Native Instruments’ free VST synth platform Kore is a nice tool. It comes with many great patches, and works well on PC, but the Mac version appeared to have lots of trouble recognizing a MIDI input from a Triton… or so I thought. Read about my wild goose chase…
This story has a happy ending, but only after hours of troubleshooting. I actually feel rather embarrassed, but in the spirit of this experiment, I must note it here.
Here’s the type of oversimplified “No, you just can’t do it – it will not work” type of screen you get sometimes…
First, just note that the Triton is recognized in other apps, including the VST plugin version of Kore. So the MIDI input problem here was just in the stand alone Kore Player.
As it turns out, the “Status” column is clickable. As simple as that sounds, this was not immediately apparent. There’s no button-like quality to it. I tried to “open” the device name – by clicking on it – thinking there would be another page, but there wasn’t. So I just dismissed this as the end of the line.
What followed was a wild goose chase of several hours, involving multiple versions of the Kore Player: v 2.10.09, then v 2.0.4.003, then Kore 2, the latter of which was just a demo and really caused me trouble.
Hours later, after examining the PC version – which has a more button-like option for Status – I discovered that this setting is user-controlled. Just click, and it works.
To be fair, this is a Kore issue, not necessarily Mac. The Triton worked fine as a controller with both Reason and Garageband, and with Kore VST inside of Cubase LE4. This rather simple design flaw on Kore’s part could waste a lot of people’s time. Reading some of the forums on this, it appears Kore has a history of issues with Mac over the years. Apparently I got off lucky because I can actually use the app now.
This issue brought me to fact that there is no (obvious) control panel that shows me where the Triton is plugged. This is where Apple could do better. There’s an extra “Audio/MIDI Setup” in utilities that gives audio users many more options. I realize that the average user will not likely need this, but it would have been nice to have a link to this page from the oversimplified Sound system preference page.
I thought this was a perfect example of a case where the myth of “music is easier on a Mac” doesn’t hold up. For last night anyway, I was just as frustrated as any PC user would be.
Page two of the hidden options is shown below… now I have an alias for this, but I could have used this a week ago:
In the end, these settings didn’t matter in THIS case. I’m sure there will be other times when they will be needed, so I am glad I found them.
It wasn’t all bad though, I had a lot of fun with Garageband.
…
