I run five instances of GP at once (one of them being the main instance which is the one that I interact with through my MIDI controllers, and all of the others just running various commonly-used VST instruments).
I find that on occasion, one of my MIDI controllers will be grabbed by one of the secondary instances, preventing the main instance from accessing it. I can prevent this by being careful to invoke the main instance first before the others, but occasionally there are still situations where that happens in spite of my efforts.
I’ve gone through the secondary instances and disabled the specific MIDI inputs and outputs that correspond to my controllers, but this seems like a risky and temporary fix: a day will come when I’m using different controllers, or where my existing controllers are connected to different USB ports (ah, Windows), and then those new MIDI devices will be enabled by default in the secondary instances. Is there an option in GP to globally disable every MIDI port (other than the Local GP Port of course)?
If not, then consider this a feature request.
And while I’m at it, it would be useful to have a dummy audio device provided as a built-in audio device in GP (Reaper has this, for example, where it’s called “Dummy Audio”: it has a sample rate and buffer size but isn’t connected to any actual audio inputs or outputs). I would select the dummy audio device in all the secondary GP instances, just to make sure that none of them attempts to communicate with any actual audio interfaces on my system.
TL;DR: If I am not using any MIDI devices, how can I disable MIDI entirely so as to prevent GP from blocking other instances and applications from accessing the MIDI devices on my system?
Here you can enable/disable the MIDI devices
Yes, that works for MIDI devices that are currently connected to the system. But (as I tried to explain in my original post), this is risky and temporary because as soon as I connect a new MIDI controller to my system, it will be enabled by default.
Picture this scenario for example: I arrive at a gig where I’ll be using different keyboards (which I don’t have access to until I’m there setting up on stage). Suddenly, all my secondary instances will see the new keyboards and try to connect to them. As long as I’m careful to start my main instance before starting the secondary instances, then everything will work fine until some moment in the middle of the gig when one of the keyboards gets accidentally powered off. When I reconnect that keyboard, one of the secondary instances will grab ahold of it, and then the main instance won’t be able to connect to it, and then from my point of view that keyboard will be unresponsive. This has happened to me and it’s a serious problem.
Forgive me if you considered this, but do you use the Rig Manager? I think this was designed to fix this situation.
If you have it set up before hand (DJH uses the aliases “Upper” and “Lower” keyboard, I think), you would just go into the Rig Manager and make sure each keyboard is connected to the alias you want.
[I may well be missing something because multiple instances are an important part of your issue].
