HI everyone,
I can’t believe I haven’t found anything about this (maybe I was googling the wrong stuff). Is there some sort of communication (even only in AU / VST etc.) that communicates the master tuning configured in the host application in what ever way the host supports (e.g. either as a preference or per project basis)?
And how is that not discussed more? Is it that uncommon to change the middle A to 441Hz or 442Hz?
Any advise would be greatly appreciated!
Support for even this simplest retuning scenario has been notoriously lacking in hosts and plugins, to speak nothing of retuning/remapping individual notes.
A modern solution that has been come up with is the MTS-ESP system :
https://oddsound.com/usingmtsesp.php
This of course requires a plugin that acts as the tuning master/source to be loaded in the host and instrument plugins that can receive and use that tuning data from it. Oddsound has the free MTS-ESP Mini plugin that is suitable for simple tests of the system and the much more complicated payware Suite.
The free and open source Surge synthesiser plugin can also act as a MTS-ESP tuning source too. These issues have been talked about and developed at length by the Surge Synth Team. If you are interested to talk about it more, you can join their Discord server, there is a dedicated channel for discussing tuning related topics :
Thank you very much for the quick reply! I don’t think I would have found that any time soon. It’s a pity that at least Logic/Apple doesn’t support that in AudioUnits. They obviously support it for their in house plugins like the EXS Sampler or the Tuning meter so there has to be some API in place, that they were just too lazy to think all the way though for the SDKs…
i think DAWs and plugin formats refuse to have the concept of a global tune parameter on purpose, because it forces all of the plugins to interpret midi notes in the same way. usually that’s exactly what everyone wants but maybe some super experimental composer wants to combine 420hz 12edo with a base pitch at 69 with 666hz 3edo with a base pitch at 42 in the same session for some reason and suddenly it makes sense to not have a global master tune. but now it suddenly makes no sense anymore that MIDI2 is not supported yet to allow for such crazy scales to be introduced by a piano roll directly. so all in all: the current solution embraces none of these possible extremes in none of the DAWs yet and i’d be a fan of the latter
