Send Keystrokes to 2 or more apps?

A user asked this:

Can you target multiple programs with Midi Translator? i.e. you have 2 progs running; Live and a lyric display prog; can the keystrokes derived from midi messages be sent to a particular app. Eg prog ch 1 sends Live 'ctrl +1' but sends lyric prog 'Page Dn'?

this is an issue that we're working on for a long time. There are many ways, and none works for all programs, so it's hard to provide that functionality. A future version will have one way or the other to target specific programs.

So far, people have found 2 work-arounds:
1) use Alt-Tab
You can use Alt-Tab as outgoing Keystroke in order to switch applications. You can even use Alt-Tab-Tab or the like to switch to the over-next app. Obviously, this is rather shaky, especially when more than the 2 programs are running.

2) Use program start keyboard shortcuts
In the start menu, or in other program shortcuts (e.g. on the desktop), right-click and selct properties: there you can define a keyboard shortcut that will launch the program, or, if the program is already started, activate it. For example, assign Live the shortcut Alt-Ctrl-L. Now the trick is to prepend the keystroke that you want to target to Live with that shortcut, so your keystroke sequence would be Alt(Ctrl(L))Ctrl(1) - first activating Live, then sending it Ctrl+1.
That solution seems to work well.

Florian

Hi Florian
Actually your idea might extend a bit...when writing macros with AutoIt, you can make it send keys to a targeted prog ie not just the focused window. Perhaps a hybrid might be to make a couple of autoIt exes that sends keys specifically to the lyric prog with the appropriate keys eg Verse1.exe=Numpad1 and simply get translator to execute those macros. At least that would be hardwired to the target prog and would be reuseable, greatly simplifying the setup of translator.
Cheers
Mark

thanks, great suggestion!
I should investigate how AutoIt manages to target apps without activating them. I've done my own tests, but it would only work with ~50% of all applications.

Florian