Playbeat 3 Midi device output functionality is...odd

I am running the latest version of Playbeat 3 VST3 in FL Studio 20.8.4. I want to use the Midi Device output functionality to send the individual tracks to 8 midi channels on the Elektron Digitakt through USB.

However, Playbeat seems to buffer MIDI output for an absurdly long time for some reason. I’m not kidding when I say that it takes nearly 20 seconds from pressing play to when MIDI starts arriving to my Digitakt.

Thankfully I was able to find a workaround to my issue by manually setting the midi out port of the plugin to match a midi in port of the Digitakt Overbridge plugin, which maintained the all midi data on their separate channels and corrently routed them to the separate channels of the Digitakt.

But yeah, you may want to look into this feature a little extra. It seems like it needs to cook for a while longer. :smiley:

Also, it’s a bit underdocumented. It was stupid obvious when I realized it, but I had issues getting it to activate the MIDI Device at all for the longest time, until I realized that it obviously requires the device to not already be occupied. Might be a good idea to include some error messages.

Hello and thanks for reaching out to us.

Sorry to hear that, this shouldn’t happen. So you achieved the same routing to your hardware module but routing it through your DAW output(s) rather than straight from the Plugin’s MIDI outputs, is that correct?

Ideally there should be no delay since Playbeat uses the same MIDI outputs ports in both cases, so this heavily depends on your MIDI interface and/or driver settings. Can you make sure you have the same settings/MIDI interface for both DAW output and Plugin output?

Elektrons stuff is a bit different. Overbridge is a VST plugin that acts as a self-contained audio/midi interface in a VST that connects via USB to the hardware. It’s basically a way to have an additional audio interface active in addition to the DAW host. So set it to take in midi from a random port, and set Playbeat to also send midi to the same port. Playbeat then correctly sends it’s 8 channels to the overbridge plugin, which correctly transfers the midi to the Digitakt via USB.

However, you can ALSO use the Digitakt as a normal USB midi interface, which is how I’ve been communicating with it thus far. Activating the Digitakt Midi interface in my DAW and sending midi out to the port assigned to that interface works fine. However, when I deactivate it in my DAW and activate it in Playbeat, I get a 20+ second midi delay. It actually keeps going for 20 second after I hit stop in FL Studio, so there’s clearly some strange buffering going on.

That said: superb plugin. Does exactly what I needed it to do, and it’s so fast and easy to work with. Great job! :+1:

Thank you for the additional information.

As we prepare for our upcoming 3.1 update in which we will also introduce a totally new algorithm for randomization, we will do our best to find what might be causing this problem and correct it.

Thank you for your patience!
Max