A3, Midi Touch Control Surface Success - but Bugs

Installation & Configuration Linux
#1

Hey everybody,

I was able to control A3 remotely, first wired with MIDI cables and then later wireless.

First, A3 on my laptop running Ubuntu Studio 12.04 was very unstable for some reason. Just clicking on various things would cause exception faults. The one I could repeat every time was clicking Mackie control surface and then double-clicking Generic would shut A3 right down. I built the app on my Desktop PC running regular Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and A3 seems very stable in that evironment.

Anyway, using my iPad and iRig Midi I was able to hook into A3 using a2jmidid -e and the MIDI codes came streaming in through the Midi Tracer window. I then created my own Control Surface in Midi Touch and I started developing a .map file by watching the tracer output. When I let A3 assign the Remote ID’s I would get an error stating “Control ID’s cannot start at Zero”. I set my Remote Control ID’s manually so I could be sure what they were. Faders work great both on Tracks and in the Master, also I can Mute individual tracks.

Here’s a couple of bugs that I noticed: When I hit Rec, Solo lights up. When I hit Solo, Rec lights up. Should be easy to sort out, right? Nope - no amount of watching codes, tweaking the map file, etc. could reverse them. I’m using latched buttons, do they have to be Note buttons? Also once in a while when I hit Rec, the Mutes lit up on all 8 tracks! Seems like there were some memory location sharing issues.

I then turned my attention to wireless. Midi Touch supports DSMIDIWIFI so I fired that up, and using Patchage (you can use Jack) I connected the DSMIDIWIFI Out to the A3 Midi Control In and it worked perfectly. Way easier than I feared. I am going to keep my eye on the latency though, because I do detect some.

Lastly, has anyone gotten Scrub to work yet? It works great in 2.8.14 if you assign the control, but A3 - Nada

Regards

#2

“when i hit rec, solo lights up” … since you are responsible for defining what a particular MIDI message does, you’d better show the binding map(s). but … i refuse to have discussions like this on web forums. they are the worst possible medium i’ve ever seen for this sort of thing. file a bug report or show up on IRC during US eastern daytime, and we can make some progress.

btw, scrub is ardour is pretty pointless. even in a2. i actually think that scrub in general is a bit of silly chrome on DAWs. its impressive to see and cool to listen to, but actually serves almost no purpose whatsoever if you are not actually using tape.

#3

Thanks a lot paul, now because of your tounge-lashing people are going to be afraid to respond with any insight they might have.

From now on I’ll keep my worthless questions to my self. We don’t want to waste bytes, right?

#4

@zionhill, as i said in the other “thread”, this isn’t about you or anything you’ve raised. i just find web forums intolerable for this sort of thing. they are slow, inefficient and just all around … bad. once you had the experience of either a design discussion or an interactive debugging session over IRC, i suspect you’ll see what i mean.

please keep the conversation alive, just not on this (or any other) web forum :slight_smile: