Using Ableton drum racks with synfire?

Ok, the problem with ableton drum racks, like all ableton instruments, is they are not your normal vst or au pluggins. They therefore can not be hosted in a synfire drone.

Instead you have to add a drone to a track in ableton, then set it up in synfire, but make it a midi drone. In ableton you then need to route the midi from that drone to a track with the drum rack on it (by changing the midi from drop donw in the drum rack).

Back in synfire make sure the instrument you are using for drums is green in the arrangement by selecting the category as drums and giving it a name. 

Then you can add figures to the instrument, but you must use static as the interpretation. The playing range is observed so you might need to alter that in synfire or it will automatically transpose notes outside of the range.

There is a video in the user video section I created which shows how you can drive the native albeton instruments from synfire.

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Also check out the wiki as there are more examples of intergrating synfire and ableton. Also check 

(http://users.cognitone.com/wiki/cool-ableton-routing-tips)

Jbone suggested putting all the midi drones inside a instrument rake in ableton which keeps things really neat and tidy.

Sorry forgot to say, video is a bit old now so some of the options have been moved around and might take some hunting, but the idea is the same.

I'm also searching for a drum Vst to use in Synfire only. Tried Geist (FxPansion) but it is very difficult (if not impossible) to set up (even difficult in Ableton)

duderanch, really busy with a project that should have gone out the door last week and working 15-20 hour days at the moment, but if no one else can help you out in the meantime, as soon as I have the time I will try update the video with the latest version of synfire.

A couple of things though from memory (poor). You have to use a midi drone. Add the cognitone drone as normal to a midi track then change it to a midi drone in synfire. You now have to change the drone setup to midi in the device rack tab, not the instrument inspector on the right.

In ableton, on a different midi track add your ableton instrument or drum rack. Drop down the midi from box. Select the track with the drone. In the next dropdown below that one (might be channels) you should find the cognitone drone's output options, select the vst option (think thats the name), not the first two, there is a separator in the list, use the one below(at least that's how it was for me).

I'm not sure but think the issue is ableton decides the drone is an instrument vst when it is added to the track and so presents a sort of confused list of outputs rather than the 16 channels you would expect (I had something similar with a pluggin i was playing around with). If I'm right, I'd love Cognitone to develop a pure midi drone which would negate these issues.

Lastly in ableton, the second track wont react to midi from the first track (with the drone) unless it is either primed for recording or you change the monitoring to In rather than auto.

One other thing, in synfire, you have to make sure any instruments that use that drone have a category and name set (as shown in the video).

One other question for you, have you upgraded to live 10 or still on live 9? I havent had time to update yet.