How to play only ONE midi channel

I created 2 MIDI tracks with 2 different synthesizer plugins. There is a menu where I can chose, which channels are recorded and played. Then I set track 1 to MIDI channel 1 (both recording and playing) and track 2 to MIDI channel 2 (both recording and playing).
“Record/Inbound” works fine, “play” only when playing back an already recorded track.
But when I just play notes on the keyboard (channel 1) without recording, the notes are also played by the second instrument on track 2 - so the channel “filter” doesn’t work. How can I change this?

Hi,

I also reported/requested this quite some time ago: http://tracker.ardour.org/view.php?id=5340

In order to get this to work as you want you need a combination of the x42 midifilter and channel selector plugins which is a bit cumbersome to set up the first time but works well…

Maybe not the solution you are looking for, but I just go change the input source in the mixer strip for each channel to DISK when I don’t want it to play and INPUT when I’m recording that particular track.

Thank you ssj71 for your idea. But I want to play SIMULTANIOUSLY two different instruments in two different tracks:
I split my keyboard so the lower half is sending on MIDI channel 1 and the upper half is sending on MIDI channel 2. So I could play with my left hand the instrument in track 1 and with my right hand the instrument in track 2. This works for recording, but just playing music with motionless playhead triggers both instruments :frowning:

The channel filter does not currently work for input. This was a deliberate design decision, but another user on IRC raised the same issue as you have done. A future version of Ardour will probably change the design so that it works the way you’re expecting/wanting.

I see. This should probably be put in the bug tracker. As a work around, you can use a midi filter like at https://x42.github.io/midifilter.lv2/http___gareus_org_oss_lv2_midifilter_channelfilter.html

Thank you very much. So I will use the channelfilter as plugin - and look forward to a future version of Ardour with the “native” channel filter working also for input.

Hi, sorry for the thread reincarnation - I’m investigating using Ardour (6.5 currently) with live coding languages (tidal/supercollider/orca) on linux and would like to use it as a softsynth midi aggregator.

It still doesn’t seem to be available - has there been any discussion on changing this design decision?

For anyone reading, I’m working around it for now by creating multiple virtual MIDI through ports in JACK (I’m running linux), creating the mapping explicitly for each synth in supercollider, then routing with JACK from each individual midi output to the midi input port in ardour.

It would be nice to be able to keep the supercollider setup to a minimum, by mapping a single virtual midi port and gain control over synth choice by changing the midi channel in my livecode environment.

Side note for other readers, I’ve also noticed that some softsynth plugins let you control the midi channel they listen on natively (eg calf organ)

It’d be a nice feature to support this rapidly growing style of music creation :slight_smile:

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Is this still a plan?

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