“I must say that at present the performance of the soft midi thru function is not impressive. I'm not yet sure whether this is due to .NET, the .NET library I'm currently using, the marshalling between native Win32 API and the .Net framework or just because it's Window”

And the correct answer is: none of the above. Turns out that my Korg CX-3 has some problems when you send it note on/off messages for mutliple channels and starts lagging badly. Strange, how long can it take to ignore a note on/off message that's on a channel that you don't respond too? None of my other keyboards have this problem. Anyway, I think I know how to compensate for this in FXLC..

This is good news because it looks like the .Net library is plenty fast for real-time MIDI forwarding which allows things like transposing notes for external modules and so on.

I have added a filter that will remove all channel messages (note on/off etc) from the soft-midi-thru stream except if they are really intended for an external module. Seems to have solved the problem I was having with my Korg CX-3.

If you use a lot of Parts during the song, all those parts KBD switches must be enabled (all the time, for that song) and as a result the Fantom is sending out the notes that you play to all the corresponding MIDI channels, even if the internal Rx is switched off (thank goodness) and of course regardless of whether FXLC filters out note events for external parts that are currrently switched off.

The result is that from the MIDI output port point of view you may be playing many notes on many channels at the same time and this could still cause a slight latency which is for the most part simply due to the limited bandwidth of MIDI. It would be possible to greatly reduce the amount of external MIDI traffic by manipulating the Key range for a part as mentioned earlier so I think that at some point I will implement that, but not now. This would also allow having the FXLC be the last 'device' in your MIDI chain, in fact in principle you wouldn't even need to connect it to the Fantom MIDI OUT.

What I am working on is a new file format because while the .NET object streaming support is nice, it generates relatively large files and even worse, if you rename you internall classes or assemblies or sign them you're suddenly no longer able to read back older files so you'd loose all of your settings. So right now I'm implementing a simple binrary file format which will be much, much smaller and will always be backward compatible (ie newer version of FXLC will always be able to read back files created by a previous version).

When that is finished all that is left for the 0.5 release is the Setup. This will probably be an MSI (Microsoft Installer) package wrapped inside a single exe.

Fantom X Live Commander version 0.5 can now be downloaded from

http://www.livecommander.com

Have fun and let me know what you think. I have added copy&paste functions with full undo. You can also customize the keys or mouse buttons to use for advancing to the next or previous 'stage' (set of active sounds of the selected performance).

That's all I have time for now. Will be back later with more info.

Great, great job!

Thanks. RIght now I'm adding a transpose option for external parts and a send program change for each stage so that you can switch external modules during a song. I will probably also add a feature to change the keyboard range per stage.

I haven't checked the websites server logs but I wonder how many have downloaded and tried this. Let me know if you have and what you think of it so far.

I noticed the other day while installing this on my brand new Asus 1000H netbook that it won't install unless you have certain DLLs and the .NET 3.5 framework installed on your system. The DLL requirement is easily fixed but the .NET 3.5 requirement is a shame because that is only required by Windows Installer 3.1. The actual application only needs .NET 2.0 which is a much smaller download. On top of that, I could not find a truly self-contained .NET 3.5 installer, even the complete install still wanted to download several MB from the web.

I have just uploaded Fantom X Live Commander 0.7.0. Check out http://www.livecommander.com for a list of new features.

Enjoy and Merry Christmas!