In my Rig Manager I’ve got a device alias “upper keyboard”, and a bunch of control aliases mapped to controls on the upper keyboard. It was working fine until just now, and I’m not sure what I did, but for some reason all of the control aliases have associated themselves directly with the underlying device (“2- Impulse”) rather than its alias (“upper keyboard”).
So, now when I happen to have connected this device to a different USB port, my “upper keyboard” device alias is mapped to “4- Impulse”, and none of the controls work, since all the controls have mapped themselves to “2- Impulse”.
What did I do to cause this and how can I prevent it from happening in the future?
If on Windows the first thing I would do is try another USB cable and plug it into the port which was originally used. Windows sees different USB ports as different control modules…
Imagine that your UpperKeyboard has a slider producing, let’s says a CC#20 message and is mapped to a Slider alias name. Following what you are expecting, if you need to change your UpperKeyboard from a XKeyboardController to a YKeyboardController, you would expect that as the UpperKeyboard is now an YKeyboardController, the Slider is automatically remapped to the UpperKeyboard, i.e. the YKeyboardController. But what if this YKeyboardController has no slider at all or a slider which send a CC#21 message rather than a CC#20? It would simply not work. That’s why when you change a controller you need to remap all the controls too.
If I remember well there are solutions to deal with this Windows USB port issue, but the easiest is the one suggested by @jpt.
Indeed, putting the device back into the previous USB port solved the issue, as you say and as I had expected, but as @David-san astutely surmised (in the next reply below), I had been under the belief that the nature of the Rig Manager was that I should be able to move to a new USB port, update one controller alias, and be done.
An excellent and well-explained response. You guys are so smart! I would like to think that I would have come up with the same explanation if I had thought about it for another few minutes haha…
But I’m scratching my head… it must be possible in theory that the Rig Manager could detect that a new device is the same model of controller as a missing device and automatically transfer all of the control aliases from the missing controller to the new one in that case? Or at least could there be a command where the user could ask it to do so?
Unfortunately, Windows users need to scratch their head a bit more than macOS users…
This is a very old and very well-known Windows issue that has been around for at least 20 years…
You’ll also find out, as the rule of a thumb, that most MIDI drivers on Windows are single-client, while on macOS they are multi-client (i.e. multiple apps can use a driver at the same time).
I am running into issue similar issues of losing access to (rackspace) widgets when I swap out my home right and my gigging rig (Casio CTK-7200 and Casio PX350).
But, here is an interesting thing (that may be obvious to you):
I just started up GP and then turn on my keyboards (which were connected via USB). I was not able to change songs using the buttons that are usually assigned even though it worked a couple of hours ago.
So, I shut down GP. Then I turned on both my keyboards. And then started up GP and it worked as expected. My impression is I have less glitches when I have everything connected and on before starting GP.