Problem with two midi keyboards

Trouble with Synthesia, your keyboard, or adapter? Think you found a bug?
When describing problems, always mention your OS and game version (shown at the bottom of the title screen).

If your keyboard has USB or MIDI ports, there is a tremendously high chance (>99%) it will work with Synthesia. See what you'll need on the keyboards page.
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cemieux
Posts: 3

Post by cemieux »

Hi,
With windows 7, synthesia v10.3. I use two midi keyboards. The one for the right hand on channel 1, the other for the left hand on channel 2. With a different instrument for each synthesia output channel (output configured in OMNI).

When I play right hand on the keyboard channel 1, no problem, it is the instrument channel 1 that runs.
When I play left hand on the keyboard channel 2, there are two cases:

1- If I play keyboard channel 2 a note "false" compared to the piece of synthesia, it is indeed the instrument I chose channel 2 that runs.

2 - If I play keyboard channel 2 a note "just" of the synthesia partition, it is curiously the instrument channel 1 (of the right hand) plays, instead of the expected channel 2 !

Check made with midi-ox software, notes are generated in this case channel 1 instead of channel 2 by synthesia.
In this case, there is a routing error between input and output channels.
Would it be possible to remedy this problem? Thank you.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Hmm, I may have misunderstood a few of the details, but here is the way Synthesia tries to make things work:

When a user's note has been determined to match a song's note, it is assigned the same channel as the song's note. (That is, its original channel from any input device is completely ignored.)

When a user's note doesn't appear to match any notes from the song, it is assigned to the same channel as the most-recently played part that is set to a user-played hand. (Again, the original channel from the input device is always discarded.)

Does any of that help explain Synthesia's behavior? Does that seem to agree with what you're seeing? You should be able to change your input devices to output to any channel and Synthesia's own output will most likely remain the same.
cemieux
Posts: 3

Post by cemieux »

Thank you for your reply. Actually synthesia seems to behave as you say ... but that does not help my business! I want to be able to use two keyboards to be able to play organ partitions, with a different voice (and one channel per voice) for each keyboard. Would not it make more sense for synthesia to keep the channel assigned to each voice in the partition for output messages ? Also, I did not understand your last sentence "you should be able to change your input devices to any channel, and the synthesia output will likely be the same"?
I can actually choose an output channel for each keyboard: but you wrote beforehand that in any case the channel of the input device is ignored?
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

I am probably one of the few other people who sometimes plays two keyboards with Synthesia. If your keyboards produce sound, turning off the Synthesia sound and just relying on the sound from the keyboards might give you what you want.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
cemieux
Posts: 3

Post by cemieux »

Hi,
The disadvantage of this solution, if I want to work each hand separately, I will hear this hand alone with the keyboard connected directly to the sound source. But not the sound automatically generated by synthesia for the other hand, since the synthesia sound will be cut. In addition, with the MIDI driver of an M-audio keyboard, it is impossible to assign the MIDI output of the keyboard to two programs simultaneously: the sound source of the keyboard (a VPO) and synthesia which must remain MIDI controlled by the keyboards!
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

You are right. My solution is based on a keyboard with its own sound generation. MIDI controllers, like the M-Audio keyboards, won't do what I was thinking of.

If you are on Windows, you could use MIDI-OX to do some rather elaborate MIDI routing so that Synthesia is not controlling the sounds. But this is not an easy solution. The basic idea is the MIDI-OX becomes the hub and sends MIDI from your keyboards to both Synthesia and a VPO. I am not sure if you would benefit from running MIDI from Synthesia to MIDI-OX, but it could be done if that solved additional issues.
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
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