I'm new to both Madrona Labs and MPE and it appears there's not a great deal of info out there about their relationship—so here's a thread to formally address the topic.
When controlling Aalto with a Linnstrument in Reaper I found that voices were being selected seemingly at random, often with notes coming into conflict as Aalto was assigning two notes to the same voice. Interesting dissonance but not what I wanted.
The Linnstrument was set to send on more channels than there are voices in Aalto and by finding which channels Aalto responds to, and limiting the Linnstrument's sends to those, Aalto is now playing in a predictable fashion.
In MPE mode it appears that Aalto responds to midi channels 2,3,4 and 5.
It seems that you need to match the number of voices selected in Aalto to the number of channels sent from the Linnstrument. So, for 2 voices in Aalto, set the Linnstrument to channels 2 and 3, then add the remains channels as your number of voices increases.
Is there a way to change which channels Aalto responds to?
For anyone interested in a 'less expensive' MPE controller this Kickstarter campaign ends in 9 days and is funded.
This thread got lifted up by a spam comment and then I saw I never replied. Sorry about that!
Aalto does a basic version of MPE without some of the possible configuration options. It only responds to notes on channels 2 and up, and on channel 1 (main) to affect all notes as spec'd in MPE.
Just got Kaivo, and it seems, that the pitch bend setting is the setting for the MPE PB range.
As I use it with a Linnstrument and in Bitwig, I would prefer, that it would take the PB setting as the global (Midi ch 1) and the PB setting for MPE (all other channels) should be fixed to 48, as the spec recommends... Bitwig assumes that all MPE pitch bend is 48, and adjusts the Linnstrument PB 24 by deviding the incomming PB by a factor of 2. Though this is stupid and might change, the fixed 48 PB seems logical for me...
Wonderfull playground that Kaivo, I had to wait for the deal to be able to afford it though...;-)
Thanks for the note. I'll be doing some work on MPE compatibility in the future and have added this item to the list.