For some time now I have noticed a strange behavior that I have encountered with the use of Actions and Shortcuts.
To automate some parameters of a VST, after routing some Quick commands through Actions and Shortcuts, I created a track of midi control change messages for the automation.
The strange thing is that using a click on the Timeline or indicating a measure in the Transport Bar, the automation of the parameters worked perfectly, while, on the contrary, moving from one Part to another Part in the Left Zone, the changing of the parameters was often “lost”.
Starting from one of my main projects, I built a small project with just 4 midi tracks, one of which controls the parameters to be changed for the VST in the Layer:
I realized that by activating only the midi track that contains the automation messages and keeping the other midi tracks in the Mute state, the changing of the parameters on the VST occurs correctly even when moving with the Part in the Left Zone.
On the contrary, as the Mute are removed from the other midi tracks, the change of parameters when moving between the Part in the Left Zone begins to be increasingly ignored.
I hope I was able to explain the behavior noticed and that you can provide me with your feedback, thank you.
I am fully aware of the difficulty of keeping track of the many requests that come to you and I am familiar with the concept of time never being enough.
I may be missing something here?
Track 1 (activated, not muted), Track 2, and Track 4 contain MIDI controllers, but none of those are controller 20, 21, and 22 resp., which is what Actions and Shortcuts are listening to. Pls help me understand?
Then, Track 3 contains Program Changes. A program change is heavy duty for any instrument, most of which don’t even support it. Just so that you know and maybe exclude those. A lot of instruments will ignore further incoming MIDI messages while they are changing their program (preset, content…).
The only track that intends to automate the behavior of some parameters of VST Retrologue 2 is Track 1, the messages contained in Track 2, Track 3 and Track 4 are not used for automation.
If Track 1 is the only track not in the Mute state, then when moving from one Part to another Part using the Left Zone, the automation seems to respond perfectly.
On the contrary, if the Mute state is removed from all the tracks you will notice that the automation of the VST parameters begins to work in “hiccups”, often not working at all.
Consider that what I get with one of my complete projects is that systematically using the Left Zone to move between parts means that the automations are not correctly executed.
I hope I have clarified what I observed and above all that the behavior is also occurring in a similar way on the machine you are testing it on.
Yes, but none of these match those programmed in Actions and Shortcuts - but you seem so confident that I guess I’m missing something.
Controllers sent from Track 1 are BankSelect…etc, all “named” (different from “Controller xx”), while QC actions expect Controller 20, 21, and 22.
No?
Sorry, all the same. This time Virtual Midi Keyboard opens and controller is set to Bank Select.
I will try and replace the registered controllers with the ones you programmed for Actions, but it is quite suspicious that I get different values than you appear to have?
Can you open Midi Monitor with input of the VM cable you use for Track 1 and see what it plays back? Is that what you would expect?
This is exactly what I expect to see and it is also what I get if I enable Track 2, Track 3 and Track 4.
Moreover, as I said in my initial post, if I only keep Track 1 enabled and Track 2, Track 3 and Track 4 in the Mute state, the automation for the VST Retrologue 2 works perfectly, even moving between the Part using the Left Zone.
As already mentioned, the problems begin when, after removing the Mute from some or all the tracks, I try to move within the Song using the Left Zone: at this point the VST automation begins to work intermittently.
It is super weird though that I get different controller data with your project.
As said, they are there, and even positions and data are the same as you say. Just the ccs don’t match…
Anyhoo, will try to replace those with the ones you claim and see if I can reproduce it that way.
I can only tell you that using the CCs you indicated was my very first choice when I started trying the Actions and Shortcuts, but I abandoned these specific CCs a while ago and replaced them with controls for general use
