ForumsSoftware ← MPE implementation difficulty

Hey guys,

Im having trouble trying out MPE. OS X 10.10.5, with newest version of aalto and the sound plane client on ableton. Is there a walk through that Im missing or something? Ive tried enabling MPE in both the sound plane client and Aalto, but it doesn't seem to work. Also, does MPE provide a way to record and edit sound plane performances? if so is it pretty self explanatory once MPE is working?

Hi Yorke,

I'm sorry to say MPE doesn't work well with Ableton Live. There's nothing I can do about this—it's because Live strips off the channel information before sending it to the plugin. There's some more information about this at http://madronalabs.com/topics/4718-key-outputs-by-protocol where I document all the protocols by what comes out the KEY module in each one.

There is some weird workaround for Live that may work. You can see it in this screenshot:
Live MPE

I haven't tried it myself but this may be a solution for you. Or another host may be.

Yes, with MPE working properly you can record and edit a Soundplane performance.

Ah Thank you!

I was worried. I can use logic, and I'll give the workaround try and post results here.

@yorke, if you are trying to record multi channel midi (rather than just play it, i.e. hosting) , there appear to be only 2 solutions that offer proper support.

  • Cubase (Artist and Pro) , not the basic package
  • Bitwig 1.2 in beta BUT this currently is not working properly with MPE in VSTs only built-in instruments.

outside, these, the solution is either to:

  • record audio (this is what I do)
  • create separate midi tracks and route them to the VST this is what you can see in the above, and is a technique that works in most hosts, Live and Logic included.

its not a fault of MPE (as Voice per Channel midi suffers the same issues), nor Soundplane (its the same with Linnstrument/Seaboard/Continuum/Eigenharp)... its just the DAWs have not yet 'caught up'.

Hopefully with the new Seaboard RISE, and ROLIs marketing, we might see more widespread use, and so there the DAW developers will sit up and notice the demand :)

@thetechnobear thanks for the info. I'll do some experimenting.

The reason I'm looking into it is that I ran into some frustration with my last project. I was trying to make an appreciation pattern with the sound plane, but wanted to give it a sort of soft quantization so It would sit with other synched up patterns. I couldn't ever nail it well enough performing it, so I sort of gave up.

"appreciation pattern" = arpeggiated ?

could the synth not be clocked to do the arp?

but yeah, tricky if your trying to arp manually... if the sound has strong enough transients, Id have thought Live could do this even with a audio clip.

for sure though, easier to do with midi. doing the above in Live for one or two tracks is not really a problem... its just a pain if you do it routinely, as you'll find every time you change the VST you have to reset the routing of the midi tracks. (I actually have a small M4L object that does this)

Bitwig have said they do support MPE for VSTs, I'm just waiting for a new version of Aalto which will support the 'canDo' operation (see separate post) to see if this fixes MPE within Bitwig.

Personally though, if midi editing of MPE/Voice per channel data was important to me (and I did it a lot), Id seriously consider Cubase. but for the odd time here and there, Live (or any other daw) is fine once you know how to do it.