MIDI In block missing note events

cuebert · August 2, 2024, 8:49am

Hi,

I am in the progress of migrating my setup from an older 16" MacBook Pro (Intel) to a brand new M2 Mac mini.

After installing all plugins, sound packs, etc., I was finally ready to fire up my big Gig-file that I have been using successfully on my Macbook for the last few months (and that I have been building over the past few years now).

Immediately I felt that a few things were ‘not right’: some notes were not playing, other were hanging, totally at random.
initially, I suspected a few Scriptlets that I had written, but as these worked perfectly fine on the Intel MBP, I investigated some more and discovered that (some of) the MIDI In blocks are not passing all Note ON/OFF events, something that never happened before!

In the attached screenshots you can see I simply added a MIDI Monitor block immediately after the MIDI In Block and compared it with the information in the Global MIDI Monitor. You can see that in this case 3 Note On events are missing.

Note that the Main MIDI In block has no special settings (filters, routings…) at all, and while it does have a GPScript handle, I actually disabled any code that referred to it, without any change. The MIDI In (OMNI) block before the Main MIDI In, is added to only capture Sustain pedal messages from any input, as I sometimes need to connect my pedal to a different keyboard. This works perfectly on my Intel MBP so I do not suspect that this has any influence. In fact, I even tested it without this block without any improvements.

So, any idea what might be going on here? Why is the exact same gig-file working perfectly on my Intel MBP and showing these issues on my brand new M2 Mac mini? I am using Gig Performer v5.0.9 on both machines.

Any suggestions are appreciated. I really hope there is a simple explanation as I don’t want to rebuild this gig-file with about 70 rackspaces. In any case, I will in the meantime build a small new gig-file, just to see what happens when I start from scratch.

Many thanks for any help.

KR,
Bert

cuebert · August 2, 2024, 8:55am

To be complete…
I just wanted to add that this happens with multiple MIDI In blocks, both in the Global and Local Rackspaces, with and without GPScript handles.
So, please do not focus to much on the specific example, it happens all over the place at random…

Florian · August 2, 2024, 12:14pm

Hi Bert,
did you accidentally map the marked note-on messages to something in the global settings?
This would explain why only the corresponding note-off messages arrive in the lower midi monitor.
Since the global settings are not part of the gig file, this would also explain why the same file behaves differently on the two machines.

cuebert · August 2, 2024, 12:45pm

Hi @Florian ,

Thanks for the suggestion.
Unfortunately that is not the case; I did not do any mapping at all. In fact, it is also totally random which note messages are missing. Sometimes it is a note on, sometimes a note off, and there is no consistency in which notes do this. Most of the time they play just fine for several minutes, and then all of the sudden a few messages are skipped. It is very hard to reproduce consistently.

Further, I just played with the ‘Keys of the 70’s’ gig-file and there I do not have the issue at all, using the same global settings, and the same rig… At least not for the last hour or so that I have been noodling around…

It’s all very confusing and troubling. As a manager of a software development team, I know this kind of issues is the hardest to detect and solve… So, I really hope there is a simple solution, not requiring me to rebuild my gig-file, because that will take me weeks…

Dave_bass5 · August 2, 2024, 1:06pm

Have you tired replacing the midi in block with a new version? Could be corruption of some sort. Ive had to do this a coupe of times when ive not had any midi being passed to the pluggin, even though the were working before.

cuebert · August 2, 2024, 1:22pm

Hi @Dave_bass5

Yes, I tried that. While it did seem to improve, it still happens from time to time.

Frank1119 · August 2, 2024, 3:52pm

Are there also events missing if you attach a MIDI monitor directly after the MIDI omni input (so without the main kbd in block)?

dhj · August 2, 2024, 4:15pm

Are you running GP in native mode or under Rosetta?
If you’re running under native mode, are you loading any Intel AUs that would require Rosetta to be loaded?

cuebert · August 2, 2024, 8:01pm

Hi @dhj,

I am running everything in native mode. As far as I know, there are no plugins that require Rosetta to be loaded.

That said, it looks like I managed to get things working for the moment.
I first removed and then recreated the ‘Master’ alias in Rig Manager. The ‘Main Kbd In’ MIDI block actually refers to this alias.
Then I removed all Midi In (OMNI) blocks from all rackspaces and replaced the ‘Main Kbd In’ MIDI In block with the renewed ‘master’ in (using right-click, replace plugin). Visually nothing seems to happen, but I hope this at least kind of ‘re-instantiates’ the block properly.

I am not sure which part did the trick, but now all note events seem to be coming through properly. My guess is that the Midi In OMNI block was kind of causing a conflict (although it works on my Intel Mac).

@Frank1119 : The Midi In OMNI input is set up with filters for everything, except sustain. Attaching the MIDI monitor after this block then indeed shows no other events are output from this block (only cc64 events passing through) so I am still confused how this could influence the note on/off events from the next MIDI in block.

I’ll keep on testing to make sure everything is stable now, and then figure out a solution again for my sustain issue (which I was trying to solve using the omni midi in).

In any case, thanks for the help!