Giga96: Ran out of channels - what are my options?

[MDesigner]

I\'ve occupied every single channel on ports 1 and 2. That\'s it, I\'m out of room now. Is there some way I can load instruments in Giga and then have Sonar tell Giga to do a program change to temporarily map an instrument to a certain port/channel, and then change it later to something else? How would I do that?

Thanks in advance.

[Luigi]

You can upgrade to GigaStudio 160, which has 4 Midi Ports.

[Bill]

Of course you can use program change.

GSt responds just the way any other MIDI device would.

You may want to first edit all your instruments to give them unique Bank/Patch numbers. If you allow Giga to do the numbering, they will be different, depending on the order you load them in.

[MDesigner]

Got it.. thanks!

[Louis Athenstean]

Hi Sam,
haven\'t done it myself, but should be pretty easy. Open the GSEdit, put all your instruments you need for the song into ONE new gig file (should be possible with instrument-copy and paste) and given them program numbers you feel convenient (should be straight forward as long as the original instruments only use one program number). Then instead of loading your original instrument gigs, just load the combined one...
I had some old tracks I did when I was still using SoundFonts and I wanted to try them with Gigastudio. It was quite simple because I just had to convert my original sf2-bank and that was it. The programm changes I had in the cubase file which usually triggered the sf2-bank now did the same with my converted sf2-bank in gig-format...
Only modifications you need in the song itself would be program change messages to switch which instrument is on which midi-channel at which time...
Of course this only helps if you don\'t need more instruments at THE SAME TIME than you have channels in gigastudio. It\'s more like using one channel for say a sax at one time in the song and for a bassoon later...
Hope that helps...

Louis
(P.S.: You can see the program changes in your gigastudio under \"loaded instruments\" if I remember correctly)

[Markus S]

Hello Louis!
Just by couriosity: How did you convert the sfs to gig?

Markus.