Akai Apc40, Solo, Mute, Etc. Midi Mappings

Help, Support & Bugs
1

I’ve only had the APC40 for a couple weeks, was considering selling it, but 2.5 and it’s bidirectional communication promise has got me re-thinking this position, especially now that Akai has released the APC40 Communication Protocol.

I’m wondering if anyone has started setting up APC40 mappings yet? If so, I have a question…

The APC40 has 8 channels of the following three buttons: activator, solo/cue & record arm. When all of these buttons are in an “off” state (that is, not lit up), pressing a button sends D2, C#2, C2 “note on” on channels 1-8 respectively, and lights up the button. An additional press will send a “note off” and turn the button LED off. I am, however, getting unexpected behavior when trying to map these buttons to the on-screen solo and mute buttons.

For example: if I’m in learn mode, and try to map Global Mappings -> Track Muting -> Mute/Unmute -> Track XX [Toggle] -> Track #01 [Toggle] to APC 40 Activator button 1, it defaults to Trigger mode, which requires 4 button presses to move through both LED states on the Activator button. My expectation is that switching to Gate mode would result in the behavior I’m expecting, which is, “channel 1/note d2 on” puts Track 01 mute in an “on” state, while sending “channel 1/note d2 off” would put the Track 01 mute in an “off” state. However, there is no discernible difference between Trigger and Gate mode in this respect. Am I doing something wrong, do I have flawed expectations, or is this a bug?

Outside of my immediate question, I think the APC40 will likely prove very useful in Renoise once bidirectional communication is a possibility. Akai kinda dumbs down the interface for general MIDI use (which is understandable), but being able to send messages back to the controller to say, control the state of the Pan, Send {A, B, C} Track Control buttons such that only 1 is active at any time along with sending the current state of the respective param so that the circular guide lights around the buttons are in the current position of the mapped Renoise parameter </homer drooling noise>

2

If the controller sends a note on when pressed, and a note off when pressed again (not when released) then
Mute/Unmute -> Track XX [Set] -> Track #01 [Set]
is what you need.

Alternatively you could try switching to a different preset on the APC40 which sends a NoteOn/Off when pressed/released - or just a note on.

[Trigger] -> Do something
[Set] -> Apply a value, state

3

Taktik: do you attempt to guess the type of switch, or is it always defaulting to [toggle] ?
Because it would seem that most controllers work with dual-state buttons, so perhaps using [set] is a better default value then?

4

Thanks Taktik – this makes sense. Is it by design, then, that there isn’t a [Set] for solo? Would it be possible to have a [Set] in addition to a [Trigger] for Track Solo ?

5

A small bumping reminder for me. Maybe we can indeed try to auto-detect the controller type here and automatically choose [Set]s…

6

Solo is no “state” in Renoise, it simply mutes all other tracks. Guess we need to handle solos different first in order to add such a thing…