Audio to midi

[arman]

"1/ When using Rakarack this way, I'm not able to make the midi signals release, they get stuck. This means I cannot use long lasting synths like a pad or something, as each tone will just be playing forever. It also means recording the midi gets really messy - every new note goes into a giant cluster."

I just had this problem today! I'm assuming you also wanted Rakarrack to both control your synth's note via audio->midi and process its audio with effects. The audio from your synth is being converted to midi in rakarrack and feeding back into itself, hence the note seems to never end. Solution would be to have TWO Rakarrack instances open. Feed the audio from your synth program into the second one instead of the first in Jack and voila.

So your connections in Jack would be like..
midi:
rakarrack -> synth program

audio:
audio source (For me just "system") -> rakarrack
synth program -> rakarrack-01 (This is where I will process fx)
rakarrack01->audio out ("system")

If you plan to use a midi controller to change presets (ex: footswitches), then you don't want both rakarrack instances changing.. to avoid this, have the first instance of rakarrack be open with a bank with only one preset.

[keinstein]

1/ When using Rakarack this way, I'm not able to make the midi signals release, they get stuck. This means I cannot use long lasting synths like a pad or something, as each tone will just be playing forever. It also means recording the midi gets really messy - every new note goes into a giant cluster.

The MIDI standard has a solution for that. It is called mono-mode. MIDI allows to configure synthesizers in different modes so that they respond either to one channel only, or to all channels, either polyphonically or monophonically. The mono-mode ensures that on each channel there can sound only one note at once. The subsequent note-on event will stop the previous note.