Dynamic port usage

I've checked the help and I swear I cannot find an answer in a nutshell there. I see ports can be dynamically opened but I have no idea how.

I'm using MTP to control different MIDI gear to different DAWs so I need to switch the opened ports back and forth.

The question is:

Am I forced to open ports in the settings options or can I leave them unchecked and open them from the individual translators? If so how? I tried and nothing happens when they're left unchecked and I have set the default ports as well as individual port from the translators.

My plan is to use two Presets to switch modes/ports before opening the software, as opposed to opening the projects and opening the used ports. I guess that would be the intention with the presets so you can even use another gear to control those presets and switch presets with a button, right?

I'm I forced to use aliases too? what's the real benefit of them?

Thanks a lot!!

Hi Sacco,

unfortunately, as of version 1.7.2, you cannot dynamically open or close MIDI ports while one project is active. It's the first time that I hear of this idea... MT should be able to do that! An obvious way would be to have an outgoing action that can be used to open or close specific MIDI ports. Another way (or additionally) would be that as an option, the Preset Default ports are closed when you disable that preset, and re-opened when you activate the preset. I add that to the feature list for version 2.

The current way is that when the project file is loaded, all ports that are used in the project (i.e. project properties, preset properties, in/out translators and routes) are opened, all other ports are closed.

At first I thought you could do a hack: for your different MIDI port setups, create separate projects. Make sure that when loading the project, the respective ports are opened and closed as you need it. Then use outgoing actions to load the different projects. On OS X, that could work with the "Execute File" outgoing action, on Windows you'd be restricted to emulate keystrokes to load a different project. Both ways, however, will probably not work well enough. In particular, on OS X, the "open used ports" function will not close unused ports (seems to be a bug, will be fixed in next version).

I've added a topic for the aliases here:
The Beauty of MIDI Port Aliases

Thanks,
Florian

Hi Florian thanks for your answer.

I just somehow assumed that the default ports in each preset could dynamically open the ports (given the user doesn't go crazy switching presets like mad I guess) so I could leave all the ports in the settings blank.

That I guess could be the solution on v2, the choice of each device on each translator would only point to the device on the already opened ports by the preset. So the preset could become the port manager instead of having a centralized "per project" port manager.

Maybe that could also simplify the devices list on the translators. Right now I have many devices connected to my machine (8 devices, some list two MIDI ports) so without aliases the list is big enough to make it a bit frustrating when assigning specific devices on each translator cause you need to scroll on that small box all the time. If only the used ports (the selected default ports in the preset settings) were listed to chose from it would help a lot.

I had a look about what you wrote about aliases and now I have to put it in practice and see, thanks again. I guess right now since I'm translating only for two specific devices that aren't meant to be interchangeable I don't need them.