simple (?) midi question

defetto's icon

Hello people,

i'm getting into maxforlive more and more, and the more i discover the more i have questions, but i guess that's good.

Now i have a few things i'd like to ask you more advanced user, but i will keep them separated in single topics.. here comes the first about MIDI

What i'm trying to do should be quite straight forward, basically i want to send midi out from a MIDI track to another application (vvvv) using a virtual port, for example MIDI Yoke : 1.

Now as you probably know, if there is an instrument playing on a MIDI track in Live, it doesn't let you send the MIDI out from that track (for some reason that to me is unknown).

Before the maxforlive era, i used to create an additional MIDI track, receiving from the instrument and sending out to MIDI Yoke. This works, but when you have to send many different tracks it starts to be boring and ugly.

So i thought, there must be a way to do that with a simple Max MIDI device that i put on the track, and it does the job with no need of another dedicated track..
.. i patched it, but for some reason it doesn't work.

(I have the suspect this is related to the fact that i don't own a Max standalone license, i just have maxforlive, cause in the Max MIDI setup i don't see the MIDI Yoke ports)

Can anybody explain me how to achieve this? Is there a way at all to do this in Max?
Or is it a limitation with no workaround? and if this is the case, is there a clever alternative in Live to the method i mentioned above? (using the additional track dedicated to sending the MIDI)

Really hope there is a way to achieve this, as i'm working on a project with many Instrument tracks that i have to send out via MIDI Yoke.

Thanks a lot for your help, really appreciated.

Best,

Pedro

broc's icon

Personally I'm using OSC for sending MIDI data from M4L devices to 'Processing'. It doesn't require an additional track as the sender can simply be inserted like a MIDI effect.

Max Patch
Copy patch and select New From Clipboard in Max.

Here is an example patch of an OSC sender for MIDI notes.

defetto's icon

Thanks broc, yeah that works, i wonder if it's not too heavy when applied to many tracks.. as far as i know midi should be optimized for these kind of communications, doing it via osc on many tracks may result slow..? Don't know maybe i'm wrong, i'd like to hear your thoughts about this.

Anyway thanks for the nice workaround, but does it mean that i was right and max is not able to send the midi out? can you confirm this?

Btw are you on skype? If so please add me (skypename is defetto) or just give me ur skypename

cheers man, thanks again.

broc's icon

In my experience OSC/UDP communication is not heavy at all.
So I have 5 Live tracks sending OSC without any problems.
To my knowledge the UDP protocol is quite simple technically.

In fact, max devices can send midi out only through Live.
They have no direct access to midi drivers in the outside world.

And no, currently I'm not on skype. Maybe later.

Cheers.

defetto's icon

thanks for the confirmation broc, speak to you soon, add me if you decide to use skype at some point..

cheers