s easy enough just to run a MIDI cable in…

Thanks for the thought though.

Pierce