no midi plug-in routing in protools 9

[wertt]

so...i have sort of a strange bug.

i reopened a protools session this morning with a couple of instrument plugins (one instance of battery and one of kontakt) and the midi routing was no longer active. i've had protools do weird routing stuff to my midi before so i wasn't terribly surprised, but, when i went to reassign the outputs of my midi channels the plugins no longer show up as an option. i tried all of the easy fixes (restarted protools, the machine, trashed preferences, etc) to no avail. i updated to 9.06 a few days ago and i'm not sure i've opened any sessions with instruments since then, so i uninstalled protools and reinstalled 9.00, but my plugins still don't show up in the routing menu. all of the hardware ins/outs appear to be working correctly and i can trigger sounds in the instruments by clicking on them...they're just not telling protools that they should have midi channels available.

the problem seems to affect all midi routing, not just native instruments stuff and is true of both instrument and midi channels. has anybody ever had this happen? i'm sort of out of troubleshooting options.

[wertt]

i'm now pretty convinced that this is somehow related to mmerefresh, which is no longer running on my system. the program is present, but running it doesn't seem to do anything and it doesn't show up in the services list. i just uninstalled absolutely everything avid/digidesign related and am doing a fresh install of protools (for the third time). is there some way to manually add this service to the registry?

[JMS40]

MMErefresh should be left running at all times. It's directly related to allocating midi ports. By default, it's installed to run on boot up. Check your startup items in msconfig and make sure it's set.

[wertt]

yeah, i was wrong about that one....it shows up as digirefresh now, not mmerefresh. both msconfig and the task manager show it as running.

i have been beating my head against the wall on this one for the last 4 hours. i have completely uninstalled protools 3 times, tried running both 9.0 and 9.06 without any results.

then, as i was typing this, i pulled all of the plugins except xpand out of the plugins folder and, like magic, it's behaving normally again. i'm going to start adding plugins back in and we'll find out who the culprit is.

[wertt]

so...after adding everything back in, everything is still working.

apparently starting protools with no plugins present fixed the problem. i guess. it feels a little bit like magic, but it took me most of the day to get to this point so i'm just going to roll with it.

[albee1952]

Glad you got it going. Something to remember, any time you perform an update or trash prefs and database files, your midi studio setup can or will disappear(which could render instrument tracks and midi non-functional). I recommend always having a backup plan before any update(drive imaging is king) and you can export your midi studio(and IO settings) so you can import at a later date, in case something causes them to go away or get messed up.

[wertt]

i was hoping that trashing them all would reset things back to default and get it working, but no such luck. oddly, i never had any trouble with hardware inputs and outputs showing up after any of last night's reinstalls or updates...it was strictly the software routing within protools that was giving me trouble.