Snapshot question / Button state.

[lukas412]

Ok sorry if this is an old question.

I am building a controller for Ableton. It will use 1 core to the max pretty much, 32 rotaries, 64 buttons, and some leds. The question is, say i have some stuff going in live, and some of the leds are activated and indicating the state of a button in live. If I go to my next snapshot and make some changes, push buttons ect. when I come back to the original snapshot, will my button state come back? Like will the lights on the midibox represent the positions in live? What if I manually change a button in live with the mouse, will the midibox reflect that change?

Thanks,

Luke

[TK.]

Hi Luke,

MB64E can "only" receive the parameters of the currently selected bank. Means: 128 encoder values and 64 button (LED) values.

Each bank is divided into groups. With 32 rotaries you have four groups, which can be selected with "Special Function Buttons" (see sfb table)

There are several "workarounds" which could be used:

• if your host application provides a function which sends the status of all control elements (faders/pots/buttons...) via MIDI, then just trigger this function and the Encoder positions/LEDs will be updated. This is how my MB64E interacts with Logic Audio, it has the big advantage that LEDs/Encoder positions will be updated even after I loaded a new song - for myself this is very important, therefore I never thought about the capability to store even more parameters in RAM, since this wouldn't really be a perfect solution
  
• you could enable the auto-snapshot function which stores and restores the whole "scene" when you are switching between different banks
  
• in the last time it very often turned out that people don't really need the high flexibility of MB64E, but just want to use their MIDIbox to interact with a host application. This means that normaly encoders only have to send 7-bit or 14-bit events, the buttons should send Note events. If the appr. CC#s and Notes are statically defined (e.g. Encoders always send/receive CC or NRPN, Buttons always send Note On/Off), an alternative application could be realized which only supports predefined events, but can handle with up to 640 encoder parameters and 1024 LED values at the same time!
  

Whats the oppinion of the community, is there a need for such a "generic" controller (in my eyes it's a primitive application, but it seems that this is exactly the need for most of you?)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[lukas412]

Hi Thorsten,

Thanks for the quick response.

MB64E can "only" receive the parameters of the currently selected bank. Means: 128 encoder values and 64 button (LED) values.

Each bank is divided into groups. With 32 rotaries you have four groups, which can be selected with "Special Function Buttons" (see sfb table)

So these 128 encoders and the 64 butons are always being updated, even the encoders that are not "active"?

[*]in the last time it very often turned out that people don't really need the high flexibility of MB64E, but just want to use their MIDIbox to interact with a host application. This means that normaly encoders only have to send 7-bit or 14-bit events, the buttons should send Note events. If the appr. CC#s and Notes are statically defined (e.g. Encoders always send/receive CC or NRPN, Buttons always send Note On/Off), an alternative application could be realized which only supports predefined events, but can handle with up to 640 encoder parameters and 1024 LED values at the same time!

If I am understanding correctly, this would be perfect for me. I would have way more available parameters than I could ever need in a relatively small MidiBox.  I ussually only ever send cc values. I hope very much that you could find the time to do this, I would love to assist, but I just dont have the skills.

Thanks again!

Luke

[moxi]

Hi,

just to say that the last LIVE version -5.0- is out and now live support the "mackie control" , it's better to choose the mackie emelation.. ;)

[lukas412]

is it possible to run the mackie emulation on the mb 64e?

It would still be nice to have the extra memory though.

Luke

[TK.]

So these 128 encoders and the 64 butons are always being updated, even the encoders that are not "active"?

yes

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[adamjking]

What if I manually change a button in live with the mouse, will the midibox reflect that change?

TK, in this thread: http://69.56.171.55/~midibox/forum/index.php?topic=2888.msg18775#msg18775 you had this suggestion:

However, during programming I assumed that somebody could ask for this sooner or later, therefore I've build an option into mb64_midi.inc which allows you to try it out. So - you will see that it will disturb the interaction with the host... ;-)

-> open mb64_midi.inc, search for "if 0" (it appears two times in this file). Change it to "if 1" and rebuild the project. Thereafter the LEDs are controlled internally and via MIDI by default (no need for selecting the "MIDI status received" register)

I don't know if it's what lukas wants, but it worked for me.

- Adam