As the title implies, I've been wrestling with Reaper over getting MSGS to work, and while I've made progress there's still a few small things making everything mysterious and annoying, and most importantly, it's unable to be worked with.

I will say before people bring it up: I watched Defense Mechanism's video tutorial on doing MSGS in Reaper, and I will give credit to it in that it did provide me with a functioning template and it was useful in the sense of providing helpful guides for optimizing things when working with MSGS in Reaper.

Unfortunately, the video did not really cover in depth the two concepts I was most interested in:
1) How to take a new blank Reaper environment and get it to a state where the MSGS soundbank is hooked up to the midi tracks and can be composed in like one would with VSTs.
2) How to take a valid MSGS midi file someone else gives you and import the channels in properly so that you can both play and edit the imported midi and export it with your changes.

I'm most interested in the latter for the sake of being able to pass a basic midi back and forth with someone so that the difference in DAWs is negligible when collabing with someone. I will say that some facets of these were easier to figure out than I initially thought, and I'm at the point where I can play midi's with MSGS in the DAW, and edit, kinda, but not perfectly. I'll outline what I've done and where it's landed me.

First, I imported a midi file, expanding all the tracks, and made the tracks children of a parent track which routes all of the channels out to MSGS. This lets me hear all the instruments correctly on playback. I added to that by putting the ReaControlMIDI plugin on the tracks (mainly done for the sake of mimicking DefMech's template midi).

Where I am stuck now is being able to place notes in the right instrument. When I am in one track it plays a particular instrument, but when I switch to a new track's midi item to edit MIDI it'll keep using that old instrument regardless of what the current instrument on that track/MIDI item is. It is entirely unclear as to whether changing a Bank/Program Select event or a Control Change event or if it matters if GM.reabank is set in both the plugin and the track event somewhere, or ANY combination of those things, leads to me being able to draw notes with a new instruments.

I am aware that the way a MIDI file is encoded on the byte level precludes it to there being the ability to draw notes of any instrument kind on the same midi item (perhaps save for percussion). But it almost feels like I just have to juggle the controls and the play button a few times to get my selected instrument to maybe change, and then it's stuck on the next one. But for some reason, despite me doing everything I visibly can to replicate it's setup, DefMech's template MIDI seems to be configured such that the midi tracks behave like you'd expect, and every time you switch to a different track it changes what instrument you're drawing with.

On top of all of this, I have no idea how to access the percussion channel. I imported a percussion track. It plays percussion notes when I play the song. The track is mapped to track 10. Or the notes. Or both! But no matter what I do in the soundbank or channel settings, I can't get the letters on the piano roll to show up in percussion view, much less get myself to be able to draw percussion notes on the percussion channel. I can have the written and visible instrument/channel settings be completely unchanged and I select a percussion note to verify the sound and then draw my own right next to it, and I draw a guitar note on the track instead.

Now, I can at least copy and paste the percussion notes, drag and change their length/"pitch" to make percussion, but that is a grossly inefficient method to do anything, and it still doesn't solve the issue of barely being able to get onto the right instrument for adding to the other channels, or heaven forbid adding new channels with samples that haven't been added yet without 10 minutes of trial and error soundbank changing.

At this point I've expended nearly all of my mental resources trying to solve this black magic, and I can't be wasting too much time on it with how many songs I need to take time to actually make this month rather than losing a ton of time to bug-fixing things that other people have 0 issues with from what I can tell.

So yeah! That's the battle I've been facing for technically at least 3 years but haven't bothered facing head-on until now. Hopefully please someone here knows something about how to answer some of these prying questions of mine, at least about how to get to a state of "this track is this instrument".

(It'd also be nice if someone remembers where the setting to edit the max pitch bend limit is, I imported a MIDI with 12 pitch bend range on and now my playback is forcing it down to a 2-semitone bending max. I know how to fix that in C700 for SNES since it's a part of the plugin settings, but I have no idea where the setting would be for MSGS.)

Please someone liberate me from this purgatory of broken midis

for changing pitch bend range you would go to the midi editor of that specific channel and click the drop down at the bottom left corner so that you will see a list of midi cc's like velocity and program change and stuff. there are three midi cc's u will b figgling with... select cc #100 and set it's value to zero, select cc #101 and set it's value to zero (do this by clicking in a point on the cc lane at the bottom half of the midi editor so that you see a single point and a line). NOW the final midi cc: select #6 and set it's value to the semitone range you want (12, 24, etc.). if you'd like more info about the function of these midi cc's i'd look at the RPN/NRPN section in damifortune's snes guide.

if you found those 3 cc's to b set up already with #6 being set to twelve then the only thing that i can think of is... if the playback cursor doesn't catch those three midi cc points, you will be hearing the default bend range (2). like if i set my pitch bend settings down at the beginning of the song, and then later i play the song starting from the middle, my pitchbends will sound like it's on the default setting.

reaper rokcks!

for ur big big midi problem...maybe i can make a video on how i do it and then send it to you. it is the worst reaper workflow in the world but it work p good.

also please correct me if i am wrong in my explanation.

Interesting. CC #100 was set, but not #101 (listed as Reg Parm LSB and MSB). When I go to #6 though, that's just Data Entry, and it's already being taken up by a Control Change event set to 30, which I believe is setting the instrument to use? If I change it to be a "Pitch" type event it just sends the event over to the Pitch lane with a bottomed out value, which still results in -2 semitones, rather than doing anything to set the max pitch bend range.

Is there a specific type of Data Entry event in CC #6 that is used for things like pitch range limit? There's only a few options the first dropdown gives, and none of them quite match up.

EDIT: Nevermind, it seemed leaving it as Control Change did fix the pitch bend range, and I am dumb and thought Control Change only applied to instruments.

to address da big midi problem...

below i've got a link to how i set up imported midi. i have it in a way where there is one track that outputs through msgs and for every receive x i add it takes in notes from any midi channel and sends it to output track as channel x. this way, for example, for any note i click down at track 2, no matter it's channel, teh notes will playback through output track as channel 2.

because i don't record the whole song to the output track when i'm done, i iterate through each track such that for each track i select all notes and set their note channel to what i need it to be (i go to track 2, select all notes, then set their note channel to 2). if i don't do that and i export that midi it will have my new notes as channel 1 and it'll b all piano-y (or whatever instrument channel 1 is set to). i didn't do any of this in the video



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