Pedal board sending aftertouch events instead of note events

[ekortright]

I put together a console with components purchased from the Classic Midiworks site. One component was a MIDI pedal board that could be augmented with a few foot pistons.

Originally, I was using the GrandOrgue Windows version, but there were a couple of bugs in GO, and Windows seemed to get slower and slower over time, so I decided to switch the OS to Rocky Linux.

Everything worked quite well. The exception was that, although I had mapped the foot pistons to general and divisional presets in Windows GO, the foot pistons stopped working under Linux.

There were absolutely no changes in the hardware; the only thing that changed was the operating system and, of course, the latest GO version at that time for Linux (GrandOrgue v3.12.3-1). So although I never checked this, I am pretty sure that the pedal board was sending exactly the same events to GO under Windows as it now sends to GO under Linux. The pedal board and manuals are daisy-chained and connected to the MIDI-in port of a Behringer audio interface that sends all events to the computer via USB.

One important thing to note is that the foot pistons, unlike the thumb pistons attached to the manuals, actually send the same type of event as the pedal keys. It seems that the pedal board controller just sends one kind of event for anything connected to it.

It turns out that the pedal board has three options for what events to transmit when pressing the keys: (1) aftertouch, (2) program change, and (3) control change. Those event names are what GO reports in the "Log MIDI Events" panel; the pedal board manual actually calls these three options (1) "MIDI Note On/Off", (2) "MIDI Program Change", and (3) "Ahlborn Stops Control".

Fortunately, GO recognizes the aftertouch events when connecting the pedals division to the hardware, so that the pedals division plays as expected when the pedals are pressed. But the built-in general/divisional buttons do not recognize the aftertouch events being sent by the foot pistons. They do recognize regular note events, however, as I can map any manual key to them with no problem; they are just not expecting the aftertouch events coming from the pedal board.

I have tried to contact the company that sold me the pedal board, but they do not respond to my emails. I suspect that there is no way to change the pedal board behavior.

Also, although it's not the end of the world not to be able to use the foot pistons, I am intrigued by the fact that the Windows version of GO was able to connect the generals/divisionals to the foot pistons using the events sent by the pedal board. I wonder if this is something that changed in GO or perhaps Windows somehow intercepted the USB events from the sound interface and converted the aftertouch events to note on/off events?

Any ideas as to what I could try would be appreciated. If I can provide more information, please let me know. Thanks for your attention in any case.