Hi MIDI guys, i use to be a hevy user of midi and appreciate its usefullness, but looking at your conversations from the sideline am having a bit of a gigle as i use to do things the hard way as well and have reduced my setup to a very simple ipad and ST3 with very minimal external equipment, reason beeing i am a musician performer first, a tinkerrer last, the reason we have ST3 is to run things simply having midi capability on ST3 ithought was to do very basic things like control lighting if you have the time to setup your own lighting, and simple program changes to change guitar effects and perhaps patch changes of keyboards, if you are running midi as your main sound sorce for backing and you need an external drum machine to play sounds for you then you obviously just need ST3 as a lyrics display only, this seems such a waste of Peters time that could be used to improve more important things in ST3 that really will make ST3 much better, i think perhaps transfer all your midi file backups to a sound format and use ST3 the way it was intended to be used, it will simplify your life a lot so you can concentrate on the MUSIC itself.
I ve been in your shoes years ago, dont waste your time with innoficient operations.
If looping was available on ST3 you would have a very nice drum machine in st3 itself as well as so many other great features your complicated midi struggles would be a total thing of the past.
Simple message step back and think of a faster, simpler more efficient way midi has a very small place on ST3 thats why we are using it we are departing from midi.
You have great tempo change capability, pitch change great mixing etc etc use ST3 to achieve your goals and keep it simple.