Midi Echo In Renoise?

Hi …

I have a setup involving an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer, a Kawai K1 multitimbral keyboard, and Renoise. What I want to do is enable MIDI echo in renoise, so I can hook things up this way:

MMT8: Out to Renoise, in from Keyboard
keyboard: in from Renoise, out to MMt8
Renoise: in from MMT8, out to keyboard

The MIDI interface for my PC is a MIDIsport UNO, which has only a MIDI in and out, no thru.

I want to still be able to control my Kawai keyboard through the MMt8, and yet also have the MMt8’s clock trigger Renoise, and have my PC pass through all the data the MMT8 is sending out, through the MIDIsport MIDI out. Any ideas how I can do this?

With a quick glance, renoise doesn’t appear to have ‘midi echo’ (AKA soft thru).

Depending on what OS you have, you may be able to do it in software, merging the computers input midi stream with renoises midi output, before patching it in software to the hardware midi port.
This is acheivable on Linux using Jack. ~Ubuntu studio is rather cool~

For lesser (just joking) ~other operating systems, there maybe something out there to do the trick.
I recall a program for win98 called hubbys midi loop, and also hubbys audio loop, which created some extra software audio and midi ports and routing possibilities.

Also, if the k1 has a ‘soft thru’ option, this is the same as midi echo, which may help.

A last (and better) option of course would be to get more midi ports or a through box or a merge box, chaining midi devices results in midi delay, as midi runs at a clock speed specified in the early 80s, i think about 31.25kbps.
Personally, i think it would be ashame to have midi delays in a modern system. SEQ24 on linux is a rather cool pattern based sequencer that would replace the mmt8.

I solved my problem actually …

The midi thru on my kawai K1 doesn’t work for this function, because for some reason, the MIDI clock isn’t getting sent through to the PC. There is no “soft thru” that I could find.

The solution was to install MIDIOX (a neat little utility) on the PC and have it running in the background while Renoise is running. Making sure of course to set the clock master off and the clock slave to my USB midi interface, and hooking things this way:

Kawai: in from the PC, out to the Alesis MMT8
MMT8: in from Kawai, out to the PC.

Then setting midi echo to “On” with the Alesis, and voila! Renoise is synched to my hardware sequencer, thanks to MIDIOX passing the MIDI clock data through… :)

Also, make sure that you have the MIDI in device set to null, otherwise the notes playing from the MMT8 will be picked up by Renoise and played. You might not necessarily want that.

Thanks for your help! I guess I just needed to persist with it.

I had a thought maybe jack is available for windows, its being worked on but not finished.

http://jackaudio.org/node/13

Worth making a mental note of for the future :)