Pianoteq custom Midi Mappings

Getting Stuff Done Hints and Tricks
#1

Hello and Happy New Year to all.

Bottom line: Pianoteq’s ability to use custom MIDI mappings is a great feature, and works well in Ardour (with one small exception).

Details:

I recently installed Ardour 8.10.0 on a Raspberry Pi 400, as part of a project to create a virtual synth for live performance. My main interest is in using the lovely SetBfree and Pianoteq. My controller keyboard is Studiologic Numa X Piano 73, which has a USB audio interface. Each registration (let’s call it a “favorite”) can have up to 4 voices (“zones”) which can be a mix-and-match of internal sounds, external MIDI instruments, or audio. These can be split and/or layered, and each zone can be muted or solo’d independently using hardware buttons on the instrument. The MIDI zones can optionally send a program change message when they are first selected, and/or they can send any arbitrary program change on-the-fly.

And so in Ardour I create a session with 3 tracks:

  1. SetBfree on track 1, configured to send/receive on MIDI channel 1 (i.e. upper manual)
  2. SetBfree again on track 2, configured to send/recent on MIDI channel 2 (i.e. lower manual)
  3. Pianoteq

On the Numa X Piano, I then created a favorite with 3 zones:

  1. MIDI channel 1 - to play the upper manual of SetBfree (using the keyboard from middle C on up)
  2. MIDI channel 2 - to play the lower manual of SetBfree (using the keyboard up to but excluding middle C)
  3. MIDI channel 3 - to play Pianoteq

This works great! If I activate zones 1 and 2 simultaneously on the X Piano, I have a two-manual organ. If active only zone 3, I have Pianoteq.

The challenge is how to change presets in Pianoteq. Here is how I did that?

As many people already know, Pianoteq lets you set up custom MIDI mappings (Options, MIDI). These can include associating presets with program change messages. These files have an extension of ptm and on Linux are stored in /home//.local/share/Modartt/Pianoteq/MidiMappings/

I wanted to report that the Pianoteq plugin GUI appears to handle custom ptm file identically to the Pianoteq standalone - including the ability to create a save a new ptm file and set it as the default. And, this default is remembered when Ardour is closed and restarted.

However there is one minor exception: within Ardour, the “Browse…” button in the Pianoteq plugin GUI doesn’t do anything (in the Pianoteq standalone, the “Browse…” button opens /home//.local/share/Modartt/Pianoteq/MidiMappings/ in the file manager).

Overall this is a minor inconvenience (and I gather that Ardour has no control over the behavior of any plugin GUI).