Re: MIDI devices

Hi Chris,

On 12/04/2026 00:11, chris wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am pretty new to Rosegarden.

Welcome!

> 
> Coming from ancient Emagic/Apple Logic 5 under Windows, I see quite some 
> conceptual similarities between both programs.
> However, there is one neat thing I liked and used with Logic - the 
> environment.
> 
> I own lots of external (hardware) MIDI synths, and in order to save MIDI 
> out ports, I combined several synths on each out port, using thru boxes 
> and different channel settings.
> 
> What I am looking for is a way to represent this setup in Rosegarden. 
> The closest I found are home-grown MIDI devices.
> As I can see, I can define MIDI devices with the proper out port - but 
> have to use a paper cheat sheet with the correct channel(s) for each. 
> Not to mention that after assigning a device to a track, the channel 
> needs to be set manually too, even if the synth only uses one.
> 
> Is there a way to limit MIDI device definitions to specific channels 
> (sometimes only one, sometimes more, but rarely all 16) ?

What Rosegarden calls 'devices' are essentially ALSA Midi ouputs, you 
can assign banks definitions to these (e.g. think of the General MIDI 
ones, or there are a few for actual hardware synths), and MIDI 
controllers. Then you can send MIDI from Rosegarden to 'anything' 
(including hardware or software) which can expose a 'MIDI in' port(s) 
('writable client' in alsa midi lingo).

Channel 'routing' is indeed done by selecting the output channel (1 to 
16) - (confusingly called 'instrument' in Rosegarden).

What is your scenario for this? Sending the output of one single track 
to multiple synths, and therefore midi channels (managed by your through 
box / filter)?
In this case rosegaden itself has midi thru capabilities for tracks (you 
can check the Recording filters for options, and in this case there *is* 
a midi channel filter for 'midi in'. So you can simply connect the 
output to the input and then turn on midi through on the track.
This seems more complicateed than it is but effecitively you could send 
the output of a track to other channels via other tracks.

If you simply want to have a bunch of tracks set-up to different 
channels easily rosegarden does also have templates, so in this case you 
could set-up a template with tracks / channels typical for your setup 
and load that - a template can also be auto-loaded.

Last but not least, for more 'funky' midi routings (e.g. letting notes 
through but not controllers on a specific channel) I have used Pure Data 
which can do quite a lot with midi. This was with soft synth (Yoshimi) 
but I think the principle can be similar.

Hope this helps and have fun with Rosegarden ;-)

Lorenzo