Sorry in advance - it's a midi request

[Flagfoot]

I'm asking for midi ports to show up. Somewhere. Buried deep in a menu. Whatever. Heck, put them right there next to channel. Port 1, channel 1. Like that. And eventually, let the "fan out audio tracks" respond to the total number of ports x channels created by a midi bus.

I know midi is auxiliary to Mixbus' core competency. So ignore this if you're not a midi person.
Look, I don't like midi, I don't like vstis much, nothing but trouble. As much as possible I want an instrument, some form of audio in, and an audio track. I also don't like features over stability. So again, ignore this if it's not your thing. I see plenty of requests on here I think are stupid too. If adding this reduces stability, don't add it.

CONTEXT - WOULD HELP AN IDIOT WHILE COMPOSING
The reason I ask is I've been using Mixbus 32c for composing and arranging. Because I like it. And now there's a Vienna Ensemble Pro Server running. Which is nice for my purposes. It makes Mixbus way, way less stable, but I made my bed. It's on me for driving a humvee on the interstate. Now I'm seven states over and committed. I will not rent a minivan. I will not rent a minivan.

ENSEMBLE PRO SERVER VST2 = 1 PORT x 32 CHANNELS. WORKS FINE.
So Ensemble Server, sends and receives stuff from a bunch of tracks at once. I create a midi bus and drop the Ensemble Server VST in there. With their VST2 plugin, I get 1 port with 32 channels in and out of whatever I want. That's 16 stereo audio returns for me. Cool, 16 stereo instruments. No problem. at this point, inserting the VST2 plugin gives the ONE TIME ONLY dialog to fan out return tracks. Awesome feature. Works great. Kind of frustrating that it's one time only since if anything gets broken from user error at any point, recreating return tracks is near impossible. Whatever.

ENSEMBLE PRO SERVER VST3 = 8+ PORTS x 32 CHANNELS. DOESN'T WORK QUITE YET.
Vienna's VST3 is supposed to give access to ~8 ports with 32 channels each. Whatever that means. The point is I could connect more instruments, like a string section, more easily. But the VST3 version doesn't really talk to Mixbus V7 fluently about these ports. So it just spits out one stereo track return. No more fanning out tracks for each return. So I don't use the VST3 version of the plugin.There are workarounds but they make setting up project templates worse.

This is not a jab at VST3 compatibility. It's simply about allowing me to select midi port as well as midi channel.

[Ben@Harrison]

Regarding the "fan-out", you might still be able to right-click in the "Input" button of the mixer strip, and choose "Fan out". This works a little differently for AU's than for VST's:

AU's "can" have multiple outputs but you have to configure them. Mixbus prompts you to "fan out" an AU when you add the instrument to a track, otherwise it just gives you the stereo version. If you choose not to "fan out" but later change your mind, you can right-click on the "Input" button of the channelstrip and you should find the "Fan out to Buses"/"Fan out to Tracks" option there.... BUT in the case of AU's you must first open the "pin connections" dialog and add some number of output channels to the plugin & track, to tell Mixbus how many channels you want it to have.

VST and VST3 have fixed number of outputs, so if you have 16 outputs then we will prompt you to "fan out" the plugin. If you choose not to "fan out" but later change your mind, you can right-click on the "Input" button of the channelstrip and you should find the "Fan out to Buses"/"Fan out to Tracks" option there.

Regarding adding multiple MIDI input ports to a track, so you can feed them into a plugin with multiple MIDI ports: we currently don't have that ability and it is not on our roadmap. In some earlier versions of Mixbus we allowed multiple midi ports in a track, and it caused a lot of complexity (you'd need a "MIDI channel filter" for every port, for example, as well as some way to discriminate between the different "ports" represented in the editor canvas, if the instrument is on a Track not a Bus)

Fundamentally, the ability exists to have multiple midi ports in a channel so it "might" be possible with some kind of plugin or send/return or Lua script that could feed the information into your Ensemble Pro Server VST3. But there are very few plugins that provide that feature so we've avoided it for now.

Best,
-Ben

[Flagfoot]

Thank you. The fan-out info is really helpful to know and will save a lot of trouble.
That makes sense why distinguishing ports (if I understand the terms correctly) isn't on the roadmap.
You and your team have been really responsive to my emails and hopefully it's clear now that stability means exponentially more than features.

The workaround will continue to be to add additional midi buses, each with an instance of Ensemble Server VST, every time I need another 32 channels / 16 stereo instruments over on the server. Not the end of the world.