I have a large live keyboard rig with  7 keyboards (including a wireless MIDI keytar), several pedalboards with MIDI,  as well as an Eigenharp and various other control surfaces. I also have several synth modules in a rack that also contains two MOTU 8-port MIDI interfaces and a MOTU 828mkIII/8Pre combo that is fed by an SSL X-Patch so that I have complete control over how audio is routed from place to place.

Historically I have used Apple MainStage to control my rig but even though I considered it to be brilliant in conception, it was never (and sadly still is not) 100% reliable. I have never gotten through a single rehearsal (never mind performance) without several glitches such as plugins randomly stopping as well as occasional stuck notes. Although I stopped using audio plugins and added a Muse Research Receptor to handle such things, even MIDI routing fails to work reliably. The Receptor was also surprisingly flakey as well, and subject to many reboots as well as occasional failure to respond to MIDI.

After considering the available alternatives, including switching to a Windows box as there are a couple of interesting alternatives there, last weekend I decided instead to bite the bullet and just develop my own MIDI routing environment. The main criteria was that it had to implement the MainStage indirection mechanism where you can define devices (keyboards, knobs, pedals and so forth) which respond to incoming MIDI but which can then control  other devices that want different MIDI values without having to be focused on knowing the actual MIDI data all the time (a key highlight differentiator that separated MainStage from other systems with similar functionality) and it had to be very easy to add new "patches" representing new songs.

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