Some time ago I bough HAPAX to be able to sequence my Osmose ExpressiveE. Unfortunately HAPAX cannot output to ‘virtual USB 2’ port so recording works well, but playback doesnt (DIN in on Osmose appears terribly buggy as of yet). A previous request has been made to be able to select virtual USB ports which would probably solve this problem).
Now, in order to play and record/sequence at least óne cool MPE synth in my setup, I just bought Nina (Melbourne instruments). This thing is not from earth!! (seriously, go get one). However, in conjunction with Osmose and Hapax, trouble again.
Nina’s default MPE mode is set to Master Ch1, resulting in no sound at all playing midi from Hapax. Luckily, Nina allows one to set MPE Master to Ch16. Now Hapax can play notes, yay!
Unfortunatly Osmose only plays nice on ‘Ch1 mode’.
This is very annoying, forcing me to switch back and forth modes on Nina. In other words, I cannot use my Osmose and Hapax concurrently as an input. Please give us (me) an option to change the MPE Master channel on Hapax, would be much appreciated.
Secondly, midi feedback is a bitch (and the anti echo feature in Nina doesn’t appear to cope well with MPE + CC recording, possibly due to the enormous stream of midi messages using MPE?), maybe an anti echo feature on Hapax (like on Pyramid) could help?
There are scenarios where being able to set MPE mode to upper zone (where channel 16 acts as the global channel for MIDI messages that should affect all voices) rather than the default lower zone (where channel 1 is the global one). There are also scenarios where being able to limit the range of channels the Hapax assigns to MPE notes would be helpful, eg when using the handful of Sequential synths that support MPE but only respond to channels 2-7 for notes in MPE mode.
But Im confused about why you actually need that with your combination of equipment.
Why would NINA being set to use channel 1 for global stuff in MPE mode cause a problem with the Hapax? Are you talking about non-MPE notes from the Hapax, eg ones played using the pads on the Hapax rather than ones that were recorded by sending the output of a MPE controller into the Hapax (on a Hapax track thats set to MPE)? Even so, I dont understand why that would make channel 16 work better on the NINA than channel 1 for these non-MPE notes.
As for the Osmose, its true that they have a very simplistic view of the MPE spec, and the latest manual claims that the global channel must always be 1, as if they have never heard of the upper/lower zone stuff.
You might still be able to workaround stuff via Osmose settings though, have you experimented with using multi-channel mode rather than MPE mode in the Ext MIDI settings on the Osmose? In multi-channel mode you can set both a start and end channel number for the range of channels to be used, so you could set that to channels 1-15. However since this mode has no concept of a global channel at all, this mode might have undesirable consequences for you, depends what you are doing with global pitch bend etc.
Anyway this Osmose workaround doesnt negate my previous head scratching about why you would get better results with NINA set to global channel 16 in the first place.
I suppose I can imagine the following might explain it:
You have a Hapax track set to MPE. You want to use actual MPE notes with this, via an MPE controller, and these will be on channels 2-16. But you also want to do some stuff with Hapax-generated normal notes, which will come out of channel 1.
This should work, except if NINA is failing to pay any attention to notes that are sent to the global channel 1 when it has MPE configured in that way. ie If its only listening to channels 2-16 for notes when in that mode. If this is the case (I dont have a NINA so cannot check) then the NINA people have probably misinterpreted the MPE spec because the NINA really should be listening for notes on channel 1 too, it should treat notes received on that channel like normal non-MPE notes with no per-note pitch bend etc messages applying to them.
