Midi 64 & Samplitude ver 7

[Guest gregmac]

Hi Thorsten,

Long time no see.  

I'm back from holidays after working solidly for 9 months with very little spare time and not much of a chance to work on the Midi box.

Great to see all the magnificent developements that are taking place with the midi box.

I think I will rebuild my box and try and come up with a more practical and ergonomic design.

I just downloaded the new version of the Samplitude demo. Samplitude is the main program I use for recording and I have been eagerly waiting for the new version with it's promised full midi control implementation.

So far it looks O.K. but not as good as I hoped, it has ready made templates for logic control, Mackie, and US 428 and also a learn feature that doesn't sem to work.

There is a problem with the midi box however ( or I think really with Samplitude, I will write to them shortly) and that is that Samplitude doesn't switch out midi through ie. it transmits from the virtual fader when it is moved with the mouse and also when it is moved from the midi box. A strange thing happens when in snap mode and that is that the faders only move downwards, snap works but if a virtual fader is approached from below it just moves one increment or so and won't move any further. It is as though the value transmitted back to the midi box is always a step lower than the sent value.

Could you suggest any relevant information I could relay back to the samplitude team.

Apparently samplitude is working O.K. with the Logic and Mackie  controls and the US428.

Also My Midibox is working fine with other software such as the creamware SFP software which doesn't transmit while recieving incoming data.

Thanks if you can help  :)

Regards Greg Macmillan

[TK.]

Hi Greg,

great to hear from you again! :)

I will check the Samplitude demo in the next days - since it supports the Mackie Control, this will also be a good compatibility test for the MIDIbox LC.

Since you are working with two MIDIbox64, I think I should integrate the "MIDIbox Link" feature also into this firmware. This concept prevents the danger of feedback loops. If Samplitude sends some additional events which are not assigned to the faders or buttons, a MB64 with enabled merger and "through filter" will just send them back to Samplitude. This could "confuse" the software. But with "tunnled MIDI events"  this will not happen anymore.

See also on my Homepage: Concepts->MIDIbox Link->Introduction

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Guest gregmac]

:)

Hi Thorsten,

Thanks for your help.

I just started to use Serge's editor, what a great program!

In the editor I set midi link to enable so I presumed it was already activated.

I think Samplitude is going to bring out an update soon so hopefuly they ca intergrate any new features then. Midi through to off should be a must.

Cheers  Greg

[TK.]

Hi Greg,

the "MIDIbox link" option has not been integrated into the MB64 firmware yet (this time Serge was faster than me ;-)).

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Guest gregmac]

Hi Thorsten,

Many thanks again.

I'll look forward to trying the new firmware again sometime in the future when you get arounf to the update.

regards  G :Dreg

[TK.]

Hi Greg,

today I tested Samplitude with the new version of MIDIbox64, which features the Houston and Mackie Control protocol. The emulation itself works fine, but Samplitude doesn't get use of the display. So in fact it doesn't make a big difference if you are using an emulation mode or the MIDIbox as generic MIDI controller.

I've also integrated MIDIbox Link. Your two MIDIboxes have to be configured that way:

PC Out -> MIDIbox64-1 -> MIDIbox64-2 -> PC In

The MIDI merger of box1 has to be configured as "MBLink Forwarding Point"

The MIDI merger of box2 as "MBLink Endpoint"

On this way feedback loops will be prevented. :)

The new firmware can be downloaded here:

http://www.ucapps.de/midibox/midibox64_v101.zip

some configuration examples:

http://www.ucapps.de/midibox/mk_syx.zip

and the updated editor from

http://serge.ucapps.de

(in few hours).

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[Guest gregmac]

;) Thanks a million Thorsten,

Can't wait to try it. Looks like I'll be ordering the new version of Samplitude soon.

I let you know how I go.

Regards  Greg

[Guest gregmac]

:( Hi Thorsten,

Well I finally got to testing the Midbox 64 with the new firmware and Samplitude ver 7.

No feedback loops now but still unfortunately the same problem remains with only being able to move a fader in the downwards direction when in snap mode. As far as i can see this is really a fault in samplitude and I have written to the samplitude forum outlining the problem.

The problem I have discovered is that sam transmits simultaneous to recieving when a fader is moved. this shouldn't be a problem except that the value that is transmitted is one increment lower than the recieved value. in this way the value that is stored for snapping is always one value lower than the transmited value. When you want to go up you can't as you first have to return to the previous value which is lower and then again to an even lower previous value. Samplitude sucks for that. I don't know of any other app that does that. It must be somekind of stupid way to prevent feedback loops. With all due respect to samplitude for a great app, I feel midi is not their forte

So sorry to plague you with bad news Thorsten, but I don't feel it is up to you to worry about but something that needs fixing in samplitude.

BTW the combination of the new firmware and serge's editor really rocks.

cheers  Greg