Midi Track Not Playing

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Every time I try to start a project with Ardour I hit 234980 barriers and waste 2375429348h trying to do again something I’ve done before 234764 times… let’s go again…

I saved an older project as Template. Loaded. There is a Track with Midi Drums. It is empty. I add some notes. The Gauge reacts when I do, indicating that I’m setting the correct notes. I’m using LSP Multisampler for this Drum set. It finds the samples. In fact, I can click the the “listen” button and it plays the sound of each instrument there.

Everything is hooked to master. It doesn’t play a sound. The meter reacts as if sound is being played. It is not.

It is, very likely, something extremely dumb. It always is. But I always waste 23897424897h on dumb things whenever I have to start a project in Ardour. It is VERY frustrating.

Anyway, help appreciated.

#2

There’s a good chance the LSP multisampler drum set only uses notes on Channel 10 (which is conventionally the channel for drums, though this varies significantly in other plugins and DAWs). By default, drawn notes will be on channel 1. There’s a selector for this in the MIDI tools bar.

#3

Thanks. No idea where the MIDI toolbar is. Tried selecting the miditrack and pressing “D”, nothing happens.

#4

I think I found it, if this is what you’re talking about.

Only accepts the first 6 channels, none play sound. Click 7 or larger falls back to 6.

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#5

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#6

Found the problem with the help of DeepSeek.

My LSP Instruments were listening to Channel 3, not 10. No idea why it was set like that, why it is working in my older project and why the template didn’t set the track to listen to channel 3 automatically, but hey.

Is there any way to set the MIDI Editor to only show the 12 notes/instruments from the LSP Plugin, instead of all of them?

#7

If you spent some of these 23897424897 hours on reading the manual it would be a less frustraing thing to work with ardour (sorry, too obvious, silly joke :slight_smile: ).

But it would be nice if the default channel could be set in preferences. I mostly use channel 10 but when editing a track I first need to go to Draw-mode to set the channel to 10, then go to Edit-mode.
If Edit-mode also had a Midi-toolbar that would save one step.

And also this: Channel by default is: Auto
In the manual: “Channel Auto - This value will be inherited from the closest note.”

I don’t know how that is supposed to work but if I insert new notes close to notes with channel 10 (or any channel) it still draws notes in channel 1

(This relates to Inline-editing, Pianoroll works different of course)

#8

I did read most stuff back in my youth, but unless you use them very regularly you will forget some stuff over the years.

MIDI has always been one of the most problematic things in Ardour imo.