I wanted to give an update of what’s going on with me and MIDI Remote: after having worked with it for the past three days I feel safe to say that the new system is working perfectly for me. Specifically: I am in fact able to switch between instruments in their different slots loaded up into HALion 6, and the QCs that are assigned to each distinct Instrument do, in fact, follow the new Slot selection, making it possible to control each set of QCs with one bank of 8 knobs on my Novation ReMote Zero SL. This is exactly the way I wanted it to behave, and it is obliging.
Why was I having trouble to begin with? Well, this is where things get sort of murky: I am not exactly sure of why, as there are a few culprits to point to. How I finally came to figure things out is that I noticed that with the HALion Control Panel in focus, and while viewing the QC Panel at the top of the window, if I pressed one of the pull-down menus for any of the QCs, I would note that there were various possible assignments for instruments that neither had been presently highlighted, nor (in some cases) were even presently loaded into HALion (this is what I meant earlier about the existence of “Phantom Instruments”). So it looked to me like these instrument assignments were somehow hanging around, and I wanted to know where this interaction was coming from. Investigating this, I came across the Remote Control Editor (right-clicking anywhere at the top of the HALion Control Panel window), and inside I actually found knobs with these same assignments!
So that suggested to me two things: 1. Remote Control Editor was somehow the culprit and 2. Remote Control Editor-as it had proven itself to be closely affecting whatever happens within the new MIDI Remote system, is actually it’s basic equivalent, and I would assume MIDI Remote is intended to be the much more accessible replacement of Remote Control Editor (am I right?).
That’s all fine and good (if I’m correct), but if so then a mention of this within the documentation would have gone a long way towards shortening the length of my detective work in figuring out the problems. I would have known from the get go that I needed to check out Remote Control Editor along with other things in determining what’s going on.
At any rate, what seemed to fix everything is when I pressed the “Get Default Factory Layout/Copy Layout from Other Tab” button (it’s a downward-facing curving arrow, in the upper right-hand corner). This seemingly cleared all previous assignments, essentially resetting this MIDI Remote/Remote Control Editor system entirely, and seemingly clearing the way for my Focus QCs to populate and vacate knobs correctly.
This, coupled along with the realization that while in HALion, the QC Focus Assignments would only follow the movement of the Slot selection provided that each Slot was assigned to it’s own distinct MIDI Channel clarified things for me more and more (not assigning each Slot with it’s own MIDI Channel results in confusion: even though a user might move from one Slot to the next, if the Slot being moved to is assigned to the same MIDI Channel as the Slot being moved from (or even assigned to a Channel shared by another slot) then the Focus QC assignments will not reassign to the Instrument/Slot, but rather will show the assignments of the last Instrument selected that shares that MIDI Channel).
But clarity was not easily attained in this situation.
It came after a lot of time lost and through much confusion that I can’t help thinking could have been averted had these things that I’m bringing up been addressed in the documentation. Things like: Focus QCs in Multitimbral Instruments require that each instrument be assigned to it’s own distinct MIDI Channel, otherwise the Focus QCs will not display properly, nor will they be able to follow focus properly. That would be easy enough, as a for instance.
It caused so much confusion on my part that I cannot say with 100% surety that it was not this phenomenon that I was being confused by from the start, in determining that there were “Phantom Instruments” being stuck somehow into this new MIDI Remote system, whereas instead I was just going from one slot to another, but because some of the slots shared MIDI Channels, I would sometimes go to a different Slot and yet notice that the Focus QC assignments did not follow my movements, and so not yet understanding about the need for fastidiousness with MIDI Channels, I, in my mind made sense out of it by saying that new assignments were “coming up out of nowhere.”
A mistake clearly on my part I would admit, but I would also state that Steinberg could have helped me a lot more to steer me away from making such a mistake by being clearer in the very beginning. Yes?
So, I apologize for such a long post, but I did want to give feedback of my journey to help anyone else out there who might run into the same issue, and to inform Martin.Jirsak of my solution, and to give Steinberg feedback that I feel could help all of us. Thanks for listening.