Some suggestions!

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Anonymous user
Some suggestions!

A product truly worth of a couple of $ donation!  Thanks!  Anyhoo, some suggestions:

1) Midi Mixer:  STOP DISAPPEARING!!!   Whenever my midi player stops playing (WMP and winamp, for example),  the darn mixer disappears (closes).  Please have it stay put!   If I want it to close, I can click the little "X" in the top right you've already helpfully provided.  This alone is enough to stop using this software (it is very annoying to fumble with the mouse when you've got a guitar in one hand and a piano in the other.  Yes, I know about the Ctrl-Alt-M hotkey - but this is a two-handed keypress, and my hands are already full as mentioned)

2) Midi Mixer:  Add a "Solo" button to each channel in the mixer.  You have a "Mute" button, but need a "Solo" button.  This is helpful when you are trying to find the ear-offending instrument.  (and just use the word "Solo" as your button - if you create a little solo *icon*, nobody will know what the poop it is.  Similarly, if I wrote this software, I'd replace the ugly little mute icon with the word "Mute").

Anonymous user
Midi Mixer

Upon further reading.... I see your DLL is at the mercy of the midi app... which throws a monkey wrench into my rant/suggestion "Midi Mixer: STOP DISAPPEARING!!!" above.  A possible workaround: have an exe which is always-resident in the notification area, and is the displayer of the gui:  when the user twiddles the mixing levels, the levels get passed to the DLL in almost-real-time.  Similarly, the DLL will pass the instrument names and whatnot to the exe.   The DLL is still the sole keeper of the actual midi stream - the midi stream never gets passed back and forth between the dll and the exe.   Hope this makes sense...

Posts: 1972
Joined: March 25, 2012 - 01:19
As you already said, VMS is a

As you already said, VMS is a DLL so its lifetime is strictly related on the application using it (MIDI software).

The bad behaviour you're experiencing is due to a too-conservative software that closes (and unload) its output MIDI devices when they're not needed anymore: this is usually sign of good programming, but here is the main cause of this "malfunction". Maybe your MIDI application has an option to keep the MIDI out device open...?

Your suggestion of an additional exe is a good idea, and it's the way I'm following with next 2.x version of VMS.
It will try to solve much more issues, like the DLL versioning hell (think about a MIDI client using a different BASS.dll version as the one VMS needs) and soundfont preloading (actually it's done each time the virtul device is started). See the FAQ page for further details.

Sadly its release is a little delayed due to some bad real-life events (take a look at my blog and you'll see what I mean); anyway I'm still working on it and I hope to release an alpha version soon.

I've added the "solo" suggestion to my TODO list. Anyway I prefer the "icon" implementation to the "label" one (as you suggested): icons are smaller than labels and, also, they should not be translated... I hope I do not misunderstood your suggestion.