no midi if wmpk window looses focus
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#62 no midi if wmpk window looses focus
VMPK does does not receive keystrokes (and thus do not transmit/send MIDI) ** if the window is not active.** I am on Windows 10 and my usecase-is to control VSTs in my DAW. I have connected USB footswitch (acts like regular keyboard- generates key strokes) and registered in "Extra Controls" sections of VMPK. This works well and VSTs receiving commands if I click to VMPK windows first. But whenever it looses focus it stops to work, kindy defying the purpose of my whole setup (I need to control things via foot all the time).
Haven't find a setting to enable recevign keystrokes when windows not active (is it limitation of windwows system?). Is this only my problem, cause I can't imagine to use this program in other use-cases, like playing the piano and controling parameters elsewhere than this window.
Thank you.
(sorry I would rather post this to help discussion, but I don't have rights here for some reason)
Of course, keyboard input is only received by the window that has focus. This is the normal way GUI programs work, not only in Windows, but also in macOS and Linux.
For instance, suppose two instances of notepad.exe running at the same time. Only the focused notepad window receives keystrokes at a time. It is not possible to make both windows to receive keyboard input at once. To put it in another perspective: if it were possible, how do you tell Windows to send the keystrokes to some window and not to the others?
Windows 10, like other operating systems, has a feature called 'global hotkeys', that allows a program to register some key combinations to be received by that program even when it doesn't has the focus. In the past this was implemented in VMPK for Linux X11, but some changes in Qt5 invalidated this feature, and anyway it wasn't implemented for other operating systems.
I suggest you to find another program that offers this feature, like for instance https://www.bome.com/products/miditranslator
Ticket moved from /p/vmpk/bugs/61/
Moving this ticket to feature requests, where it is more appropriate. I think that there is already another ticket discussing this same thing, but I couldn't find it.
Pedro, thanks for quick response! Understand the challenge. Maybe a system service would work on a background, but that's platform specific. Thanks for the hint with miditranslator, it may be a bit overkill for my needs, but let me try.
There is no need of a service, it has been implemented already by a number of people ( for instance: https://bitbucket.org/libqxt/libqxt/wiki/Home has a class QxtGlobalShortcut ) but the problem with Qxt is that is unmaintained, and there is not an official Qt5 alternative, so I'm not inclined to add this feature to VMPK for now.