What about different keyboard ranges from different DAWs

Hello community,

I’ve not found something to this topic but maybe I failed to find the right words I noticed, different DAWs use different ranges for the MIDI mapping. For example Bitwig ranges from C-2 to G8 while e.g. Mixcraft and Reaper ranges from C-1 to G9.

So it’s a different mapping, just a different definition basically. But when you write a manual or tooltip for your virtual instrument, this can become a bit tricky, because MIDI note 40 will be named E1 in one DAW and in the other DAW it’s E2.

Or is this actually a confusion between English and German note names like you can read it here in this table? MIDI note numbers and center frequencies | Inspired Acoustics

How do you handle this situation?

Is there a way to detect it by code?

Have a nice day,
Schnabel

We just note in our docs that we define the A below C3 as 440Hz (not counting any Detune applied). If our C3 does not line up with a DAW’s notion of C3, then it just doesn’t. :man_shrugging:

Ok, I do it a bit like that. But I also want to display the notes (for key switches etc.) in the software, and it would be great to find a way how to detect the range so it always displays the correct not for the DAW. Probably not possible, but I had some hopes.

What we could do is get the DAW name (Juce offers a function for that - returns “Unknown” in some DAWs but the major DAWs should work) and we could use this information if we know what range each DAW uses, so it’s correct “most of the time” :thinking:

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