Remote Control usability

[buserror]

I was discussing with someone about the remote control; as to how I find it not useful at all because it uses 'standard' controlers (that are useful as input) and doesn't allow you to 'teach' it.

It'd be very very useful to be able to specfy a numeric value for the controler one want instead of the popup for that reason.

Idealy it would be nice to be able to specify a separate MIDI input source as the controler.

And last but not least, a "learn" mode would be great: click "learn..." then move a knob/slider and the received midi message is recorded as trigger...

Also, more automation would be nice too; like being able to tweak the instrument window etc...

Just a few ideas

[Jerm]

BusError,

I agree a number is useful at times. Although it is nice to be able to select by name too. It is a pain to go to the favorite controller dialog just to get your controller to show up in remote control. I should at least add the missing controllers to the popup. The MIDI source would be a nice addition. A learn mode would be great too.

As for the instruments window. What cannot you tweak?

[GarySome1]

Thanks for taking suggestions Jerm - Metro is great and additions for control surface support would shine. It's one of those things that when you use it makes you giggle because its cool

-Having the whole list of controllers would be great.
-If MIDI source means choosing the MIDI port (and not just a global MIDI channel) that would be great, too.

I use a Tascam US-428 so the rest of this discussion may seem based (biased) around it but it applies to other controllers like the JLCooper CS-10, too. All the background info for the rest of this long post is available here:
http://www.tascam.com/products/us428/US-428_manual_V3.pdf
mostly in Appendix B but “4 control banks mode” is in section 8.11.2.


So here are some suggestions/requests…

* Have the faders and other channel controls in the Instrument window “bank”-able. Control surfaces often allow you to press buttons to shift control to another set of faders. In the case of the US-428 with 8 faders the idea is if you press the “Bank Right” button the faders should control faders 9-16 instead of 1-8. The US-428 sends these “bank” messages (hex):
BANK_LEFT:
Button-down: BF 10 7F
Button-up: BF 10 00
BANK_RIGHT:
Button-down: BF 11 7F
Button-up: BF 11 00
I like the way Metro generalized things so it would be useful to allow the user to choose how many instruments are in each “bank” in case you have a controller with 4 or 16 sliders instead of 8. The slider messages are like this (note :
FADER_POSITION: BF 4x vv
where x = [0..7] for which slider (1-8), vv = [0..7F]

* Allow setting of controller values to be part of the message to avoid “double striking” buttons. For example with the bank messages above messages are sent for button down and up so in the case of bank left you would end up moving 2 banks to the left for the way Metro works now.

* More controllable items per channel (also selectable w/ the bank switches) like record enable, solo, mute.

* Have Metro send user-definable data in response to controller messages. This is useful to allow control over displays (LEDs) on the controller. For example, the US-428 accepts this sysex message to mean, “turn on the play LED”:
F0 4E 00 12 01 16 7F F7
to respond when the controller message is received for play.



From reading the US-428 manual it might seem like I should be able to do most of what I want to do with the “4 control banks mode” but I found that Metro’s transport had trouble being controlled with these note numbers (other things would work):
STOP button sends MIDI note 2
PLAY button sends MIDI note 3
RECORD button sends MIDI note 4


Thanks for your consideration,
Gary

[Jerm]

Gary,

I think I understand what you are looking for after reading your message a few times. I need to think some more about it.

As for the bottom of your message...

From reading the US-428 manual it might seem like I should be able to do most of what I want to do with the “4 control banks mode” but I found that Metro’s transport had trouble being controlled with these note numbers (other things would work):
STOP button sends MIDI note 2
PLAY button sends MIDI note 3
RECORD button sends MIDI note 4

Is this a bug report? I will look into this.

[Evan E]

As a US-428 user who has not taken the time to delve into the back of the manual the way Gary clearly has, I second every recommendation he made.

Additionally, the powers-at-be at SaganTech might want to get in touch with the folks at Tascam - the US-428 comes bundled w/ a customized version of Cubasis, an antiquated (but still functional) beginner's version of Cubase, which will not run in OS X. Now that there are functional (if still beta) OS X drivers for the US-428, and Steinberg has not mentioned (that I'm aware of) creating an OS X-native Cubasis-equivalent, perhaps a bundled version of Metro SE could fill the gap on Tascam's installer CD. Could be a great way to entice new users to eventually upgrade to the full version of Metro; at the very least, it would be another way to raise awareness of Metro's OS X compatibility (and its impressively responsive stewards), which seems to be the PR equivalent of a closely-guarded secret so far.

Evan Evanson

[Guest]

... perhaps a bundled version of Metro SE could fill the gap on Tascam's installer CD. ...

The irony is, of course, Metro SE has no remote control.

[Evan E]

Yeah, I could have edited that better. The bundled version of Cubasis that comes w/ the US-428 is specially customized to work out-of-the-box w/ the control surface - I was thinking the same thing could be done w/ Metro SE, but still keeping it less feature-laden than its big brother, leaving an upgrade path for those whose appetites have been whetted.

