Midi-issues in Ardour4

Recorded Midi does not behave as I expect.

I was awaiting Ardour 4 to be able to track midi and have given it a few runs but it does not work well for me.

The setup is, A Yamaha Motif XS connected by USB cable to my Ardour Box. The Yamaha is set up to use USB as midi connection and the a2jack port is exposed to Ardour.

Tracking seems fine and visually the midi info apperast to be ok, I have no x-runs or other glitches but when I later play back the midi info I get some notes stuck. Have tried several times and also made sure mu controller is in non-local mode to make sure there is no midi-loop but it still behave very bad. I stumbled on an old discussion involving Ralph and the behavior of Note-ON, Note-OFF of the same note having strange results… I really can’t say that I have a clue to how I can use my gear to track midi. Of course I can go the regular MIDI-Connector route instead but I don’t know yet why this is happening.

Well if you are using the Motif as the audio engine, then my first question is, is the NOTE-OFF being transmitted. The only way to tell that is to look at the MIDI being transmitted itself through a trace or other program and see if the command is there. If it is, it indicates (Not guarantees but indicates) the problem is not in Ardour itself.

Another thing you may try is to use a plugin temporarily and see if you get the same behavior from the plugin.

Finally this is something I would say is worth to submit a sample test session through Mantis as a bug report, then get on IRC and talk to developers there as this is likely going to require some in depth analysis.

     Seablade

@seablade. thanks for the response, I will do some more investigation and test with plugins and see what comes out.
I was using the Motif as audio engine, yes

Since the midi note events shown in ardour both have a start and a stop, I imagine midi note off is beeing sent but the forum Ralph thing made me wounder if Ardour does something “Clever” that is technically correct but does not work in real world ™.

Will do some more investigation and file or add to existing mantis reports.

If you can reproduce this issue, please file a bug report.

First, please make sure the Events make it out of Ardour (use Ardour’s MIDI-tracer or jack_midi_dump).

If some events are missing: you’ve hit: http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=6287 . tl;dr: try to disable periodic saves and Don’t save while playing.

If all events show up in Ardour’s midi-tracer but not in jack or the physical midi-layer. Increase jack’s midi buffer size (jack1 -m option). jack2 is pretty safe (32KB fixed size buffers).

Last but not least: if you do mux multiple jack-midi ports into one physical output things can get messy. I lost track of which version(s) of jack and which jack-midi backends do support event re-ordering, but I do know that Ardour’s ALSA backend handles this correctly (both raw-midi as well as sequencer).