Generic Remote - Rotary Knob decrements not working on Mackie (work around found)

Steinberg Lounge
#1

Hi folks,

I am new in this community and currently trying to get hardware working, especially the external Mackie Controller in Cubase 10 (Windows 7). Many controls are already working.

But one thing made my brain stall. :wink:

With Generic Remote, Decrementing values (e.g. for Panning) with rotary knobs is not working correclty. Either it goes down in 4 steps, or even in 1 step. Incrementing is working fine. Strange. Where is the problem?

A bit of background:

To exclude mal-functioning of the controller: Adding the external controler as a Mackie Control remote device, every thing works fine. Panning, fading, On/Off etc… The draw back with MC is, that you cannot re-assign controls. AFAIK, it is frozen, except a couple of function keys.

Then I started digging into Generic Remote and spent already hours, as many others too here in the community.

Got many things to work. E.g. Faders with 14-bit resolution. The “Learn” for the Rotary Buttons worked also.

But I failed to get the Panning done smoothly. Left to Right is fine. But “Right to left” happens in either one single or at most three big steps. Not at all smoothly.

What I figured out with Midi-Ox is, that a CC message " B0 10 01" is sent for clock-wise rotation (Increments), and “B0 10 41” is sent for counter clock wise rotation (decrements).

The missing bit is, how to map control messages of rotary knobs correctly to the Pan function of the mixer.

Thanks in advance and best regards,

JuS

#2

Hi,

found a workaround myself.

Found out, that the Increment of the rotary know sends a midi value of “1” and the decrement “65”. Looks, as if there is a “sign-bit” set (1+64), to indicate the decrement (negative value). The incoming value is using different Midi addresses for each of the eight rotary knobs. More to that later.

Via Generic Remote, Cubase does not recognize the “65” correctly, or even ignores it. However, the different addresses are recognized correctly. This helps partially to resolve the problem.

Used “Midi-Ox” to catch and transform the value from 1 and 65 to 1 and 127 and set the CC# to “10=Pan”. The address was transformed to differing midi channels per each address.

In conjunction with LoopBe (Virtual Midi-Port) I routed the signal into Cubase. In Generic Remote, I replaced the original Midi-In port from the Mackie Control (USB) to LoopBe. Then re-learned the knobs with the new CC#, addresses and midi channels and adjusted the flags.

Not the ultimate solution, but it works.

The Midi-Out port in Generic Remote is still at the Mackie Control. I still lets the motor fader move in synch to Cubase faders.

Perhaps, this helps other folks too.

LG, JuS

#3

I had this problem with a bcn44. the solution was as follows. the maximum value should be 126 and not 127. and depending on the parameters some should be set in relative or absolute. then the problem was solved. today I will no longer have any problems I will take this solution.

https://mpmidi.com/controller