I’m having trouble switching from Cantabile to Gig Performer 5 on my Windows 10 stage machine.
I’m using a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 and a mi.1 II BT dongle for MIDI In/Out. Previously, I also used loopMIDI and MIDIberry to aggregate multiple software and hardware MIDI sources without any issues.
However, when I try to use Gig Performer 5 on Windows 10, none of my MIDI devices are listed. On my macOS studio machine, both devices work perfectly with the macOS version of Gig Performer 5. The same devices also still work flawlessly on the Windows 10 stage machine when using Cantabile.
I’m pretty lost as to why Gig Performer 5 on Windows 10 doesn’t detect any of them.
Normally they show up, in use or not (checked it 2 minutes ago, using Reaper and GP while Reaper was receiving MIDI in, I made that sure). GP doesn’t get MIDI in however while Reaper is using the port (as expected).
But visually the ports do show up. There’s really something strange going on with the system of @Surfable
I have decent IT-Background. Sorry, I didn’t say before.
Fortunatly I just found the solution to my issue and wanted to document it here in case someone else encounters the same problem.
The Issue:
If you’re using a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session to connect to a Windows 10 system running Gig Performer 5, the application might not detect any MIDI devices—even though they appear correctly in the Device Manager and work fine in other applications.
The Fix (in my case):
Adjust RDP Audio Settings
In your RDP connection settings, set the audio playback option to either:
“Play sound on this computer” (host), or
"Do not play sound."Any other setting (e.g., “Play on remote computer”) causes Gig Performer 5 to fail to detect MIDI devices.
Restart the Host Machine
After making this change, restart the host system.
Without a restart, I experienced persistent artifacts from previous RDP sessions (e.g., using the iPadOS Microsoft RDP app) that continued to block MIDI detection on the host system even after making the required changes to the configuration.
Additional Notes:
This behavior seems unique to Gig Performer 5. In may case I had the chance to check differnt applications (like Cantabile) which worked fine with any RDP audio playback settings. Gig Performer 5 likely handles interface access differently, which (in my case) leads to this issue.
If you previously relied on remote audio playback (e.g., to hear system sounds (host) on your remote Apple iPad), you’ll properbly need an alternative workaround for this, as the above changes disable this functionality.
I hope this helps anyone facing similar challenges!
Yes, indeed. However, this solution comes with the loss of playback capabilities on your remote, as mentioned earlier. What confused me was that regular audio worked in Gig Performer just as I was used to. It’s important to understand that RDP typically bypasses the user’s audio configuration from the RDP connection if a dedicated audio device is selected in a host application. I configured it this way, and all audio inputs and outputs were detected and functioning properly in Gig Performer no matter which config was made to the RDP connection. The only issue in this setup was that MIDI did not work in Gig Performer and only Gig Performer.
Windows OS has two different sets of interfaces for Audio: the older multimedia-system (mmsystem) API and the newer UWP based API. Some applications use the newer API. GP uses the mm-system API for Windows.
Windows mm-system API:
I can imagine the newer API has no such issues, but I’ll have to check that out. BTW Reaper (v7.22) suffers from the same problem.
Draw back of the newer API is that it is only supported from Windows 10 (built whatever), while GP offers support for Windows 7 and later. So upgrading to the newer API is a breaking change and would effectively orphan a group of users…
(most of the time 
)