Sustain Pedal not working when MPE turned on in Bitwig (Tested on Repro 5 and Bazille + Bitwig)

[Buckster]

First of apologises if this is User error - I am not using a MPE keyboard but I am using MPE features of Bitwig

I noticed this a while back but assumed a plugin had gone wrong - finally worked out what it was this morning

Turn on MPE mode of Repro 5 or Bazille and neither VST responds to the sustain pedal on my keyboard

Turn off MPE mode and instantly sustain pedal works

Just tried with Zebra HZ which I also own - Sustain Pedal works whether MPE selected or not

I don't have a MPE midi device so this might be the problem but I have tested with Dune 3 and sustain pedal still works after turning on MPE

I'm turning on MPE to use Micropitch etc in Bitwig

Any ideas please ? many thanks and much appreciated

[tasmaniandevil]

Please note that we do not support the MPE standard fully, yet.
What we do have is what we call multi-channel MIDI, so you can play MIDI and some controller messages on all 16 channels. This is supported in most of our plugins.

What we don't support is the global channel of the MPE standard.
Bitwig likely uses MIDI channel 1 as the global channel if you activate the MPE button.

As a result the plugin won't receive sustain pedal messages on MIDI channel 1 anymore.

It can still receive sustain pedal messages on all other channels.

Try setting the MIDI channel in the Bazille or Repro tracks to anything other than channel 1. You can set this in the instrument track settings in Bitwig.

The reason why the sustain pedal still works in ZebraHZ is because Zebra2 and ZebraHZ do not support our multi-channel MIDI feature.

[Buckster]

Good afternoon - I'm really sorry just realised I hadn't replied

thankyou very much for taking the time to give a reply and a possible solution - and reason behind why not working makes sense

I did try mapping the midi channel to one other than channel 1 - and sustain does work - but not properly

I wasn't sure if was user error or not - so was going to retry before replying then forgot to reply sorry. It seemed when I tried that setting channel to anything other than channel 1 does allow sustain to work - but bizarrely only sustains one note ! which I don't really understand.

so play a chord channel 1 - sustain works - turn MPE on and sustain no longer works

play a chord any channel other than channel 1 - sustain works with MPE mode enabled but only sustains one note out of the chord - very odd

thanks again and sorry for delay in answering your original reply was much appreciated

[tasmaniandevil]

Ah, interesting, hadn't noticed this yet.
It's still able to sustain multiple notes, but you'd have to press the chord multiple times.
Each time one additional note gets sustained.

I currently can't say if that's a bug in the plugins or in Bitwig, or just another side effect of our yet incomplete implementation of MPE.