Adding Controller to PRV...default to current Channel

[RobertWS]

Suggestion:

When viewing controllers on a track in the PRV, when you go to add another (by clicking the + in the lower left corner) it would be very helpful if the channel defaulted to the current channel instead of always being Channel 1.

 

 

 

[David Baay]

I'm guessing you mean the current forced output channel of the track. If the track has a forced output channel assigned, the channel embedded in the events doesn't matter. In the age of soft synths, most users write/record everything as channel 1, and depend on independent ports and/or forced output channels on tracks to route events to the proper synth and channel.

[RobertWS]

Say I have a track selected.

If I add events in the PRV, and I forget to set the channel to the correct track, the events go to the wrong track.

And sometimes, I am looking at a track and seeing events the belong to a different track!   What good is that?

It could be much better.

 

 

[Promidi]

14 hours ago, RobertWS said:

Say I have a track selected.

If I add events in the PRV, and I forget to set the channel to the correct track, the events go to the wrong track.

And sometimes, I am looking at a track and seeing events the belong to a different track!   What good is that?

It could be much better.

 

 

I agree fully with this

I do MIDI projects and I have 16 tracks set up - each forced to channel 1 to 16 respectively.  Therefore the MIDI channels of individual events are irrelevant.

When I go to add a controller, I too have to manually set the channel.

However, there are times I forget to do this, or an operation results in certain controller events having an incorrect channel.  This becomes important when viewing controller lanes as this does take into account the Event's channels.  It would be nice if the bakers could restore the entry "All channels" under the channel select that is present in Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.

In the file %APPDATA%\cakewalk\Cakewalk Core\cakewalk.ini under the [WinCake] section, I have added the following line.

RechannelMIDI=1

What this does is when I bounce MIDI clips to a single clip on a given MIDI track, the MIDI channels of all the MIDI events on that track will change to match the forced MIDI channel of the track itself.

Edited November 28, 2019 by Promidi

[David Baay]

17 hours ago, RobertWS said:

And sometimes, I am looking at a track and seeing events the belong to a different track!   What good is that?

Not sure what you mean by this. If you make only one track at a time editable in the PRV tracks pane, you can't see or write controllers on another track.

3 hours ago, Promidi said:

I do MIDI projects and I have 16 tracks set up - each forced to channel 1 to 16 respectively.  Therefore the MIDI channels of individual events are irrelevant.

When I go to add a controller, I too have to manually set the channel.

Those two statements are contradictory, and the first one is correct in my view. If you write channel 1 controller events to the channel 4 track, they'll be forced to that channel on playback along with note events, and if you save as a MIDI file, Cakewalk will re-write all the events on the track to channel 4. This happens with Save As .MID regardless of whether rechannelMIDI is enabled in Cakewalk.ini.

Knowing you have a lot of experience, I think I must be missing something about your workflow.

 

[Promidi]

22 minutes ago, David Baay said:

Not sure what you mean by this. If you make only one track at a time editable in the PRV tracks pane, you can't see or write controllers on another track.

Those two statements are contradictory, and the first one is correct in my view. If you write channel 1 controller events to the channel 4 track, they'll be forced to that channel on playback along with note events, and if you save as a MIDI file, Cakewalk will re-write all the events on the track to channel 4. This happens with Save As .MID regardless of whether rechannelMIDI is enabled in Cakewalk.ini.

Knowing you have a lot of experience, I think I must be missing something about your workflow.

 

However, when I am editing a track in the PRV (which I do a lot) , I always have the controller pane visible.  This controller pane is in single lane controller view.

If a track has controller events where those events themselves are set to different channels, there would be several lanes to select. Doing the rechannel of the controller events puts all those controllers that are the same CC number on the same lane.

In a nutshell, it's mainly for display purposes.  For example, I prefer all the expression events (CC11) on their own lane, all the release events (CC72) on their own lane, and etc.   rechannelMIDI = 1 on bounce achieves this.

As you can probably work out by now, I use heaps of controller events per track.  This helps me keep track (no pun intended) of them all.

[David Baay]

10 minutes ago, Promidi said:

For example, I prefer all the expression events (CC11) on their own lane, all the release events (CC72) on their own lane, and etc. 

So why not just write everything as channel 1 in all tracks in the first place and let the forced output channel take care of the rechannelization as I suggested?

[RobertWS]

13 hours ago, David Baay said:

So why not just write everything as channel 1 in all tracks in the first place..

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying.

Channel 1 might be bass, Channel 2 might be piano.   Putting everything in one channel means everything would be the same instrument.

[David Baay]

As I said, I assume that by 'current channel' you mean the output channel assigned to the track. If you have a separate ouput channel assigned to each track and only put parts for one instrument on each track, that output channel assignment will take care of re-channelizing everything as a needed. If you're not using forced output channels, you should.  In the case of non-multi-timbral instruments, channel doesn't matter at all; the dedicated virtual MIDI port presented by that instrument ensures that no other synths see that data, and most single-instrument soft synths will respond to MIDI on any channel.

[sergedaigno]

 

I had to face this annoying problem, here is what I found to rechannel CC's, hope that helps.