No.

It's a highly requested item. Yamaha has heard the request and even reference the request as an aside during a "behind the synth" podcast where the comment seems to indicate the cure would be worse than the problem.

Searching on ideascale will find several ideas you can vote up of add your comments.

can I not assign the MIDI receive channel per part ?

No, but there are ways to remap things externally. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Maybe there's another way to get the results you're after.

Dear Jason, I am really intrigued about this:

" Yamaha has heard the request and even reference the request as an aside during a "behind the synth" podcast where the comment seems to indicate the cure would be worse than the problem."

What kind of terrible disaster could happen allowing the customers to assign freely the MIDI input channel of each part?

It is an incredible argument.....or ridiculous....

I'm just a user like you - I don't know how to answer that. I'm not sure Yamaha was making an argument as much as they were waving a white flag due to the house of cards that was built around the control matrix that depends on inflexibility of the MIDI channels as a way to make everything work. And undoing this would gum up the works for the architecture more than anything.

Another user heard the same thing and took away something else.

Jason:

Catastrophes can be predicted, but the difference between magic and science is that the latter is based on logical and testable foundations.

Until today I have not heard or seen a single argument that the possibility of freely assigning the input MIDI channels could lead to a collapse of the Montage architecture.

Yes, I see an obsession in forcing users to adopt the MIDI Polyphonic Expression criteria and numerous provisions of the MIDI 2.0 standard, which in my opinion are unnecessary or useless.

Yamaha's refusal is basically a marketing problem that expresses in any case the fear that, given the freedom to choose, musicians will continue using the MIDI protocol as they have been doing for years.

The mistake consists in ignoring that the MIDI 1.0 protocol was the result of an intense and historical experience of investigation, trial and error on the part of professional musicians, which concluded that in 1983 all the pre-existing protocols would be unified in a single standard.

On the contrary, MIDI 2.0 is a laboratory technological development, created by ignoring the community of musicians and turning their backs on them and emphasizing the convenience of technology companies instead of respecting the opinion of artists.

The soundcloud interview I reference is in this message:

https://www.yamahasynth.com/ask-a-question/free-allocation-of-midi-channels#reply-103748

... backing up, the VL context is: https://www.yamahasynth.com/ask-a-question/free-allocation-of-midi-channels#reply-103748

From years of hardware and software design experience, I know there's a way to implement the system so that MIDI channels could be freely assigned not "mess up" the rest of the system. However, I also know that one could (through poor design - at least poor in the context of allowing for channel assignment) paint oneself in a corner depending on the fixed relationships and that straying from this would tumble the house of cards.

Nate publicly positions this primarily as a customer experience issue - but there's also other language in the quote that, to me, smells like an architecture issue. Not architecturally unsound for what the product does today - but for moving MIDI channels. And the mess on the hands to deal with this would be on a lot of patchwork routines to reconnect the superknob-to-common-assignable-to-part-assignable relationships if one moved the MIDI channels around (or assigned to the same channel). Yamaha's normal approach isn't to abstract the complexity - so I can see that the user may be left with a mess. On the other hand, if a few differences weren't made to the "bones" of the architecture - then this patchwork would need to go back and put humpty dumpty back together again after MIDI channel changes.

If you are I were to design this - it'd be clear that MIDI channels as signposts would not be used. And that those would be merely properties on top of a structure that could, internally, use fixed PARTs to link the matrix together and only use MIDI channel as a property on each Part. It doesn't seem like rocket science. But that's easy to arm-chair. The reality may be, and likely is, more complicated than we have visibility to.

Yamaha is well aware they'd make customers happy - they'd enable 3rd party software (like Karma) or hardware that relies on overlapping MIDI receive channels in order to work. It's been on their radar and Nate has gotten feedback, apparently, that Montage would "blow up". That's my read at least.

Then again, I could be wrong in reading the tea leaves - it's just my take.

I'm on your side. I have applications where assigning MIDI receive channels would benefit me. It's part of the puzzle that would cut down on the amount of duct tape I have to wrap around this instrument.

Jason:

I am grateful to Mr. Nate for the tender and maternal overprotection that he dedicates to us musicians, but we have spent many years since 1983 refining the skills of using the MIDI protocol in the most varied and complex situations.

Yamaha in the years of the beginning of MIDI had an invaluable and leading role in the dissemination and support to users in everything related to the MIDI protocol and FM synthesis, but in relation to MIDI today today is completely absent or at most is merely trivial.

It seems that Yamaha thinks that the young people of the current generation are a group of the mentally weak, incapable of striving and learning, just as we did at that time.

It is a treatment that degrades the man, the citizen, to a mere role of consumer of predigested knowledge without giving way to their own initiative and creativity, and above all to the possibility of shaping the instruments of creation according to the artist's own needs.

It seems that today it is proposed that artists have to make music and use instruments according to the needs of the companies that produce them and not the opposite as it has been historically.

I do not care if engineers find it easy or difficult to build instruments that meet the needs of artists, they chose that task and it is their responsibility to achieve it, especially when it comes to the main aspects of a design.

A clear example of this is the specification of the MIDI 2.0 protocol, a development that completely removes knowledge from the orbit of the artists and puts it in the walled territory of the engineers, taking away the possibility of opinion and criticism to which we are legitimately entitled by be about "our tools" and not theirs.

A vision completely opposite to the one that guided the creation of MIDI 1.0 tailor-made for artists and understandable to anyone who wants to understand it.

This is completely conjecture on my part, but my thought was that providing the ability to re-assign parts to whatever MIDI channel you wanted could conceivably significantly complicate the implementation of one of the features introduced in the Montage... multi-part single instruments. Those instruments expect their various components to be assigned on consecutive MIDI channels. If you were able to arbitrarily assign different parts of the same sound to non-consecutive or identical MIDI channels, you might create havoc. I suppose the manual could warn users "Don't do that!" but people don't read manuals, and tech support could end up with tons of inquiries about their "broken" keyboard. (The same reason, I presume, that no keyboard ever remembers a "Local Off" setting between restarts!)