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Model 15 relative CC support

edited February 2018 in General App Discussion

I'm using an Arturia Minilab mkII with the Model 15 app. It's a pretty cool combo because with 16 endless encoder knobs and 8 pads I can create a CC map to all 106 mappable knobs/switches/buttons in Model 15 using "only" 5 preset pages. The 8-step sequencer in particular maps very cleanly to this interface.

One very annoying problem though is that if I run the Minilab knobs in their default Absolute mode, the first time I touch a physical knob it starts at zero, resetting the in-app knob to zero rather than starting from its current location. I've turned on Model 15's option to Send Knobs/Switches out as CC messages, but Minilab's Absolute mode doesn't seem to pay attention to that.

Next I tried all 3 of Minilab's Relative CC modes, but it seems Model 15 doesn't know how to respond to those and only interprets them as Absolute values, which means that turning a knob just jumps between two fixed positions instead of incrementing/decrementing relative to the knob's current position.

So two questions:

  1. Does Model 15 actually support relative CC mode and I'm just doing it wrong or overlooking something?
  2. If not, is it possible to accomplish this with a utility such as MidiFlow in the middle?

Here's the rough idea for #2: The Minilab sends relative CC to MidiFlow. MidiFlow converts it to absolute CC. And (magic happens here), Model 15 sends Knobs/Switches values to MidiFlow which stores them in its absolute CC positions so that the next time I touch a knob on the Minilab, MidiFlow applies the relative change to the last absolute position it received from Model 15 and sends that to Model 15, with no big jumps.

Is MidiFlow or another tool capable of that? Any other ideas to explore? I'd really like to make this work. Model 15's MIDI support is top notch in every other way. Thanks!

Comments

  • Is it possible that M15 is not actually sending to minlab because you still have to configure M15 to send to Minilab? It seems like M15 is receiving ok, but Minilab is not receiving anything back, just sending, if I understand correctly.

  • Yeah, I configured it to both send and receive with Minilab and made sure it’s sending on the right channel, but no luck.

  • Have struggled with the same (not just with Model 15, not just with Arturia gear). Hopefully someone has a clear solution.

  • edited February 2018

    I came up with two solutions, a complete solution with MidiFire, and a partial solution with MidiFlow.

    I documented the MidiFire solution here:
    http://audeonic.boards.net/thread/453/relative-absolute-storing-sent-parameters

    The partial MidiFlow solution takes advantage of the ability to convert CC values to MiniLab sysex messages to update the internal absolute knob position.

    The complete MidiFire solution allows the MiniLab to run in Relative #1 mode, and the partial MidiFlow solution allows it to remain in absolute mode. The problem with the MidiFlow solution is it’s still possible for knobs to get out of sync if you have a bunch of mapped pages/presets like I do for Model 15.

    An unexpected bonus of the MidiFlow relative mode solution is that now my knobs turn much faster! Previously, even with the MiniLab configured to “fast” knobs, it would still take about 2 fast full turns to go from 0 to 127. Now with relative mode it only takes about 1 fast full turn.

    I’ve noticed that knobs 1 and 9 (the special toggle button knobs) are about half as fast as the rest of the knobs, and that’s still true in relative mode. But now that I know how to use MidiFire, I should be able to compensate for that by scaling the faster relative values by 2 to make them the same speed as the others.

    There’s a lot more information I could share (such as all the sysex codes I discovered), but I’ll save that for later. Hopefully this helps others get started.

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