Is there any hack-a-billy way to make a control surface plug listen and talk to more than one midi port?

I have a plug under development and have the desire to listen to usb midi coming in on different usb midi ports. I would also like to send data out to the various devices on those differing ports.

I can cascade devices using midi thru and achieve the desired results, but would like to also do it by plugging the various devices into exclusive ports.

Thanks.

:Ron

Have never tried this, but if I needed to do something like this, considering that port assignments are done in the host software (i.e., Sonar), I might try using two instances of the interface, perhaps with slightly different names, then assign them to different MIDI ports.  You might have to have a scheme for coding I/O messages so they didn't get crossed between the two instances, or at least make sure the logical routing within the interface was such that they didn't...

Thanks.

I used to have a different plug for each surface, each coded for different midi interfaces but having to maintain all of them in parallel got to be a bit much. So I have consolidated it all into one plug.

Again, cascading units via midi gets it done but limits the user to doing just that. And not having the "luxury" of separate usb-midi connections for example.

I have toyed with the idea of a "shim" surface plugin that would just forward incoming and outgoing midi from the real surface plugin. That would be as messy or worse than having to load a plug-per-surface as I did before and be likely an uncharted can of worms to open, not knowing if Sonar would permit such monkey business.

You could also use Windows Multimedia functions to route the messages by port, I think.  Not sure this would work in a CS plugin, but it might be worth a try.

I'll look into that.

Thanks.

:Ron