Broken List - Bome Forums Archive 2005

mschnell

2014-02-16 14:06:51

This is on Windows 7 64 Bit.

While MT seems to work nicely with Kontakt 5 (stand alone), I have a problem with the sounds I want to play with Linux Sampler (stand alone).

I installed MT with a single virtual (output) port and assigned the Midi input of Kontakt 5 to that port. That does work.

LinuxSampler works with it's Midi Input assigned directly to the Midi input device (Native Instrument Audio 6), using a setup that I created before installing MT (and thus before the virtual Bome Midi port existed).

Now I tried to assign the input port of LinuxSampler to the virtual Bome port.

But I can't even select any port any more with LinuxSampler, as when trying so, I get an error message:

"Updating Midi Devices: Broken List."

Hence I can't see the virtual port, nor can I even create a new LinuxSampler setup that does not use it, no port at all is selectable.

In fact, whenever I start LinuxSampler (with the existing working setup) I get this message, but the program does work nonetheless with the Audio 6 port.

Seemingly the way the virtual port is managed is not compatible to the way LinuxSampler expects it.

Any help ? (In fact needed quickly as I'd like to purchase NT ASAP.)

-Michael

mschnell

2014-02-17 20:17:37

I found that LinuxSample (which is a free and supposedly open source project ( -> http://www.linuxsampler.org/ , so you easily can test it with MT), before I installed MT, wrote a text file as the setup that still is working.

Maybe it helps to take a look at the content of this file, regarding the Midi input port:

Code: Select all

CREATE MIDI_INPUT_DEVICE MME
SET MIDI_INPUT_PORT_PARAMETER 0 0 NAME='Port 0'
SET MIDI_INPUT_PORT_PARAMETER 0 0 PORT='Komplete Audio 6 In'
ADD CHANNEL
SET CHANNEL MIDI_INPUT_DEVICE 0 0
SET CHANNEL MIDI_INPUT_PORT 0 0
SET CHANNEL MIDI_INPUT_CHANNEL 0 1

I suppose that (as I only created a single Midi input port for the instance) the first "0" of any of theses settings defines this single internal port.

It seemingly is called "Port 0" as an internal alias (I did not change this setting) and shows the caption "Komplete Audio 6 In". in fact the port in Windows really seems to be denoted as "Komplete Audio 6 In": MT shows the same name for it's input device.

Does this suggest anything ?

-Michael

mschnell

2014-02-17 20:46:38

Doing a bit more research I am rather sure that the problem is that the name of the MT virtual port is

Bome's Midi Translator 1 Virtual Out

Linux Sampler obviously does not accept a single quote in a name for one of the Midi ports.

I.e. it can't save it in the file I cited above, as here the name-strings are - as usual - surrounded by single quotes.

(In fact I think that it is not a good idea at all to use such a name that really easily can create conflicts is many situations. Regarding that nowadays XML often is used as a setup format, open and closing xml-brackets ("<" and ">" characters) are not a good idea as well.)

Is it somehow possible to have MT use a different name for the virtual ports ?

Thanks a lot !

-Michael

florian

2014-02-19 01:46:01

Hi Michael,

thank you very much for the detailed report. Your conclusion about the cause makes sense. Unfortunately, MT does not allow you to rename the virtual ports. We do have the plan to use a different name in the next version of MT, or, to allow switching the name of a choice of two -- one being the long form, the other being just an acronym like "BMT 1". That's to accommodate the problem that some prominent programs have a tiny display field for MIDI port names...
Additionally, we'll drop the single quote from the Bome programs anyway: the name will become "Bome MIDI Translator Pro".

However, I don't agree with your conclusion that this is a bug in Midi Translator. Yes, a single quote is unusual in a MIDI port name, and it can become a problem if programs are not prepared for that. But MIDI ports are allowed to have single quotes in the name (as well as other "evil" characters). So, any software that cannot cope with that has a bug. There are standard techniques for storing a single quote in a string that is surrounded by single quotes -- e.g. escaping it with a backslash or by using HTML character entity references. The particularly applies to storing arbitrary text in XML: you must encode the strings appropriately so that they don't interfere with the XML tags! Maybe you can file that as a bug against LinuxSampler?

Sorry that all this does not help you right now.

Best regards,
Florian

mschnell

2014-02-19 07:13:24

Thanks for the answer.

Unfortunately this issue makes MT unusable for one of the tasks I wanted to use it for

Of course I already did file a post in the Linux Sampler forum. I am going to enhance it with the additional information we worked out.

Can't you think of any "dirty trick" to try with the current version of MT ? (e.g replace the "Bome's" by "Bome_s" in some files by a binary editor ...)

-Michael