Problems with opening midi devices (10 device limit?)

I’ve been adding more devices to my set up over the last few years, and I think I’ve just hit a limit that has made something unhappy, as Renoise has been rock solid for years (I don’t even have back up saves enabled!) but now I’m expecting problems everytime I open a device. There’s a high chance that a given device will either fail to open, or cause Renoise to totally freeze up and hang. Seems to be a different device each time

I’ve done a bit of reading around and it looks like I could be hitting a 10 device limit in Win 7. That sounds about right, as I have 5 USB synths, 4 synths connected via cheapo USB Midi adaptors (more on that later) and a Microsoft GS Wavetable synth (whatever that is) that show up in my list. One strange thing is that Renoise tends to list most devices twice… Not sure if that’s anything to worry about, but it’s never really gotten in my way previously. I’m not actually exceeding the 10 device limit, but with the duplicates that show up I don’t know if that’s causing additional problems?

I was wondering if I should try replacing my 4 USB Midi adaptors with one USB midi adaptor and a 4 way thru port? That would limit the number of windows devices I’m using, and I’d just use each of my synths on a different channel instead of a different device.

Never heard about the 10-device limit, but I guess it could be a thing. But this…

One strange thing is that Renoise tends to list most devices twice… Not sure if that’s anything to worry about, but it’s never really gotten in my way previously.

That surely shouldn’t happen. The first thing I would do is to check is whether other softwares with MIDI input report the same number of ports. That would perhaps indicate whether the problem exist in Renoise or is somehow related to your operating system.

But otherwise, yeah you might have stumbled upon a bug. I know another one fixed in which multiple (legit) devices registered under the same name, but this is kind of the opposite problem.