Just bought a new MIDI controller, but finding now that GP doesn’t have a mechanism for sending feedback to a controller yet, for things like lights on the controller. I found this thread: Send value to midi controller?,
which is a great simple solution if your controller is sending CC, but if it’s sending notes it doesn’t help.
What I’ve found that works is to send a CC message out from the button via a MIDI out block (as detailed in the forum post mentioned above), then transform that into the note message that I want in another program (ControllerMate). It works, but I hope there will be a native GP feature in the future?
Actually, to add to this: I just ran across something where all of my widgets suddenly quit responding to my controller, despite still having the correct values learned. The only way to fix this was to re-learn each control. Still trying to figure out if this was a GP issue or something external, but it really highlighted how hard it is to work with this feedback setup. Because (as far as I know) there is no way to block a particular external MIDI source, every time I tried to relearn my buttons, they would mistakenly map to the external feedback messages that were meant for the MIDI controller, instead of the message from the actual button on the controller itself. Extra frustrating.
Actually, try just switching from one rackspace to another and back — see if that fixes the widget learning. We’ve just discovered this problem (related to resetting audio engine) and a fix is in the works
@dhj I can also see this happening if you use > Options > Global MIDI > Clear all assignments
(I looked for a ticket on the bug report to add this comment, could not find it)
You mean the assignment bug, and MIDI feedback messages? I’m jazzed.
Any word on roughly when that might be coming along? I know that’s kind of a loaded question, but just a ballpark guess?
Sorry - not the midi feedback. That is not a bug, but a new feature request and had a lower priority.
the bug where widgets lose assignment has been fixed though. We do not want to promise any release dates, but should be “soon”.
Right, I totally understand about not wanting to paint yourselves into a corner with the release date.
I hope the MIDI feedback is on your radar now anyway. It’s definitely an important feature for use with a variety of different MIDI controllers. Lighted buttons seem to be all the rage these days.
Apologies, that may have been a little unclear. It seems to be common for a lot of MIDI controllers to expect feedback for a particular control in the same form it sends out. So for example, I have an AKAI APC40 MKII that sends out it’s button presses as notes, and it’s expects feedback as notes with particular velocity values in order to control the color of the button. As it is now, I have to send CC messages out from GP and then convert them to notes elsewhere. It works, but it’s fairly unwieldy. Maybe I could use GP script for this, I’m not sure, but it’d be great to have a simple menu option for feedback messages at some point in the future.
Out of curiosity, what happens if you create a midi in block representing that Akai device, create a midi out block for that Akai device, and connecting the Midi In Block to the Midi Out Block?
(Warning, depending on how the Akai responds, this could cause a feedback look, crashing Gig Performer but it’s worth the experiment)