Connecting Notation Programs to Max/MSP

I like to compose music for a combination of acoustic instruments and a pianist playing a MIDI keyboard that's connected to Max/MSP. I'm not much of a pianist myself, plus it's nice to just watch and listen to MIDI playback when I'm composing, so earlier this year I thought to have my notation program send MIDI to Max just as the keyboardist would. I originally figured this out in Finale, but with the recent sunsetting of Finale, I've switched to Dorico for notation, and there have been both some benefits and challenges in connecting Dorico to Max.

Virtual MIDI Cables

On macOS, you can use the IAC Driver to set up virtual MIDI buses between various devices. ^[1]

In Finale, I had the option to use either MIDI or Audio Units for sound, but not both. My temporary solution was to set IAC as the MIDI device and make a Max patch to run the virtual instruments I needed. Not very convenient!

With Dorico, on the other hand, you can go to the Play view > VST and MIDI, and choose any number of both VST/AU and MIDI instruments. One issue that I (and it seems other people) had was that Dorico defaults to enabling the IAC device as a MIDI input, so the MIDI signals feed back and/or end up playing other VST instruments. It took me a bit to figure out, but if you go to Preferences > Play > MIDI Input Devices, and uncheck IAC Driver Bus 1, that fixes the issue. A pretty simple setting, but since I only recently switched to Dorico, it was quite vexing for a while.

Composing in Max

Until earlier this year, when I had music that uses a MIDI controller with Max I composed by playing the part myself while Finale played back the other instruments. It's a pain keeping in sync and starting at the same time (there's usually a slight delay between pressing play and Finale starting, for example).

Even with the IAC bus and Finale, the extra steps of opening the Max patch with the rest of the instruments was annoying when I had a quick idea to jot down. While I could temporarily switch back to using VST/AU instruments in Finale, doing so usually messed up the MIDI channel assignments, and made my Max VST/AU host patch stop working.

In Dorico, not only can I mix MIDI and VST/AU instruments, I can easily switch back and forth which one a given track uses with no issue. With the feedback issue sorted, it makes writing a lot nicer.

Finally, I notice more things about what I've written when I only listen, rather than having to play. As much as I miss some things about Finale, this setup is a big relief to have.

Here's a demo of all this in action:

One More Thing

I figured out how to easily include footnotes when writing blog posts in Markdown! ^[2] A number of writers I like including Molly White and Cory Dransfeldt have them in their blogs, and I've wanted to try them for a while. I could just write them by hand using HTML, but as I mentioned the other day, any extra work in putting a post online dramatically slows down my use of this blog, so it's nice to avoid that.