[Rosegarden-user] Play/Record device confusion

[Larry T. <lt...@we...>]

Hello again, and mega thanks to the development team for fixing bugs so 
quickly!

I'm at the moment, a bit confused however, as to how this MIDI port system 
works.

I am trying to set up rosegarden to play and record to/from PD via a pair of 
ALSA virtual MIDI (virmidi) ports.  This fact might not be relevant to my 
question - I only mention this in case it is.

Before even involving PD, however, and only running rosegarden, I am having 
problems figuring out how the MIDI devices work.

First, in Studio / Manage MIDI devices , there are seperate Play and Record 
devices.  However, when setting the MIDI device for a given track (by holding 
the left mouse button down while over the device name), only the "Play" 
devices appear. If this is the case, what is the purpose of adding "Record" 
devices in the studio? 

Next, in selecting a certain device from these popups, it seems that you can 
either select the device name by itself, or the device name suffixed with 
"#n", where n, I presume is a channel number, depending on how you traverse 
the menus. What is the difference between these two selections? Does 
Rosegarden now have multichannel recording/playback if the former is 
selected?

Thanks in advance

Larry