Logic and AU instrument midi out

[stoopicus]

Well, I'm done for a while. Hopefully they will improve the MIDI routing in a later release.

Tried with Bitwig's free trial -> was trivial, Pigments ARP/SEQ controlling external instruments worked immediately
Went back to Reaper -> was trivial, Pigments controlling anything, including other instrument tracks, worked fine
Installed the iLogic skin on Reaper -> RIP Logic for a while.

It's so weird too, the MIDI environment is perfectly positioned to handle this in Logic; it just... doesn't. There is no MIDI output from AU instruments, only AU MIDI effects. I piped it to a MIDI monitor and nope, nothing, only passthrough of the original controller MIDI, no plugin generated MIDI at all. At that point it's not even clear to me hacking it through IAC would work.

Thanks everyone for the suggestions, if anyone has any luck getting something like this working I would love to hear from you. I really like logic, but this kind of routing limitation is just weird.

[Dalle]

Does the Logic update mean other DAWs can implement AU midi out too?

[Dewdman42]

no. 10.8 had a bug which was sending midi from some AU's back into the environment input port object. They fixed that bug in 10.8.1. There is absolutely not indication that Apple has added midi out for AUinst plugins on purpose or plans to. Who knows maybe they will, but as of now... no. And I doubt they will.

[chagzuki]

work.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions, if anyone has any luck getting something like this working I would love to hear from you. I really like logic, but this kind of routing limitation is just weird.

A workaround for soft synths is to use a wrapper like DDMF metaplugin. I've just tried it, and it works.

[stoopicus]

Yeah, I actually worked around it with just adding Kushview Elements as a MIDI effect on an external instrument track that had no instrument loaded, and building the entire MIDI routing graph in it, loading Pigments as a VST3i in Elements and wiring it directly out to the synths inside Elements. Basically, I completely bypassed Logic's MIDI routing, and used VST3i instead of AUi. As far as Logic knows, it's just ending MIDI IN to a MIDI effect that isn't connected to anything.

Probably will just stick with Reaper, we’ll see. At least I can hack around the limitations in Logic if I want to. Of course needing to rebuild the entire MIDI routing inside a freeware plugin host that happens to be loadable as an AU effect is not a good look for Logic.

[Dewdman42]

FYi, when you route the midi from one instrument channel to another instrument channel, you lose sample accuracy...regardless of the DAW you use. the only way to have sample accuracy for that kind of situation is in fact to use Kushview elements or MetaPlugin, etc..in order to put all the processing of both midi and audio into the same process block. You may or may not care about sample accuracy. Without it, it's still generally going to be close enough down to around 1ms or so...probably nobody will notice the timing slop from using the chained instrument track approach, but if you really want absolutely sample accurate rendering of the midi to audio..then you want to use Kushview Elements, etc.. in which case it doesn't matter if you use Logic, Reaper, or anything else they will all handle it. Actually LogicPro has a leg up on just about everything else because it is the only DAW currently that has dedicated AUmfx plugin slots...so in many cases if you are using midi plugins and separate instrument plugins, you can do it sample accurately in logicPro without a 3rd party wrapper tool.

It a bit of annoyance that Apple doesn't provide AUi outs, I agree. they could easily make a switch that will catch AUi midi out and send it to IAC...etc.. wouldn't be a hard add...but...I'm sort of anal about wanting sample accuracy so I just prefer to use the Kushview Element approach, regardless of which DAW I'm using.