In the end, of course, I'm just trying to weasel Jeremy into releasing a version of SE that I can use my cool slidy knobs in.



Eew, that sounds dirtier than I meant it.

Evan Evanson

[GarySome1]

Is this a bug report? I will look into this.

Yes it is. I'll try it again and be sure and report back.

Also, please let me know if there is anything I can do to assist on the controller stuff if you decide it is worth looking into.

[Jerm]

Is this a bug report? I will look into this.

Yes it is. I'll try it again and be sure and report back.

Also, please let me know if there is anything I can do to assist on the controller stuff if you decide it is worth looking into.

I have noticed that remote control does not handle note-ons of velocity 0 as note-offs, which is a common thing that some controllers do to conserve MIDI bandwidth. This will be fixed in 6.0.5. However I see no reason why any notes 0-127 will not work. Have you specified the correct pitch and channel. For note 0 you should specify c-2 (depending on your middle c setting in preferences). Alternatively you can select the pitch and then send the note event from the controller to set the pitch in the remote control window. Remember to click off the event when the correct pitch is entered.

[Guest]

NO BUG - my mistake.

I was entering the MIDI note number in the Remote Control window by pressing the button on the US-428 (that worked) but then it didn't seem to affect the transport. So, I just hit record and pressed the button a few times and the note-ons were recorded - on a different MIDI channel... oops! Once I corrected the MIDI channel in the Remote Control window I was off to the races.

[Jerm]

I was discussing with someone about the remote control; as to how I find it not useful at all because it uses 'standard' controlers (that are useful as input) and doesn't allow you to 'teach' it.

You can teach it which controllers you want by specifying them in the favorite controllers dialog.

It'd be very very useful to be able to specfy a numeric value for the controler one want instead of the popup for that reason.

In 6.05i1 the remote control popup has all the controllers, not just the controllers specified in the favorite controllers dialog. While some more work needs to be done in this area, such as adding support for specifying the input device, this is at least something.

[buserror]

Awesome! thanks Jeremy

[GarySome1]

I should read release notes a little more. Going back to 6.1.0.3 I see you allow remapped controllers... Excellent! The US-428 is now even more fun thanks to Metro.

I have some a couple more suggestions after having a ball with what is there so far tonight:
* It turns out the native mode of the US-428 just send max/min (127/0) for controllers like channel pan or channel EQ. In other words, it is supposed to be like 127=increment and 0 = decrement. I can put it in CS-10 mode to get it to send controller values from 0-127 but then the jog wheel doesn't work because the CS-10 didn't have one. So, is it possible to allow controller mapping to make a controller inc/dec? It turns out this feature would allow some other things like using the locate buttons to go from bar to bar or section to section.
* More controllable items per channel (preferably selectable w/ the bank switches) like record enable, solo, & mute.

Again, thanks for the features added. I hope the bold text proves itself a worthy cliff note for the verbose suggestion...

[Jerm]

Gary,
A member of our forum was able to get the jog wheel working nicely. What you need is a map controller to reverse the polarity of the jog wheel and then a jog wheel event.

As for making a controller that is sending relative data (inc/dec) and converting that to absolute, no, I do not think this is possible currently. Is this what you are asking?

Also adding support for output-solo and output-mute control makes sense. Record-enable audio track is already in there I think.

[GarySome1]

I did get the control wheel working last night. The catch is that I couldn't get jog & pan to work at the same time. The US-428 driver can operate in a few modes, the most common probably being "US-428 Native" and "JL Cooper CS-10".

US-428 Native Mode:
- Jog Wheel works (reverse polarity).
- Pan does not work (can only set hard left or hard right).

CS-10 Emulation Mode:
- Jog wheel does not work (no matter what mapping I use).
- Pan does work.


In US-428 mode the pan control for channel 1 gives controller 77 (= 0x4D) with these values:
- 127 for a clockwise click (MIDI message is 0xBF, 0x4D, 0x7F)
- 0 for a counter-clockwise click (MIDI message is 0xBF, 0x4D, 0x00)


I think what you described is what I'm asking but I'll try again because I enjoy using the control surface so much and want to jog & pan at the same time.
The feature is to allow a controller (say 0x4D in this case) to be remapped as a rotary encoder. Then this remapped controller is set to control, say, "Output Pan" for a mixer channel. In this mode when Metro gets a message like 0xBF, 0x4D, 0x00 it would go through the remap which translates this as a relative -1 before passing it on to Output Pan.

I, of course, have no idea how you actually route remote controls to controls in Metro but I'd imagine the Pan control object having a new member that accepts relative value in addition to the current absolute value.
void TControlKnob::SetValue( SInt8 newValue ); //existing abolute method
void TControlKnob::AdjustRelativeValue( SInt8 relative ); //new relative method
I'm sure I am oversimplifying it by about 10x.

Record-enable audio track is already in there I think.

I don't believe so. You can choose "Arm New Track" which arms the next track not yet used butI think it would also be useful to select a specific track by number.

Thanks again,
Gary