Problems with latest Mainstage

Using SL inside Apple's MainStage

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Steve-Bingham
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 04, 2017 9:16 am

Problems with latest Mainstage

Post by Steve-Bingham »

Hi Jesse and fellow loopers!

I am getting some unexpected / annoying issues with the update to Mainstage 3.3 :-(
Any help would be much appreciated as I have live gigs coming up - including one this Saturday morning - and currently the system is (for the first time since I started using SL within Mainstage from version 3) not reliable!

So the setup:
SL - I've been using 1.7.1 for several years without problems.
Mainstage - 3.2 was working fine and problems happened on update to 3.3.

I have SL as the input on a separate channel which is then side chained to a bus. This has worked reliably for years, allowing me to put my electric violin input and and my bass pedal midi input through to SL and also send midi control signals via my Gordius LG through Mainstage controls and direct to SL.

This has worked for Mainstage versions since the first v3 update up to and including v.3.2. However when I updated to 3.3 suddenly the side-chaining stopped working! No input signal going through to SL! Tried putting SL directly into an FX slot in an output channel and got a signal, but had lost all my midi control, and I'm loath to set it all up again if there's a way to get the side chaining to work again.

Since I had gigs coming up I went back to Mainstage 3.1.1, and suddenly everything was working again..........but then, without any change I could see, or any warning, SL is failing to load within MS 3.1.1 ??!! I'm sure it's not a SL problem, but I'm now unable to reliably load my looping setup. At a gig a couple of days ago I managed to get it all to load with about 5 minutes to spare before the performance: Not good for the stress levels :-)

I'm going to try working with the latest SL update, but in the meantime any suggestions for getting back to a reliable setup would be hugely valuable, and save my little remaining hair from being pulled out!!

Best wishes to all fellow loopers!

Steve
Steve-Bingham
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 04, 2017 9:16 am

Re: Problems with latest Mainstage

Post by Steve-Bingham »

UPDATE:

So I managed to get SL 1.7.3 working with Mainstage 3.3 after a clean install of both :-)

My bad for not immediately upgrading from 1.7.1 to 1.7.3, but 1.7.1 has been stable for several years for me!

So conclusions (maybe!):

1.7.3 works side-chained in MS 3.3
1.7.1 seems to have some issues with side-chaining in MS 3.3
neither 1.7.1 nor 1.7.3 seemed to like a downgrade to MS 3.1.1 !

All this on a 2015 MacBook Pro running OSX 10.12.4

I hope it's of use to anyone out there who also uses SL within MS.

And thanks as always to Jesse!
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