How to play midi compositions from a specified position?
So I've just downloaded Max to see if it would fit my requirements (I mainly would like to use it for music) and so far it looks fantastic. Currently I'm trying to play back some MIDI-compositions, where I want to loop and jump through them. So naturally I started looking for ways to play back MIDI files in Max. However, from all the objects I found that seem to allow me to do this (seq, seq~, detonate, mtr), none of them seemed to offer a way to set the playback position, for example to let part of a composition loop or start at a specified position. This seems to be such a trivial use case that I'm really surprised this is not implemented and perhaps I'm even missing something. "startat" from detonate comes close but is still not ideal.
So my question is, is there a way to specify the playback position of a MIDI-playing object? If not, what would be a reasonable workaround?
Unfortunately Max is not having any proper built in
midi playback mechanism.
In rare cases when I needed multitrack midi playback
with variable play position/tempo , I used to convert midi format
to text and play it back using coll.
That is time consuming, but it worked.
There were some 3rd party externals like bach,
notation oriented, maybe there is some sort of midi playback in there,
can't say , havent had a look in for a good while.
A number of Max users simply went to using Ableton Live for MIDI playback when Max for Live appeared, and they enjoyed and made use of the timepoint object, the Live Object Model, etc. for further control. That certainly doesn't cover everyone, but I hope it's a data point.