Ableton “Capture MIDI”

The Lounge
1

Anyone use this feature? I’ve got a set where using this feature gives me some strange behavior. The set contains a dozen tracks that are input monitoring enabled, listening to midi output from a drum machine. Capture works as expected with these tracks. But the set also contains another track that is listening to a Push 2 controller. If I play the Push at the same time as the drum machine is playing, Capture only captures the midi from the drum machine, and any playing on the Push is ignored. If the drum machine isn’t playing, the midi from the Push track is captured just fine.

Wondering if anyone has some insight on this. It almost seems like Capture has a limit on how much midi it can recall, or like there is some kind of track priority structure that influences what’s captured and what’s ignored.

2

I use it all the time. Love it. I never hit the record button when I’m recording midi, I just jam and stop when I’ve found the melody I like and managed to play it alright.

Unfortunately I cannot help with your issue other than confirm that it does have a limit on how much midi it captures; it isn’t long as far as I’ve noticed, only a couple of bars, which is plenty for me… I imagine two midi devices sending data at the same time will cause issues as it is not “officially” recording? :man_shrugging:

3

Ya - maybe it focuses on the first port it receives midi from, and ignores any others?

4

Just checked the manual, but nothing specific about any limit. It just says all armed midi tracks with monitoring set to ‘in’ will be captured.
There certainly is a limit, though. Haven’t figured it out, yet…

5

I’m not worried about the limit as much as the port preference mystery

6

I don’t necessarily meant a note limit, but it appears to actually have a midi event limit.

How much MIDI data is captured in one go?

Whenever 16384 events are reached, the oldest 1024 events are discarded.

Link

Gotta run some tests, maybe tomorrow.

7

Good find. Yeah, I’m not anywhere close to that limit. ANY input from the drum machine (even just a 4x4 kick) makes it so the Push track doesn’t capture anything.

8

Is it possible that your drum machine is sending clock data and filling it up? Just guessing. It could be a bug if so.

9

Good guess, I considered that too. But the drum machine’s send clock is off, and the captured events simply mirror the output, nothing unusual looking.

10

What MIDI interface are you using to capture all of the MIDI data from the drum tracks?

Also, have you tried to limit the amount of drum track MIDI data you are Capturing to just one channel plus the Push?

The thinking is that simplifying and seeing if the problem persists might give you some clues.

I’ve honestly never tried to Capture from multiple sources on the same clip. It could potentially be an undocumented limitation of the Capture function.

Maybe whichever device sends data first or last becomes the Capture buffer?