Out of MIDI tracks. May we have some more please?

[Michael Carnes]

Now that I don't make plugins any longer, I have some more time to go back to my first love of composing. I don't have the same focus as composers writing for film or TV, but I've learned a lot about efficient workflow from them. And one of those things is have a good template. Why build up a project from scratch when you can just load a template and use the parts you need?

I purchased a new Mac Pro 7,1 back at the end of 2019. I stuffed it with memory and fast PCI storage for VIs. So it's easily capable of doing what would have taken multiple machines before. But I've bumped into the 1024 MIDI track limitation and it won't take much longer to max out on the 512 instrument tracks as well. So even though my machine can handle it, I can't make the template I need. I'll still have to deal with a lot of track presets, loading only what I need, so that I can stay under the limit.

Seems like those track counts might simply be compile-time constants in PT code. But I've been programming long enough not to make such assumptions. I am curious if this limitation has begun effecting those of you doing music for picture. If it's not hitting you now, can you see it as a future issue?