Re: Software Loopers and Hardware Loopers

[Jeffrey Larson <jeff@zonemobius.com>]

 > but the last time I did, Max and Mobius would not play nice together
 > and share the MIDI port.

The main MIDI issue with Mobius and any host is that they cannot
open the same MIDI input or output device.  What happens depends
on the device driver, either Mobius will get a "device not available"
error when it tries to open it, or it will open but when Mobius
and the host both try to close it you get an error and sometimes a
crash.

This situation is usually easy to avoid because the only common reason
to make Mobius open a MIDI port when running as a VST is to send MIDI
clocks.  In that scenario the host doesn't open the device, it lets
Mobius own the clock generator.  Typically this is done with a
"loopback" device like MidiYoke where Mobius sends clocks to the "MIDI
Yoke 1" output device and the host opens the "MIDI Yoke 1" INPUT
device, thereby letting Mobius set the tempo for the host which VSTs
can't ordinarily do.

If you don't need loopback sync, then it isn't an issue, just
disable all Mobius VST MIDI devices.  If you do want sync,
then the potential problem is that the host doesn't give you
control over which devices are opened, it just opens all of them.
I'd be surprised if Max did this, but I haven't looked at it
in awhile.

For normal MIDI control you don't open any devices, Mobius just
gets MIDI events from the host.

I've heard the main limitation from a typical Max user's perspective
is that Mobius doesn't provide many "automatable parameters".  There
is the potential for a lot of creative weirdness using Max algorithms
to control things like the level, speed, and pitch of each track.
Currently you can only control the level, feedback, and pan of the
active track.  Everything else has to be done inside Mobius with
scripts or MIDI commands.

Jeff