I am a complete novice using BIAB trying to find a way to connect a keyboard to an Alesis QSR rack mounted synth and also have a midi cable input from my laptop pc with BIAB on it. What I have done is get a y splitter that splits my 2 input midi cables to 1 as it goes into my synth. What I was hoping to be able to do was to tell BIAB to NOT use
a channel, for example channel 1, so that the input midi signals from my keyboard would not get mixed up with the midi signals coming from my pc laptop as created by BIAB. What happens now is after a short period of time I will get one note that "sticks" on continuously after a few minutes of playing.

My first effort at excluding this one midi channel from BIAB's use was to go to this midi options window and make sure that the channel "1" was not being used by BIAB:

[img]https://photos.app.goo.gl/PFSx0rVScBRiu7MH3[/img]

That is not working. To describe the problem in another way....I want to be able to play use my keyboard to play any of the hundreds of sounds available on my synth without disturbing or interrupting the midi signals coming from BIAB. I would not be surprised if this is not possible without additional hardware in between. Using the "Y" 2 in 1 out to my synth is not a very subtle attempt I know. I was originally loooking for a midi "a/b" switch that would at least allow me to switch between getting the input signal from my keyboard versus my BIAB laptop. I could not find such a thing. I am thinking there must be such a piece of midi hardware that would be like a mixer where I could have the 2 midi streams input with just one output. I would be happy to add such a piece of hardware if someone could point me to such a thing.

Thanks very much,
Jim Lee

I have a lot of MIDI gear and I'm not sure a "Y" cable is good way to go but that aside. I also have a QSR (and more)... so in luie of using a Y cable you COULD connect your MIDI keyboard to PC and:

1) When NOT using BIAB have your PC MIDI routed to your QSR using something like FREE MIDI OX (if your MIDI interface HW your using on your PC doesn't have a standalone software routing feature)

http://www.midiox.com/?http://www.midiox.com/moxdown.htm

Yes it works in Win 10 (and 7 and XP I USE it in ALL THREE!), or


2) When USING BIAB just make sure you have "Route MIDI Thur to MIDI Driver" in the Options -> MIDI/Audio Drivers setup and set the MIDI driver output to your MIDI HW out. Or once again you could do all this in MIDI OX: you could MERGE your MIDI keyboard input with the BIAB output using MIDI OX and have MIDI OX send all that data to the QSR.

You can then even FILTER channels and CC's so only certain things make it to the QSR.

Good Luck
Larry

Hi Jim,

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Make sure I have it right. You are running the MIDI out from BIAB INTO your synthesizer? Why? Your interface has MIDI in and OUT on it. With your BIAB's MIDI data being sent through your synth you are getting collisions between note on and note off message and that is what is causing the hanging notes. If you want to have BIAB play other sounds from your Alesis, patch from your interface MIDI OUT to your Alesis MIDI IN and make sure the channels match up.

My thought on hanging notes is that perhaps your BIAB has generated a note on message for note 65 (to use a number) and you then manually play a note 65 (which is F above middle C) and release that key. You had the original MIDI note on message, then you manually played that key again, which sent another NOTE ON message, and let go of the key, which sent a NOTE OFF message, but that original NOTE ON is still on and the note is still playing and will keep playing until it gets another note off.

You can actually cause that manually to test what I mean. Press a key on your keyboard and while depressing that key change MIDI channel on the Alesis. When you let go of the key the original note SHOULD still be playing because the original depression of that key on MIDI channel X never got the corresponding off message because you changed channels and can no longer send the note off.

Start by remembering that MIDI is not sound. It is on and off messages. And synthesizers are not really "musical instruments" per se, like a piano or a guitar that create sounds with strings that vibrate. Synthesizers are essentially computers that are configured to synthesize and play sounds. Right there in the name. They synthesize sounds. With a data stream.