[MetalGod]

Hi all,

I have a bit of a problem. Let me give you the background. About 1 year ago I upgraded to a new DAW - Dell desktop and EMU 1616M + Cubase SE3 - which left my old DAW - AMD Athlon XP PC with Yamaha SW1000XG sound card - sitting in a corner collecting dust.

Now, for those of you who don't know the SW1000XG it's a great, although a bit dated, sound card with an amazing set of samples (some 1200 different voices + 46 drum kits!).
I always felt it was a bit of a shame not using it, so I thought I could use the old PC + SW1000XG as a sort of synth station. The plan was: use my new DAW for all audio work, send MIDI data from either my MIDI keyboard or MIDI files played back on the new DAW to the SW1000XG and record the audio output via the 1616M. Sounded fairly easy, but I've run into some problems I hope someone can help me with.

First I should point out that I'm by no means a MIDI expert, but I grasp the basics. So far the basic principle works. I can play my keyboard and record the output from the SW1000XG. I've been trying to play some MIDI files I downloaded, and here's where the problems start. In my new DAW I added a MIDI device in Cubase (SW1000XG comes as a preset in Cubase) and I was hoping that by selecting this as output for the MIDI tracks (the MIDI out from the 1616M is set as output for the device) it should, well just work. The problem I have at the moment is that when I setup a MIDI project in Cubase on the SW1000XG machine (see 2nd problem below) all the MIDI notes seem to be sent to all channels, even though I explicitly specify on my main DAW which channel should be used for which track. The result is that all tracks are being played with the same instrument, which is not quite what I expected. I've tried everything I could think of, like setting the channel for the "receiving" tracks on the SW1000XG machine to the same ones as on the 1616M machine (i.e. channel 10 for drums, channel x for piano, channel y for bass etc). I'm probably making some simple mistake but I don't know what it is.

Second problem. As mentioned above I now have to start Cubase on the SW1000XG machine to get the MIDI signals mapped and the ASIO driver loaded to produce the sounds. While this does work it means having to log in, start up Cubase, set up a project etc when I want to do MIDI stuff. It would be very nice to just have some software running in the background which does something similar automatically, ie sets up MIDI mapping and ASIO driver and then just receive notes, PCs, CCs etc from my main DAW. That way I could have it sitting there without a screen, boot it up when I want to use it and just play. I'm not sure if there is any such software though. I'm also an experienced programmer so I've played with the idea of writing something like that myself, but I have no idea how feasible this is.

Anyway, that's the long and short of it. I hope I made some sense, but if not don't hesitate to point it out or tell me if you need more info etc. Any help/suggestions would be very welcome.

Cheers,
MetalGod