Disabling MIDI echo

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Pianotehead
Posts: 325

Post by Pianotehead »

Is there anyway to prevent MIDI In notes on from being echoed to the MIDI Out device? I play my piano with Synthesia open, and it echoes the current MIDI Out device, which is Coolsoft or Microsoft WaveSynth, happens with both of them. This occurs in all menus of Synthesia, not only with a song open and playing. The notes are echoed with latency, since I assume Synthesia uses the Windows audio drivers. If there is an option to use ASIO4ALL, I've missed it.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Couldn't you just set your output device to have Notes disabled? Maybe I don't understand what you're asking. When would you actually like the output device to play notes? Do you only want it to play notes from background parts? That's something I'm planning for the 3rd quality-of-life Synthesia 10 preview. Instead of just "Notes" as a choice of what gets sent to an output device, it's going to become "My Notes" and "Background Notes" so you have more control.

(And you should be able to reduce Coolsoft's latency by reducing the "Additional output buffer" in its advanced options. Making that number as close to zero as your computer can handle goes a long way to making the output instantaneous.)
Pianotehead
Posts: 325

Post by Pianotehead »

I can't see that there's any note disabling feature in CoolSoft. My setup now has the piano only as MIDI Input (from Synthesia's point of view) and the MIDI output is as I said Coolsoft. The reason I set things up this way, is so I can depend on my laptop for the sound of the track I'm not playing. Make my laptop play the left hand while I practise the right, or vice versa. It's distracting to hear this echo a considerable time/latency after I press the notes.

As I've described earlier, I had some problems using my piano as MIDI output, and though I solved them in the end. I needed to change many MIDI system settings, including Local Control Off, and when I wanted to practise without Synthesia, I had to change all settings back. I change between Synthesia and other methods quite often and it's too much of a hassle to change the system settings everytime.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

This was the setting I was talking about in VirtualMIDISynth:
bufferSize.png
bufferSize.png (17.83 KiB) Viewed 3366 times
If you change that one to a zero, it does a really nice job of lowering the latency to just about the speed of a keyboard.

Regarding "Local Off", I'm actually planning to introduce a feature in Synthesia (in the third "quality of life" preview for Synthesia 10) that will handle sending those "Local" messages automatically. That is: whenever a song begins, Synthesia would send a "Local Off" that would last until you paused or quit the song, at which point a "Local On" would get sent automatically. Would that improve the situation? Hopefully that'd remove much of the required setting fiddling.

Otherwise it sounds like the upcoming feature I mentioned ("My Notes" vs. "Background Notes") will help out, too. In your case, it sounds like you'll want to leave "My Notes" disabled so you can just listen to your own keyboard play them without Synthesia sending out duplicates. That should get rid of the echo.
Pianotehead
Posts: 325

Post by Pianotehead »

Thank you Nicholas, solved the problem by changing settings in MIDI Mapper, selected VirtualMIDISynth both as MIDI output device and where it says Windows Media Player default device. Now everything will be fine when my shoulder gets better and I can start practising again. You don't sell software that fixes bad shoulders, do you? :P
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