Loading General MIDI Files - And Playing Correct Instruments?

[Chris2048]

I’m a newbie to Mixcraft and am finding it very good.

However one thing I had planned to do was to load ‘general midi’ files and play them as backing tracks while practicing, easily soloing the drums and bass for example or tweaking levels of other instruments/tracks to suit what I am practicing. With Mixcraft I can also display the staves if I want to see musical notation of a track

My problem is that although I can load the GM midi files they will not play the correct instrument and all tracks except drums default to the piano 01.

I open MID files by selecting File > New Project and browsing to the file location. The file will load, showing the seperate tracks and the midi data, but apart from drums on ch.10, the instruments changes don’t seem to register and all tracks play the piano.

I can of course go into each track and edit, but I was hoping it would just work and I can concentrate on my practice.

I know my GM midi files are good and they play correctly in an old version of Cubase SE via Halion SE, and even play in Windows Media Player (of course they sound particularly rubbish this way but the instruments and tune are correct).

Within Preferences > Plug-Ins, I have selected the Default General MIDI VST Instrument to be VSTSynthFont64 (a GM MIDI instrument which I have also used successfully with GM MIDI files in Cubase), and I have also tried Acoustica Instruments.

Is there something I am missing?

Thanks for any advise or help

[comedians]

This often works for me.

With Mixcraft closed select the midi file and open, or double click on it.
Mixcraft will open with the correct instruments loaded.

[Chris2048]

Thanks for the tip but in my case it didn't make any difference and each track still defaults to piano.

However it suggests there should be a solution and that I am missing a step

[cactus-head]

Hello,

Do you have an example midi file you can post that shows this behavior in Mixcraft that you are sure has different instruments assigned to different channels or tracks?

Off of the top of my head, I think mixcraft will default to GM 1 (piano) unless the prgram change is at the beginning of the track/channel. If your MIDI file programs changes come later (assigned after the first beat etc.) the default load will be piano 1.