Hi Torsten,
Again you’ve shown me something new! I didn’t know about showing the hardware MIDI ports in the racks! Now I’m re-working my racks again. However, I discovered that I do like being able to created different, named input ports to the racks, rather than just having a “Rack: MIDI In”. I think I will continue to use this in some places. But, thanks to your suggestion, I’ve eliminated my inputs and use the hardware MIDI ports directly in the ‘abstracted’ racks.
Related question: Is the background rack useful with ‘abstracted’ racks? If so, how do you use the background rack?
The background rack is a bit unique, since racks in songs can’t use background rack ports, so routing is a bit fiddly - but it can be done. The trick is to use the “loopback” feature of Cantabile, which allows you to allow MIDI input ports as output ports to allow Cantabile to feed MIDI data back into its input ports.
So I use the background rack to filter and translate data from my physical devices (e.g. Kurzweil PC3K, AKAI MPK249, my custom “Magic Keys”) to standardized abstract “upper keys”, “lower keys”, “pedals”, “drum pads” and some internal magic ports to feed my songs. These abstract MIDI input ports aren’t connected to any physical MIDI interface - they only get fed by the background rack.
So the background rack translates the input from my device input ports and feeds it into the “Loopback - Main Keys”, “Loopback - Second Keys”, “Loopback - Drumpads” etc. My input racks then receive data from these ports (“Main Keys”, “Second Keys” etc.). I could also use these abstract input ports directly in my songs, but I’ve gotten used to using my abstract input racks, so I’ll continue to use them for better visibility, even though most of the translation work is done by the background rack these days.
If you want to dive deep into this rabbit hole, here is a post that gives more detail:
I know this is an old thread, but I’m hoping someone will still be watching this. I’ve completed the hardware abstraction set-up and it works like a charm as long as I use only VST plug-ins. However, when attempting to use a combination of VSTs and internal sounds from one of the boards I can’t seem to get the internal sounds.
Bottom board is a Studiologic SL88 Studio and top board is an MODX7. I have a rack created for each.
Top board performance a six part performance. Channels 1, 2 are sent out to a VST when actually playing on the top board and work fine. The remaining 4 parts I want to control from the bottom keyboard. I’ve routed the Notes output port of the bottom keyboard rack to the Input port of the top board, making sure the channel mapping from the bottom board (Channel 1) is filtered to Channels 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the top board. MIDI monitor shows the note on/off messages are being received by the Top Keyboard rack, but no sound is produced. In attempting to troubleshoot this issue, I created a new song using the regular method of Input/Output routing without utilizing the rack port abstraction and it works fine, which would lead me to believe the issue isn’t a hardware configuration issue with the top board.
Anybody have any ideas/suggestions of what I might be missing in the rack set-up?
Can you put a MIDI monitor on the actual output to the top keyboard to see if the notes are actually being sent out by the rack? Looks like there’s an issue with output routing to the top keyboard
Maybe you can share the song and rack files - happy to take a look at them…
Here are the rack files and the song file. I think the main problem is I’m not quite certain of how to direct the Notes output of the TopKB since the sounds are internal to the keyboard itself.
Essentially, your TopKB rack is missing a route from its MIDI input to the physical output connected to the MODX7.
I would actually suggest a separate rack for that job - have one input abstraction rack (your current “TopKB” rack) and another separate one - maybe call it “MODX7 Output” that, instead of routing MIDI input from your keyboard to Cantabile, routes MIDI from the rack MIDI input to the correct MIDI output port.
You can then also use rack states on this output rack to send different program changes to your MODX7 to configure it for different sounds.
That way, you have a clean workflow from input racks via (configurable) routes to output racks. Just because your MODX acts as an input device doesn’t mean you need to put all its functionalities into one rack - separate it into its two personas as input device and as a tone generator…